Daniela Pes:The Voice of GalluraShaped by the Freaks
From Sardinian ritual incantations to surgically-shaped vocoder choirs, Daniela Pes makes electronic music that is both personal and ethereal.
We met the Gallura-born singer, composer and sound explorer at a special location near her hometown in an abandoned silver mine to see how MiniFreak Vocoder keeps her ideas mutating in real time.
A musical heritage
Daniela grew up in Tempio Pausania, a mountain town in northern Sardinia surrounded by a family of musicians. Music wasn’t something she discovered, it was always there. At eight, she sang lullabies with her grandmother in Gallurese; by thirteen, she was transcribing jazz solos for fun.
Formal studies came later, including a jazz voice degree at the Conservatorio Luigi Canepa in Sassari that gave her the harmonic understanding and control to explore phrasing, silence, and tonality. But the pull of Sardinia never faded. Even while working through standards or vocal improvisation, Daniela would find herself returning to modal intervals and rhythms embedded in the folk music of her upbringing.
Since the age of 13 years old, I started playing, singing and listening to a lot of jazz music … the biggest strategies for me come from my path into jazz music.
Tradition as material
Rather than directly signifying Sardinian tradition, Daniela prefers to let it speak through the subtle elements of her composition. A chant becomes a drone. A frame drum crack becomes texture. Folk rhythms and vocal passages weave among synthesized sounds, representing a unique interpretation of her experience and the island locality she holds dear to her heart.
Some references are explicit such as field recordings, which are processed and blended into her performances. Other times, they’re spectral - modes, inflections, or vowel shapes that reveal their roots only after the fact. What is evident is that Daniela’s inspiration rests in the living connection she has with her environment.
Take your roots, your tradition, the ancients inside you and then modulate and make those things evolve to another shape, to a new shape for you.
A debut to remember
Spira (2023) marked Daniela’s first solo release, but it arrived fully formed. Produced by Iosonouncane and released via Tanca Records, the album is a dense, immersive work that blends electronic production with vocal experimentation. Vocals drift between languages, from Italian and Gallurese to invented phonemes. There are no “songs” in the traditional sense; rather, each piece unfolds as its own compositional form: layered, circular and eruptive.
Rhythm, ambience, wordless chants, and synth gestures collide with raw vocal phrases. Spira has been hailed as a bold redefinition of Italian songwriting, lyrical, but in a language all its own. The Premio Tenco jury awarded it Best First Work and Daniela’s touring schedule has been ever-expanding since.
The stage as sanctuary
Following Spira’s release, Pes launched into an extended tour from ancient Sardinian churches and Berlin squats to experimental venues throughout Europe. But despite the variety of stages, her performance approach remained consistent: voice and electronics, structured and improvised.
What might begin as an acapella chant ends as a vocoded drone choir. Every show shifts with the space. “Sometimes the acoustics guide me,” she says. “Other times it’s a memory, a reaction, a noise from the audience.”
I think that in life, the real moment where I feel really safe is when I walk into a stage … you are free to be yourself finally without fear.
Driven by Freak
To recreate the sounds of Spira on stage, Pes turned to MicroFreak. It became her way of bringing the album's palette into a live, reactive context. As her touring setup evolved, she added the MiniFreak to expand her real-time control and sonic range, along with the MiniLab controller for hands-on flexibility.
Compact, powerful, and tour-hardened, the white-orange MiniFreak Vocoder Edition allows Pes to further shift roles mid-set. The gooseneck mic routes live voice directly through the Vocoder FX which pairs with the synth’s six-voice engine and playful modulation, from contorting vocals to generating ethereal sequences and ambiences.
Both Freaks help Daniela take a simple idea and transform it into something wider, richer, and unexpected - offering new shapes, colors, and possibilities that go beyond what first comes to mind.
MiniFreak’s Vocoder capabilities are available for all MiniFreak users with update 4.0.
In the silver mine
Pes’s live set brings her influences into sharp focus - improvisation, and precise sonic control. Her performance aided by a MiniFreak Vocoder, MiniFreak and MicroFreak begins with a solitary, vocoded chant. From there, she builds a dynamic sequence combined with impassioned vocal overlays that evolve and build to crescendo.
“I like the way the vocoder impacts my ideas on speech sounds, syllables, and vocal lines. I find it very creative on both levels - performance and composition.”
What’s next
For Pes, songwriting is less a craft than a process of intuition and trust. Sometimes it begins with a word; other times a beat, or a vowel, or a breath. Her tools, like MiniFreak, aren’t just instruments. They’re vital components and co-authors in expressing her inner world and uniting the experimental and folk elements of her sound.
Her next album, tentatively titled Altrove (“Elsewhere”), is already taking shape. Early fragments suggest more breath, less language, and a further dissolving of genre. “I want to let the music evolve the same way I do,” she explains.
If it becomes something entirely new, I’ll know I’m on the right path.
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