Daimon at Tapadum: An Alchemical Journey Through Voice and Percussion

We opened 2023 with an evening that asked something unusual of its audience: sit comfortably, close your eyes if you like, and let the music do what it intends to do.

Fifteen people came. Seventy more had been thinking about it — the highest interest figure we had seen in months.

Jader Nonni on percussion and Elisa Massari on voice. The project: Daimon.

Three Acts, Three Phases

Daimon is not a concert in the conventional sense. It is a performance in three acts, structured around the three principal phases of the alchemical process — a framework that the duo uses not as metaphor but as genuine architecture for what happens in the room.

Act I — Nigredo. The descent into shadow. In alchemical tradition, the nigredo is the first phase of transformation: the blackening, the dissolution of existing forms, the confrontation with what is dense and unresolved. In Daimon’s performance, this is the opening movement — the music going down before it can rise, the voice and percussion finding the heaviest frequencies first. The alchemical operation is the opus al nero: the transmutation of lead into gold, which begins with the lead acknowledging what it is.

Act II — Albedo. The white work. The second phase brings access to a different energy — progressive alignment of the self with the soul and its project. The music lightens. The improvisation opens. Something that was closed begins to become available.

Act III — Rubedo. The red work. The final phase corresponds to a state of grace or illumination — the surrender of the ego to spirit, a condition of total service in which personal will aligns completely with the divine. In Daimon’s performance, this is the resolution: not a climax in the dramatic sense but an arrival, a settling into something larger than the performance itself.

Improvisation as Method

What makes Daimon’s approach distinctive is the role of improvisation. Jader Nonni and Elisa Massari do not use improvisation as a stylistic choice or a jazz-derived technique. They use it as a tool for making contact — with the depths of the unconscious and the heights of the Divine, as they describe it.

That is a serious claim, and it requires serious listening to evaluate. What can be said with certainty is that improvisation at this level — two musicians with no safety net of predetermined structure, working within a clear intentional framework — requires and produces a quality of presence that composed music rarely achieves. Every sound is a decision. Every silence is chosen.

The audience’s invitation to close their eyes is not a gimmick. It removes the visual channel and directs all attention toward sound — which is, after all, where the work is happening.

Voice and Percussion

The combination of voice and percussion is one of the oldest in human music — present in every culture before any other instrument existed. Daimon works within that primacy deliberately. There is no harmonic instrument, no melodic accompaniment beyond the voice itself. What fills the space between Elisa Massari’s voice and Jader Nonni’s percussion is silence, resonance, and the listener’s own interior response.

Elisa’s voice moves through the three alchemical phases as a living instrument — not illustrating the framework from outside but inhabiting it. Jader’s percussion provides the rhythmic pulse that keeps the journey grounded even as the music rises.

A Different Kind of Opening

January 7 was an unusual way to begin a new year of concerts at Tapadum. Not folk, not jazz, not Mediterranean tradition — something older and more interior than any of those categories. The seventy people who had considered coming and the fifteen who arrived found an evening that asked more of them than most concerts do.

Those who stayed found it worth the ask.

Tapadum hosts concerts from across the musical and spiritual spectrum. Explore our handcrafted instrument collection or follow our upcoming events.

Özgür Yalçın is the founder of Tapadum and the founding member of Karagüneş. He has performed ethnic and world music across Europe for over twenty-five years and builds custom instruments from Tapadum’s workshop in Brisighella, Italy.