#Diamanda Galas #avant-garde #experimental #avant-goth #classical crossover #performance art #operatic #blues #jazz #spoken word #piano #a capella #extreme vocals
It was 1984, and Diamanda Galás — then in her late 20s, a moaning, screaming singer who wrote music with titles like “The Litanies of Satan” and “Song From the Blood of Those Murdered” — was visiting a friend’s lover in a hospital in New York. As in so many early ’80s New York hospital rooms, the man was dying of AIDS. “I didn’t know much about the AIDS epidemic at all,” Galás said recently in the rambling San Diego house she grew up in. “And it looked as if prongs were stuck into the middle of his body. The idea of such excruciating treatment and excruciating pain, just — I had to come to terms with it. And he said to me,” she recalled, “‘Would you do a piece about this — you know, about what you’re seeing right now?’ And I said yes, I would.” Released two years later, her answer was “The Divine Punishment.” Over pounding, seething electronics, Galás groans, whines, chants, squeals, mutters and gags, bellowing lines from Leviticus and Psalms, sometimes guttural, sometimes wailing.
“This is the law of the plague,” she claustrophobically intones, as if she’s lashing the listener in a dungeon. “To teach when it is clean and when it is unclean.” She followed it with two more albums radiating fury at the silence surrounding AIDS, which claimed her brother in 1986. Then came a milestone performance piece, “Plague Mass,” that condensed the trilogy into a blood-soaked cry of anguish. “I couldn’t imagine how she could do this to her vocal cords — such power and technique,” the Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry said in an email; Harry promptly started seeing Galás’s vocal coach.
In the decades after its arrival, this music ended up more discussed than actually heard, lost in the shuffle as Mute, the label that released it, was swallowed by one conglomerate after another. Galás, 66, has spent years wresting the material back and beginning to reissue it; a remastered “Divine Punishment” is out on June 10 — in all its blistering glory, and in the midst of yet another plague. “I think she’s the most important singer of the past 40 years,” the vocalist and songwriter Anohni said in an interview. “She’s expressing reality: not her reality, the reality. She’s always been willing to offer her body as a channel for reality, as a conduit for the expression of the moment.”
Those jeremiads of the ’80s forever intertwined Galás and AIDS. But her work both before and after the trilogy shared many of its preoccupations, with her classically trained yet brutal tone blurring the line between observing suffering and becoming its mouthpiece. The content was enigmatic — sometimes wordless, sometimes poetic — but the evocation of apocalyptic distress was indelible. In album after album, performance after performance, she has screeched for those left voiceless by physical infirmity, totalitarianism, mental illness, incarceration, sexual violence, exile, right up to what she calls “the genocide of the old” that’s been wrought by the coronavirus pandemic — though she’s never spouted the popular slogans about the fashionable issues of the day. Her next record, “Broken Gargoyles,” coming in August, takes as its inspiration the disfigured German soldiers who were ostracized in the wake of World War I.
“I’m really addressing the same thing over and over again,” she said, draped in black, her eye makeup vivid, sitting on her sofa. “The issue of a person who is isolated from society — either through choice or through necessity, through a sort of legal structure.” “Broken Gargoyles” finds her voice as singeing as ever. The question is when audiences will hear it in person. Galás’s last live performances were four years ago, in Los Angeles. Over a long period she spent stretches in San Diego, then finally moved back here for good, to care for her ailing parents — the age-old role of a Greek daughter. “I always was working,” Galás said, “but I wasn’t working in the public eye.” Her father died in 2009. The death of her mother — “my best friend and confidante” — in 2018 was particularly difficult: “After that, I thought, what’s this idea of being a singer? Because I realized I was singing for her.” From: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/arts/music/diamanda-galas-divine-punishment.html
