Diamanda Galas - Broken Gargoyles 1 - Mutilatus

 

 #Diamanda Galas #avant-garde #experimental #avant-goth #classical crossover #performance art #operatic #blues #jazz #spoken word #piano #a capella #no wave #bel canto #Schrei opera 

Diamanda Galás composes violently compassionate music about suffering. Her late-1980s Masque of the Red Death Trilogy focuses on AIDS, which killed her brother, Philip-Dimitri, in 1986, while other projects delve into the oppressive Greek Junta and the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Genocides. The 67-year-old goth icon performs less harrowing stuff, too - a hard-grooving 1994 collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a bevy of brilliant takes on blues standards. Yet at her best, Galás sharpens her cutting sense of empathy, slices open difficult subject matter, and approaches it from inside: Her 1991 dirge for HIV’s most deadly era, Plague Mass, might be the heaviest live record ever made. Ultimately, Galás’ haunted ritual, like all of her releases, is a ceremony of tenderness.
A master of the early 19th century style of bel canto singing, Galás uses her operatic genius to explore tropes uncommon in experimental composition - especially the breakdown of tortured, diseased bodies. Shaped from spectral piano and electronics, her soundscapes batter, unsettle, rouse us. Her virtuosic voice, inspired by avant-garde saxophonists Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman, spans an untold number of octaves. She screeches, wails, bleats, and slips between characters, usually vengeful, demonic figures skulking around like a bad conscience. Both performance artist and diva, Galás has a potent theatrical sense and a persona at once progressive and full of fire and brimstone. Echoing obsolete medical drawings that illustrate sickness as floating miasma or bodily humors to be drained, she rebukes ignorant societies while harnessing their wild imaginations.
Her latest record, Broken Gargoyles, highlights the chronic nature of our callousness toward the ill and injured. Inspired by the mistreatment of wounded World War I infantrymen, Galás unearths devastating source texts from a slightly earlier era: the verse of Georg Heym (1887-1912), son of an assistant in a yellow-fever clinic and an enfant terrible of German expressionist poetry. Before his death at 24, Heym wrote unflinchingly about sick patients, maimed soldiers, and other doomed souls he might have been exposed to through his father’s work. Setting four of Heym’s poems to pulsing, droning accompaniment, Galás traces a throughline of ostracized invalids across the past century-plus of public health catastrophes. Appropriately, she premiered some of this material at a medieval German leper sanctuary and began cobbling the album together during COVID lockdown. Broken Gargoyles targets governments’ botched coronavirus responses - implicitly, it sets sights on their homophobic sluggishness to protect gay men from monkeypox, too. The album may not shock the singer’s die-hard fans, but Broken Gargoyles is a moving, painful listen and an ideal access point for the uninitiated.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/diamanda-galas-broken-gargoyles/

Diamanda Galas - Skotoseme

 #Diamanda Galas #John Paul Jones #avant-garde #avant-metal #experimental #avant-goth #classical crossover #performance art #operatic #blues #jazz 

I have unscientifically determined that not enough people know about this (I mentioned it to someone I assumed would own a copy and she said “Whaaaaat?”), so off we go: in 1994, Mute records released The Sporting Life, a fantastic collaboration between Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and the amazing avant-garde/operatic vocalist Diamanda Galas. The result was an album too underground for the casual Zeppelin-head, for whom lyrics like “Husband/With this knife/I do you adore” were probably a bit much (plus that crowd was occupied with drooling over Page & Plant around then anyway), yet tamer and more straightforwardly rock than Gala’s fans were used to. But goddamn if the thing doesn’t smoke—and the booklet photos of Jones and Galas cavorting in a convertible with a pretty intimidating knife are good fun, too. Per AllMusic’s Ned Raggett:
Having explored sheer extremity throughout her fascinating range of solo efforts, Galas takes a turn to the slightly more accessible with her collaboration with Jones on The Sporting Life. Her vocal approach is still something which will freak out the unfamiliar listener, so anyone expecting some VH1-friendly switchover needs to think again. Keyboards are once again her other main instrument of choice, with both Hammond organ and piano used. Meanwhile, the Led Zeppelin bassist and arranger handles production as well as guitar and bass, while one Pete Thomas — apparently the Attractions’ drummer on an interesting side effort indeed — handles percussion. While it’s inaccurate to say the results are Galas fronting Led Zeppelin, Thomas does put in some heavy pounding with a hint of John Bonham’s massive stomp.
The album is noteworthy for reasons beyond its unexpected combination of principals. Jones’ playing on the album really doesn’t recall Zeppelin all that much. It actually sounds as though he’d been taking some cues from the Jesus Lizard’s bassist David Sims, and it definitely plays like a product of its time as opposed to a ‘70s throwback, which isn’t too much of a surprise — I’d always sensed that Jones was a more musically adventurous Zep than Jimmy Page, who himself was hardly a slouch in that department. Check out the opening track, “Skótoseme” (the title is Greek for “kill me”). That rawness and sparse instrumentation continues with “Do You Take This Man,” from which the above “Husband/With this knife” lyric is quoted. It’s pretty much all like that, really. Next is a version of the old Percy Sledge tune “Dark End of the Street,” rendered just with drums, organ, and Galas’ bottomlessly expressive voice. Galas and Jones spoke with Bomb magazine’s Michael Albo about the choice to keep the instrumentation minimal:

DG But, I had heard Led Zeppelin for years not necessarily knowing who it was. You know what I mean, one of those things like, (gasp) “How riveting, I like that, I could sing with that.” Especially if you’re talking about Jones-Bonham, the power rhythm section. John Paul Jones is legendary. I’d been creating tapes and working very, very remotely with musicians. Usually it would go into a tape thing and then it would turn into some concerts. So when we talked, we talked about doing live performances together from the beginning, which was a little different for me. You’ve got voice, hammond organ, drums, amp, that’s it. The power trio.

MA So from the very beginning it was a very solid, spare arrangement, not too studio.

DG It couldn’t have been; not the way John Paul plays, not the way I play. What do we need all that for? It would just get in the way. It would just be like having another bitch on stage. I mean why?

MA There are no lead guitars in this album

JJ The only guitar on this is the lap steel on the song “Last Man Down”. There’s no regular guitar anywhere else on the record.

MA Which I think is absolutely incredible. You know, when I was becoming a cognizant music listener, I didn’t know Led Zeppelin’s work as much as I knew John Paul Jones’s as a producer/arranger; and Diamanda, you were releasing your work as I became interested in the “avant-garde.” So I am interested in how your audiences, the fans of Led Zep and those of Diamanda, are going to merge. What sparks will come out of this?

JJ Well, it’s not as if Zeppelin was exactly a rock band. We were a blues band base and there were a lot of excursions and journeys into unusual areas. So anybody familiar with that shouldn’t be surprised by anything we do. With this record, there’s still definitely the energy that is found in the best of rock and roll, and there’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been heard before. Nobody else is doing anything like this.

From: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/led_zeppelins_john_paul_jones_diamanda_galas

Having explored sheer extremity throughout her fascinating range of solo efforts, Diamond Galas takes a turn to the slightly more accessible in her collaboration with John Paul Jones on The Sporting Life. Her vocal approach is still something which will freak out the unfamiliar listener, so anyone expecting some VH1-friendly switchover needs to think again. Keyboards are once again her other main instrument of choice, with both Hammond organ and piano used. Meanwhile, the Led Zeppelin bassist and arranger handles production as well as guitar and bass, while one Pete Thomas, the Attractions' drummer, handles percussion. While it's inaccurate to say the results are Galas fronting Led Zeppelin, Thomas does put in some heavy pounding with a hint of John Bonham's massive stomp. Hints of gently majestic arrangements here and there help draw a connection further. On the flip side, Thomas and Jones' rhythms often have a crisp urban funk touch at points, sounding more no-wave than heavy metal.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-sporting-life-mw0000117925

Diamanda Galas - The Litanies of Satan

 #Diamanda Galas #avant-garde #experimental #avant-goth #classical crossover #performance art #operatic #blues #jazz #spoken word #piano #a capella

Diamanda Galas is the kind of singular artist who seems to escape category and time. Her music - usually a mix of voice, piano, and minimal electronics - is more closely aligned to blues and jazz than the classical music she’s often roped in with. And the subject matter of her work is most often dark: genocide, war, abuse, torture. A couple of her records reference the devil and hell and Satan. She once recorded a spoken-word incantation complete with burning witch sounds called "Let Us Praise the Masters of Slow Death." And the one book she wrote is called "The Shit of God. " All that said, her work is ultimately uplifting. This is because Galas doesn’t work in a vacuum. She sings about real-world evils, and you can tell she wants to find solutions: She was once arrested inside New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989 as part of a demonstration opposing the Church’s stance on AIDS education and distributing condoms in public schools. She’s also an active collaborator, someone who seems to believe in community. She’s worked with avant-garde composers like Iannis Xenakis and John Zorn, but also with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, synthpop vets Erasure, and industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten—and her voice has been used by at least one black metal band.  From: https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/9891-the-music-that-made-diamanda-galas/