Diamanda Galas

Diamanda Galas was one of the singers who revolutionized the very concept of “singing” through the use of electronics and a possessed, obsessive expressiveness.

Galas, born in San Diego in 1955 to Greek immigrant parents, studied opera and classical piano (a pianist at age 14 in classical symphony orchestra) and later ventured into performance art. In Pomona in 1974 she joined a jazz band called Black Music Infinity, which featured saxophonist David Murray, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, cornetist Butch Morris, bassist Mark Dresser, flautist James Newton and drummer Stanley Crouch. She studied biochemistry at UC San Diego, and became a pianist and singer in San Diego’s CETA VI, a band that included saxophonists Jim French and Richie Flores. Her first album was a collaboration with French: If Looks Could Kill (1979).

Galas also led a precarious and dangerous existence, always walking a razor’s edge with her drug abuse and her many sexual experiences. She was discovered as a singer by the Living Theatre, which invited her to perform in mental asylums. The composer Vinko Globokar hired her for his opera Un Jour Comme Une Autre. That proved to be the decisive experience, in which her idea of music and singing took shape.

The first album burst onto the electronic-music scene with the thunder of a landmark operatic work. Galas’s vocal art appeared as a cross between Greek tragedy, expressionist theater, and a psychoanalytic session. The two compositions for overdubbed voices and dissonant electronics, extremely convulsive and oppressive, inspired by a concrete political pretext, seemed to spring from a tangle of primal forces and were underpinned by perverse satanic liturgies. Galas managed to fuse the subconscious, magic, and history into a highly emotional sonic flow.

Wild Women With Steak-Knives is a twelve-minute vocal solo that constitutes the most radical thing ever sung: blocks of horrific, extremely rapid and frantic screams alternate with inhuman wails—of the possessed, of women in labor, of beasts led to slaughter. The entire vocabulary of vocal dysfunctions is part of her repertoire: sobs, spasms, retching, whinnies, movements of lips and cheeks, gargles, strangled moans, hisses, hysterical stammers.

Her screams are the most abominable and visceral, often followed by epileptic barrages of animal-like phonemes. To produce, control, and modulate them, the singer requires superhuman concentration. Drawing inspiration from the lament of Medea and the horror of Hecuba, but also from the sense of impotence and isolation of Schoenberg’s *Die glückliche Hand*, Galas stages a style far more theatrical than the austere and refined approaches of other experimental “vocalists.” Galas’s singing is in fact devoted to excess.

Yet, paradoxically, her disjointed fabulations are closer to everyday reality than the abstractions of Meredith Monk and Joan LaBarbara; indeed, they are taken directly from life, constituting a soundtrack of pain in all its manifestations. Galas does not withdraw from the real world, but instead plunges her psyche fully into it, with apocalyptic results.

In Litanies Of Satan Galas recites Baudelaire’s accursed verses more emphatically and bawdily than ever, while a drum strikes funereal blows, electronics raise icy gusts, and other filtered voices mutter in the background. The increasingly obsessive and frantic repetition turns the verses into exorcisms, until the sound of the voice decomposes into a cauldron of sonic disturbances. In a nebula of supernatural high notes, the singer then delivers a hair-raising solo of demonic possession, with some of her typical epileptic machine-gun bursts of phonemes and the full catalogue of spasms. The piece ends on a hundred electronic echoes of her voice once again reciting the foul verses in French.

The second album, Diamanda Galas, her most political work, contains two more long pieces for voice and electronics, each a “wall of screams” no less imposing.

Tragouthia (October 1981), on Diamanda Galas (Metalanguage, 1984), is a vibrant cry of pain for the victims of the Greek dictatorship, coagulating into a predominantly choral vocal mass, to which Galas’s violent tremor imparts a continuous upward motion, frantic and on the brink of nervous collapse. The polyphonic echoes of her voice rise like the lament of a mass of agonizing damned souls. The piercing high notes, the frenetic barrages of syllables, and the guttural trills form a demonic backdrop to the spasmodic and traumatized declamation of the main voice. When all the voices stretch out into whirling arcs of pure high tones, the result is a solemn and hallucinatory requiem, the quintessence of outrage and despair.

Another example of traumatizing recitation appears in Panoptikon (February 1984), on Diamanda Galas (Metalanguage, 1984), when Galas alternates electronic silence with sudden explosions of screams, and lets whirlwinds of contrasting voices, scattered across an extremely wide spectrum of registers, be distorted and amplified in a maniacal fashion.
Galas acts in the guise of a shaman who, in metempsychic catalepsies, exudes the inner voices of an impenetrable world. An oracle of the apocalypse, she scatters her tears of pathos and anguish over a desolate landscape. Her claustrophobic lament unfolds in spirals of black magic and degenerates into a tense soliloquy with the forces of the afterlife. Trained as much by the high notes of Maria Callas as by horror-film soundtracks, Galas accumulates extreme impulses by exploiting a vocal range of three and a half octaves within a maelstrom of electronic reverberations. The thousand personalities that result collide with the violence of typhoons.
Thus Eyes Without Blood (1985) is a morbid delirium of sex and murder, where sadism, necrophilia, and metaphysics interpenetrate, creating spasmodic tensions.

Divine Punishment, her most medieval album, is an esoteric paraphrase of the Holy Scriptures, steeped in demonic prophecies and obscene anathemas. The singer’s blasphemous paroxysm delves into manuals of chiromancy to extract a distillate of cosmic pessimism and nihilistic hatred.
In the six-movement suite Deliver Me From Mine Enemies, amid Gregorian psalms and Hellenistic lamentations, Hebrew proverbs and magical formulas in archaic Italian, the angel of evil enunciates his catechism of eternal perdition, through musical scenes that alternately evoke the solitary flight of a witch or the lament of a damned soul in a Dantean circle, with backgrounds that suggest the slow advance of legions of demons or a chaos of forsaken souls amid infernal miasmas.
The singing of Galas, always at the mercy of a whirlwind of electronic turbines, embodies all the characters of this crowded medieval “grotesque,” each with a different timbre, alternating the insistent tones of the danse macabre (This Is The Law Of The Plague, with its crescendoing black-procession rhythm and Wagnerian climax) with abstract vocalizations—now extremely drawn-out, almost hallucinogenic (Deliver Me From My Enemies), now infernally guttural (the miasmatic and hideous Yiati), now mystically pure (the vertiginous muezzin-like acrobatics of Esedoyme), now spectral (the anguished hiss of Psalm 22)—which plunge into the deepest recesses of the psyche, with results that are always shattering in their dramatic intensity and sonic power. Her voice can transform into an agonizing death rattle, an esoteric formula, an imperceptible breath from the beyond, into wind, magma, flame.

The four macabre and blasphemous lamentations of Free Among The Dead are masterpieces of this inward recitation, which in Psalm 88 hisses perversely and presses forward manically in a martial suspense and crescendo, and in Sono L'Anticristo imitates a full-fledged exorcism, complete with its array of animalistic utterances, to the dark tolling of the piano. These possessed deliriums constitute the apex of her ceremonial style, wrapped in bleak and menacing atmospheres and in arcane pseudo-biblical texts.

Saint Of The Pit, with French texts by the three “accursed” poets Baudelaire, Corbière, and Nerval, is her mass for the dead, her requiem for humanity afflicted by AIDS. Galas conflates her poses as Greek tragedienne, expressionist chanteuse, and operatic soprano. Following the unsettling instrumental overture La Trezieme Revient, in the style of a “sanctus,” come the soaring song of Esedoyme, the grotesque conclave of L'Heautontimoroumenos, and the grand finale Cris D'Aveugle, a true black liturgy with somber organ cadences and choral orgies of witches and Wagnerian demons, sung with grotesque evolutions halfway between muezzin and possessed ecstatic, in a terrifying vision of the Last Judgment—and, once the orgy subsides, with the final lines spoken (for the first time in her career) in a pathetically normal voice, as if begging for mercy.

This is her work most oppressed by a sense of death. Galas’s singing is less swashbuckling than in her early efforts, more focused on conveying the message and exploiting the melodramatic effects of her Grand Guignol. Obsessed by the AIDS epidemic, Galas has moved from ancient Greece to the Middle Ages of superstition and heresy.

Meanwhile, the operatic soprano high register—the most strident and stunning—has become her preferred expressive medium, while the agitated voices in the coarser registers have nearly disappeared. Similarly, the slow, martial piano pacing that conveys the sense of a procession has taken precedence over electronic textures.

The third part of the trilogy on the “plague of the century,” the EP You Must Be Certain Of The Devil is a violent and sorrowful “j’accuse” against the witch hunt underway against AIDS sufferers. This time the texts are by Galas herself, and the music draws inspiration from Black sacred folk traditions. Moderate in its electronic gestures and supported for the first time by a rock ensemble, this is her most accessible work—so much so that it even spawned a video clip, the orientalist dance Double Barreled Prayer.

The album applies her technique of demonic modulations to spirituals (the tour de force of the title track), to dissonant funk (Malediction), to a cataleptic and cacophonous boogie (Let's Not Chant About Despair); but always interspersed with satanic invocations, strangled lullabies, and assorted cryptic gargling. Like Monk, Galas now imitates different "voices," changing register and personality from track to track. Compared to Monk, the accompaniment is much more musical, easily traceable to one of the classic genres. The atmosphere is still one of dark and oppressive horror, wild and primitive, but the anarchic and free-form vocalizations of her early work are now synthesized into a more accessible “song-form of the inferno.”

You Must Be Certain is a singular attempt to commercialize the most uncompromising vocal avant-garde. Together with the previous two albums, it forms the "Masque Of The Red Death" trilogy, the legendary "Plague Mass" dedicated to AIDS and in particular to her brother (who died of AIDS in 1986). The mass was recorded live in the fall of 1991 at St. John’s Cathedral in New York.

Masque Of The Red Death Trilogy (Restless, 1989) collects the three albums of the trilogy.

Plague Mass (Mute, 1991) is a live demonstration of her prodigious abilities.

In many respects (the appropriation of religious symbolism, the preaching tone, the intensity and ferocity of the performances, the themes linked to social injustices) her art recalls that of performance artist Karen Finley.

In the 1990s her charisma increased due to sudden popularity, but in reality the quality of her work declined. Galas did little more than tiresomely repeat the two ideas on which she had built the "plague mass." Between a collection of blues, spirituals, and gospel, The Singer, and an experiment in the rock power-trio format, The Sporting Life, a collaboration with John Paul Jones that at least produces Dark End of the Street, Galas nevertheless arrived at another work of great depth, Vena Cava, a new descent into the darkest infernos, a new sample of obscenities and flood of samples, despite the somewhat mediocre covers (Amazing Grace, Hush Little Baby) hidden within the eight untitled tracks, and despite the less-than-perfect live recording.

Her stunning psychic vertigo, her panels of manic soliloquies, the thousand disconnected and perverse voices of her anti-humanity have forged a vocabulary of pain that has now emancipated itself from the avant-garde to become a classic of our time. Greek tragic singing, Middle Eastern innodia, madmen’s cries, and vocal avant-garde experiments have violently overturned the “high” register of the opera singer.

The sources of her theosophy of evil date back to dark millennia, lost in the meanders of “other” history; yet in her works, satanic exhibitionism has always been paired with a sincere horror for humanity’s tragedies: the violent danse macabre of Law Of The Plague and Cris and the monumental free-form deliriums of Wild Women, Litanies of Satan and Tragouthia are complementary aspects of the same desperate de profundis of humanity.

Malediction & Prayer (1998) is a live album of covers. Schrei X (Mute, 1997), containing 24 short live a-cappella pieces, is based on Schrei 27 (1994), her first work for the radio.

La Serpenta Canta (Mute, 2004) collects live performances, mostly covers.

Her vocals are hardly menacing and her arrangements are hardly shocking on the double-disc concept Defixiones, Will And Testament (Mute, 2003), devoted to the theme of genocide. Even the most intriguing melodrama, The Dance, is about twenty minutes too long. Since the time she started telling stories (instead of simply screaming them), she has lost her ability to "feel" the story. She is much better at reciting other people's poetry, like the Pasolini poem that she shouts in Holokaftoma.

The repetitive, predictable and uninspired works churned out by Diamanda Galas since 1989 have become one of the most boring sagas of the avantgarde. What a change from the shock caused by her early masterpieces. Her art has become pure intellectual pretentiousness and political pomp.

Guilty Guilty Guilty (Mute, 2008) documents live performances devoted to classics of country, blues and jazz music.

The key composition of the 2010s was Das Fieberspital (2013), recorded live in Switzerland in September 2013, a terrifying rendition of a Georg Heym's poem from 1911 with wild piano playing and electronically-manipulated vocals.

All The Way (2017) collects her interpretations of famous compositions by Thelonious Monk and Albert Ayler, plus a couple of blues standards and the folk standard O Death.

At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem (2017) is a live album.

The 21-minute EP De-formation - Piano Variations (2020) contains solo piano music (no vocals) inspired by her performance of Das Fieberspital.

After working for many years on Georg Heym's expressionist poems, Galas delivered a sort of final version on Broken Gargoyles (2022). The first part, Mutilatus, is yet another revision of her 2013 piece Das Fieberspital/ The Fever Hospital but also including lyrics from another Heym poem, "Die Daemonen der Stadt" (1911). The better production hurts the potential of the piece, which is now a set of independent lieder and recitations instead of a seamless stream of consciousness. Pulsing industrial rhythms occasionally rise to accompany the whirlwind of electronic manipulations of her voice: witches screams, cavernous demonic male voices, subhuman mouth sounds echoing in a vast void as well, howling of damned souls and so on. The most powerful free-form chanting occurs between the 16 and the 21 minute marks. Nonetheless this is her most powerful recording in 20 or 30 years. The second part, Abiectio, draws from Heym's poems “Der Blinde” and “Der Hunger” and, when it is not spoken-word, it feels like the soundtrack to a horror movie. It is especially in the second half that Galas lets loose her powerful electronic tools and transcends mere recitation. The last five minutes are pure gothic.