Diamanda Galás

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Malediction And Prayer [LIVE]  Diamanda Galás

You'd have to look long and hard to find a more unclassifiable artist than Diamanda Galas. Her mesmerizing voice sounds something like Tina Turner, something like Janis Joplin, and something like Jessye Norman. It's hard to pay attention to what she's actually singing at first; Galas's voice is that compelling, from the deep, heavy notes of "Iron Lady" to the high, shivering pitches of "The Thrill Is Gone." She takes everything from French writer Baudelaire's "Abel et Cain" to legendary bluesman Son House's "Death Letter" and makes them her own, the thundering chords and deep growls of her piano complementing her astounding voice perfectly. Love her or not, Diamanda Galas will provoke a deep-seated response such as few vocalists can aspire to. --Genevieve Williams

Masque Of The Red Death Trilogy [BOX SET]  Diamanda Galás

Two things should be added to Matt Mercer's cogent review. First, the trilogy musically, and obviously, progresses "historically" from extremely spare, usually only percussive, accompaniment at the beginning of the trilogy, through lusher, sometimes even vocal-keyboard-symphonic orchestrations, to straightforwardly modern arrangements at the end (capped by a piano-gospel finale that returns us to the beginning of the trilogy). The texts as well follow this historical progression, from Biblical quotations to French symbolists to "rock" lyrics and parodies of Southern revival music. Second, the trilogy is made thematically coherent throughout insofar as it dramatizes the lamentations, howls, rebellions, and depths of anguish, rage and despair of the gay community. AIDS may be the motivating inspiration for this work, but it functions -- Galas' voice functions -- as our advocate, our Singer for the Dead (to steal an Orson Scott Card title). It catalogues the progression from faith lost, through despair, to an absolute rejection of the hatred and discrimination leveled historically and presently against the gay community. As such, it is, finally, an exhortation to hope and a call to action. -- Michael

Vena Cava  Diamanda Galás

Diamanda Galas places us at ground zero in a maelstrom of insanity. This album showcases her technical virtuosity, both with her voice (speaking, singing, howling and doing uncategorizable things) and with the multilayer synthesizer effects that punctuate the fragmented narrative. Amazingly enough, the entire hour-long work is a seamless live performance, which is a testament to her stamina. Experiencing the album requires stamina as well; I confess that it took me several listens before I could handle the entire piece at one sitting, and that's not saying how bad it is, that's saying how *good* it is. When the listener finally reaches the end, it's like being cleansed and reborn. In the face of the full fury of Ms. Galas, controversies-of-the-week like Marilyn Manson blow away like the cardboard clowns they are. Need I add that this album is not for the easily disturbed? -- Anonymous Review

diamandagalas.com

This site contains concert information, a bibliography, discography, biography, works in progress, press releases, extensive links on AIDS, photographs and much more.

From the Biography:

Diamanda Galás, possessor of a four octave vocal range and an urgent need to awake the morally dead or sleeping, has gleaned many epithets from those wishing to understand or decry her uniquely important body of work. "Bride of Satan", "Diva of Disease", "Black Rose of the Avant Garde" are but a few. "I'm not interested in convincing people like that that I'm not a sinner," she has said of her Right-wing, reactionary critics. "I'm very glad that they think that. I consider it a mark of absolute flattery, of absolute respect. And then I can see that the only resolution is to say, "If you think I wear the cloak of filth, then let me tell you baby, I wear it real good."

But far from advocating hedonism, Galás first rose to international prominence with her three album 'Plague Mass', originally titled 'Masque Of The Red Death' after Edgar Allen Poe's inspirational story, a requiem for those dead and dying of AIDS. Described as "the first, last and possibly only musical word of AIDS", the trilogy constituted a massive statement - part investigation, part scathing moral critique on the politics, theology and sociology of the plague mentality surrounding AIDS. Galás drew on religious texts, in particular the Old Testament, for the opening 'The Divine Punishment'; the poems of French Catholic Charles Baudelaire for the following 'The Saint Of The Pit', and finally, the gospel spirituals of black slaves powered her vision on the final 'You Must Be Certain Of The Devil', wherein Diamanda firmly indicted Middle America as the home of Satan in the form of bigotry, hypocrisy and benightedness. "The devil here is not some abstract, gothic figure," she said. "He is, in my definition, the coward, the man who is spiritually impotent, the homophobe, the willfully blind, the deserter." If the cloak fits...

Diamanda Galás: Schrei 27

Several short performances over the space of twenty-seven minutes alternating extreme high-energy vocal work with absolute silence. The performances are chapters of a confession which might have been induced through a chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain. There is a high density of speech-sound over time which is often machine-like in its velocity. The work employs the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Galás has been researching since 1979.

Includes two RealAudio Previews.

Interviews with Diamanda Galás

Names Index:
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