Diamanda Galás - Caught in the Serpent's Coils

In the pantheon of the great female voices of the 20th century, the name Diamanda Galás represents the brightest dark star. No one more than her has managed to push the natural instrument par excellence into realms of tormented expressiveness and searing empathy. If she isn't the most technically gifted singer in strictly technical terms (a matter she herself admits she cares little about, to the point of not tolerating talk of the extent of her vocal range), no one — with the exception of Meredith Monk (whose music is nonetheless extremely different, both in form and intent) — has managed to create such an eclectic vocal-musical language, so wide-ranging, across such a large body of work.

Born in San Diego in 1955, of Mediterranean roots (her father was from Smyrna, her mother from Sparta), young Diamanda found her first musical reference point in her father, who encouraged her to play piano from an early age (but strictly forbade her from singing, since, in his view, only idiots and whores sing).

Classical, blues and jazz were the genres of Galás's childhood and adolescence: at just 14 she performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the San Diego Symphony Orchestra. Her family environment was extremely strict and restrictive: her father forbade her from doing things that were utterly ordinary for any teenager, such as watching TV, listening to the radio, bringing friends home, dating, or wearing a bikini. The young Galás thus found an outlet in reading, with Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Pasolini, Poe and De Sade among her favorite authors. She would find much more freedom during her university years, spent studying biochemistry: freedom marked by transgression, between drug use (LSD in particular) and sexual recklessness (she even had a sadomasochist boyfriend). It was during this period that she discovered her own disconcerting vocal abilities.

Her earliest experiments took place in anechoic chambers, so as to have total expressive freedom and prevent anyone from limiting or censoring whatever passed through her mind and whatever she intended to do. These years also saw collaborations with avant-garde jazz musicians such as David Murray, Butch Morris and Mark Dresser, as well as the famous invitation from the Living Theatre to perform in psychiatric hospitals.

The start of Diamanda Galás's career is usually traced back to the 1979 Avignon Festival, when she accepted an offer from Slavic composer Vinko Globokar to play the lead role in his opera "Un Jour Comme Un Autre", based on documentation gathered by Amnesty International on the arrest and torture of Turkish women.

Galás thus began touring Europe's festivals to showcase her earliest compositions, which were met with a sensation. The next step would be recording this music, as singular as it was innovative.

1982 thus saw the recording debut of the San Diego musician, The Litanies Of Satan, an album so extreme and isolated that it found no followers even within the avant-garde world itself. Made up of two lengthy compositions for voice and electronics (a formula she would repeat on her next two albums as well), the work is arguably Galás's supreme masterpiece, the manifesto of her art, and her most fully realized project. It is also the first chapter of what might be called a trilogy encompassing her finest and most representative work.

The album opens with "Wild Women With Steak-Knives (The Homicidal Love Song For Solo Scream)", quite possibly the most shocking and harrowing piece in the history of Western music, a showcase for the artist's horrifying vocal abilities, a bacchanal of depravity, the soundtrack to snuff movies, an inventory of the most disparate vocal dysfunctions, formulated with the lucid ferocity of a perverse, deranged mind. Galás's versatility is astonishing: she shifts with startling ease from screaming to soprano high notes, from psychotic declamation to gargling, from convulsive vocalizing to silence (this last being clear proof of the musician's total control over her art).

We are a world away from the naive experimentation of Yoko Ono, as the singer herself confirms with this curious and amusing anecdote: "I started saying as a joke that Patty Waters was a great influence on me. I really do love her music, but I've only listened to it a few times, so she wasn't a great influence on me at all. I said it as a joke aimed at Yoko Ono, who intentionally lied at a press conference after coming to one of my concerts with her son. After attending the concert, she decided to add me to the list of people she claims to have influenced, despite the fact that I had never listened to her music. So I decided I would talk in numerous interviews about Patty Waters, saying that without her influence there would never have been a Diamanda Galás or a Yoko Ono. I didn't know whether she had ever listened to Patty Waters, but I figured that way she'd understand what it feels like to be a victim of disinformation. Yoko Ono has continually denied this influence, but the whole thing just makes me laugh!"

If anything, the starting point is the music of Patty Waters, but Galás goes further: Waters's vocal experiments were concentrated into a few brief vocal explosions (so they had, so to speak, a vertical orientation), while Galás's constantly branch off into new paths, new sounds, new perceptions, never leaving the listener "free", not even during the silences (hence a horizontal orientation); where Waters's music is introspective, almost a delirious talking to oneself, Galás's music carries an immense communicative power, never an end in itself; where Waters lacks full awareness of the scope and potential of her extraordinarily innovative music, in Galás that awareness is absolute. The greatness and originality of the piece also lies in its total absence of instrumental accompaniment: Galás's tormented, diseased voice permeates all 12 minutes, drawing the listener into a kind of universal emotional participation, a complete identification with a world the artist doesn't describe to us but makes us perceive on an almost multisensory level (and this is the tremendous power of Diamanda Galás's art).

The concepts of pain, suffering, and humiliation, both physical and psychological, would always remain at the center of the singer's artistic vision: her intention is to give voice to those who normally have no right to express themselves — the outcasts, the defeated, the broken, the wounded. In short, she wants to give voice to the unlistenable, to that which society, out of convention, fear and rejection, refuses to hear.

On the title track, the musician of Greek descent dons for the first time the robes of the priestess of Night, of Hecate: out of a chaotic maelstrom of harrowing deliriums (achieved through overdubbing), Galás emerges and preaches, with great emphasis, esoteric verses by Baudelaire, giving rise to a demonic mantra ("O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère!"), a sort of pagan purification ceremony. A purification that Galás, embracing the thinking of the medieval flagellants, seems to view as a goal to be reached (or at least attempted) through a path of pain and suffering; after the recitation of the verses, in fact, she once again unleashes her terrifying vocal expressiveness, though here with less variety than in "Wild Women". The piece has a cyclical structure and thus ends by returning to the indefinite maelstrom of voices: the artist thus seems to rule out purification and, consequently, salvation. If anything, the piece seems to suggest that the only reality is the sensory, earthly one, which is inextricably marked by torment.

For Galás, the ideas of purification and the afterlife are illusory. There is no redemption, no compensation for the sufferings of earthly existence. There is only pain, for the defeated, who remain defeated until the end.

The second album, the self-titled Diamanda Galás (1984), follows the same modus operandi as the debut. Here, though, there is a greater interest in political issues and a greater imbalance, a greater emphasis, in the use of instruments across the two tracks. "Panoptikon" (the name comes from the ideal prison that Jeremy Bentham designed in 1791, based on the idea that a single guard could watch over all inmates at the same time) is perhaps Galás's electronic masterpiece. A thunderous radioactive explosion opens the track, followed by the singer's voice, growing increasingly electronically distorted. A hymn to freedom, the piece is far more spoken-word than the two tracks on Litanies, but above all the voice — obviously not without several tour de force passages of epileptic bursts of bestial blasphemies — is far more immersed in the sound, a sea of metallic, razor-sharp sound, giving rise to a feeling of estrangement.

By contrast, on "Tragouthia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos (Song From The Blood of Those Murdered)", a live track from 1981 dedicated to the victims of the Regime of the Colonels (the oppressive regime that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974), the voice is absolute master, but in a surprising way: with this track, in fact, the singer silences the finicky detractors who dismiss her as a failed opera singer capable only of screaming ravings. A true wall of weeping (and of silence), "Tragouthia" is a vocal symphony of superb emotional depth, a polyphonic lament that gives voice to the souls of the dead, a direct feed from Hades, a j'accuse perhaps even more devastating, in its incessant, pained, subdued moan, than her free-form ravings shrieked at breakneck speed. Galás's voice here is surprisingly beautiful, calm, high, and the piece is incredibly lyrical and poetic, as the artist would never again achieve. Listening to it, one almost feels touched by the hands of the victims' spirits.

If The Litanies Of Satan is the album of suffering, of physical pain, of the laceration of the flesh, Diamanda Galás is the album of desolation, of inner emptiness, of the annihilation of the self.

1986 was a pivotal year for the musician, both personally and professionally: her beloved brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri, died of AIDS, and her new three-album project, Masque Of The Red Death, was born — a project centered precisely on AIDS and its victims. The first chapter is The Divine Punishment, a sort of watershed, a link between the two trilogies: the one from her experimental phase for voice and electronics, and this new one, far more theatrical and aimed at a wider audience. On "Deliver From My Enemies", a track split into six parts, Galás revisits several passages from the Scriptures, staging a kind of black mass of the self's consumption, a prayer for the desperate: in the first part, "This Is The Law Of The Plague", the drums, the dark choirs and the singer's accusing voice leave no escape. After that, Galás returns, here with greater emphasis and less lyricism, to the vocal approach she displayed on "Tragouthia": more lacerated than lacerating, more anguished, more introspective than accusatory. On "Psalm 22", the sixth and final section of the piece, she reaches an absolute death-rattle, a boundless despair, the awareness of an ending with no way back.

The second track, “Free Among The Dead”, also split into several sections (three, to be precise), is perhaps her esoteric masterpiece, a kaleidoscope of taunts and tirades against religion: driven by booming piano tolls and electronic shrieks, the piece once again has Galás reciting excerpts from Sacred Texts mixed with passages written by the artist herself.

The peak of both the track and the album is the final section, “Sono L'Antichristo”, where Galás, more brazen than ever, proclaims herself the Fallen Angel in person, in Italian. This record gave rise to one of the easiest and most superficial accusations leveled at Diamanda Galás's music: that of satanism. The artist, a declared agnostic, has in reality never had the slightest connection to satanic ideologies or cults; hers is, much more simply, a Nietzschean-rooted critique of the Christian religion as an institution: clear proof of this is her choice to reveal herself as the Devil in Italian, the language of the seat of Christianity. For her, God and Satan are nothing more than mere concepts, idols of an obscurantist organization. Galás, then, should in no way be grouped with the glossy world of satanic rock; her art finds its true sisters instead in the performances of Marina Abramović, Gina Pane, Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley and the exponents of Wiener Aktionismus, in the photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin and Andres Serrano, and in the theatrical pieces of Jan Fabre. Although Galás does not consider her own art performative, its multidisciplinary nature is plain to see.

That same year saw the release of the second chapter of the trilogy, Saint Of The Pit, an album that, as already mentioned, marks a shift in Galás's music: having abandoned the psycho-electronic declamations, the musician moves toward a more conventional, though still fascinating (at least in places), gothic music. The record opens with the instrumental track “La Treizième Revient”, in which the organ conjures a dark, hypnotic, bewitching melody; it is followed by “Exeloume”, in which both the electronic background and the voice fall into a flat, monotonous mannerism (starting with this album, Galás will increasingly rarely manage to wield her astonishing natural instrument with real originality).

By contrast, in “L'Heautontimioroumenos”, one of the most atypical and interesting pieces on the record, Galás becomes a siren who, with a sinuous voice, lures the listener in and wins them over, only to then reveal her monstrous true form; the nearly 7 minutes that make up the track are entirely defined by this dual manifestation of the artist's voice. It's remarkable how the musician, in order to reveal her full monstrousness, never resorts to her legendary frenzied gargling, opting instead for a far colder, more lucid, calculated and “logorrheic” use of the voice.

“Artémis” foreshadows what would become the modus operandi of the second phase of Galás's career, namely the use of classical piano and a voice that is more soprano-like than psychoanalytical, more narrative than expressive. “Cris D'Aveugle” raises the album's bar, serving as the closing track and also the piece that marks the end of the first phase of Galás's career: for the last time, the singer embodies the voice of the Devil, across 12 minutes of tremendous intensity, amid medieval choirs, hallucinated screeches, esoteric invocations, and storms of drums.

Saint Of The Pit, while undoubtedly a solid album, shows the first signs of fatigue and artistic decline that would soon become, with very rare and isolated exceptions, the constant reality for Diamanda Galás.

Two years later, indeed, comes the first outright failure, You Must Be Certain Of The Devil, the final chapter of the trilogy. Here the definitive shift toward the song format is complete, often with dispiriting results: from the tedious vocal solo of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and “The Lord Is My Shepherd” to the improbable gothic rock of “Double-Barrel Prayer” and “Malediction”, from the embarrassing soul of the title track to the mediocre piano-based prayer of “Let My People Go”. In practice, the only tracks that are salvageable, the only ones in which distant echoes of the old Diamanda can still be heard, are “Let's Not Chat About Despair” and “Birds Of Death”.

Rather than representing an evolution of Galás's art, this album (like most of those that follow) seems to be a bastardization of it, a sterile and inexplicable attempt to make digestible and comprehensible a music that is intrinsically indigestible and incomprehensible to anyone but the initiated few.

In 1989 the singer was honored at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for the trilogy, which in 1991 found its ideal companion piece in the live album Plague Mass (1984 – End Of The Epidemic), perhaps Galás's most famous and beloved record.

At the time of the album's release, the musician's public image was becoming increasingly controversial: in 1989 she was arrested during an ACT UP demonstration at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York against Cardinal O'Connor, who, according to the group, was waging a war on people living with Aids, since he was trying to block safe-sex campaigns. In 1990, following her performance at Palazzo Medici for the Festival Delle Colline, the artist was fiercely criticized by the Italian press and government (who went so far as to brand her "more blasphemous than Madonna"... any music lover can't help but smirk reading that line...), above all for the notorious track “Sono L'Antichristo”.

Conceptually, the record is no less destabilizing: it is, in every respect, the most imposing apologia for the victims of Aids ever created, an apologia that pours into the most sincere compassion (it's worth remembering that the artist has "We are all HIV positive" tattooed on her knuckles) and into a violent attack on the enemies of those victims: above all, prejudice and the Church. Recorded on October 12 and 13, 1990 at the Cathedral of St. John The Divine in New York, the project revisits the key moments of Masque Of The Red Death and adds previously unreleased pieces. While from a purely musical standpoint it doesn't match the level of her earlier records (the live reworkings don't live up to their studio counterparts, with the exception of the devastating versions of “This Is The Law Of The Plague” and “Cris D'Aveugle”, and the new pieces are mostly superfluous, starting with the verbose and long-winded “There Are No More Tickets To The Funeral”), Plague Mass is Diamanda Galás's masterpiece in communicative terms, her ceremonial work par excellence. Because her music, it should never be forgotten and indeed must be stressed, is first and foremost communication, the powerful and direct transmission of clearly defined messages. Anyone who views her art as a mere, provocative display of technical skill is mistaken: for Galás, the message and its form are everything. Here this reaches its fullest expression, starting with the era-defining cover art, continuing through the venue of the performance, and arriving finally at the performance itself (the singer appeared bare-chested, covered in blood and surrounded by candles).

Thanks to this record Galás became a star of the underground scene (and much sought after by directors for horror films: Craven's "The Serpent And The Rainbow" and Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" are perhaps her most memorable collaborations), to the point that the live-album formula would be repeated time and again in the years that followed.

Unfortunately, however, on the next record, The Singer (released in 1992), things slip back to the mediocre levels of You Must Be Certain Of The Devil. If anything, the musical decline here is perhaps even more worrying: the Greek-American musician becomes increasingly fixated on the use (already present on You Must...) of covers of blues, gospel, jazz and traditional songs, at the expense of original material. This practice becomes near-total: out of ten tracks, only the last one, “The Judgement Day”, is credited to Galás. It's an album of little interest or value simply because it's a string of interpretations of other artists' songs (Willie Dixon and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, among others) that, moreover, have little to do with the singer's own music. What's more, the voice here takes a back seat to the classical piano, and its use is hardly noteworthy or original: in the realm of blues and gospel, Galás is certainly no singer who stands out for flair or greatness. Some of these covers are undeniably enjoyable (“Gloomy Sunday” and “I Put A Spell On You” above all), but it's clear that The Singer is the work of a musician in the midst of an artistic slump.

Things improve the following year with Vena Cava (though actually recorded in early 1992), a new live project that returns to the search for the roots of pain, to the raw, guttural howl. Drawn from texts written by her brother Philip-Dimitri during his illness and centered on mental illness and the horrific causes of Aids (even adopting multiple personas, thus giving rise, in a sense, to a genuine piece of theater), Vena Cava is ideologically the sequel to Plague Mass, from which it differs sharply, however, in form: as spectacular, explosive and rich as the previous record is, this follow-up is just as minimalist, stark and sparse. While it's true that it contains some of the most terrifying moments in the musician's entire career, it's equally true that the overly insistent oscillation between screams, spoken word and silence, together with the excessive length of the finished work (about an hour, twice the length of her 80s masterpieces), means that the whole thing, rather than shaking the listener, ends up incredibly wearing them down instead.

Vena Cava is without doubt, among her live works, the one that suffers most from the CD format, even though, paradoxically, it is the least theatrical. The gap between what is heard and what is not seen makes the work feel disjointed, for all its courage and interest.

In 1994 came The Sporting Life, the famous collaboration with John Paul Jones, the former Led Zeppelin bassist. In Galás' discography, it's the album closest to a rock sound, which makes it accessible even to listeners who aren't devoted fans of the artist. The shame is that the quality is embarrassing: it's far more a Jones album than a Galás one, and Jones turns in a work of bottom-tier hard rock, built on stereotyped, soporific sounds that even Galás seems to doze off over, to the point that her voice sounds more like that of a jumped-up metal singer than an avant-garde vocalist. Nothing on this record is interesting, and the ten tracks blur into one another in their shoddy sameness. Even the singer herself seems to notice, quickly shelving this odd detour and setting about composing her latest (final?) masterpiece instead.

That same year, Galás was in fact working on another project, a piece for radio dealing with torture, both psychological and physical: Schrei 27. Released only two years later, in 1996, with an expanded live version and a slightly different title (Schrei X), Schrei 27 is exactly what its title suggests: 27 minutes of pure howling, the Scream in all its chaosmotic sovereignty.

The work sees a return to the stripped-down use of voice and electronics, although Galás approaches it in a substantially different way than in her early work: here, rather than grandiose psycho-vocal rides, they're used in brief, blistering stabs of unheard-of violence (with the exception of the final track, the pieces never run longer than two minutes), pearls of hydrophobic spasms. An ideal hymn to asylums and concentration camps, the record is perhaps the most frightening, the darkest (the live performances were staged in complete darkness), the most deranged of her works, as well as the one most weighed down by a premonition of death, and the one in which the singer joins her godmother Waters in the delirious Nulla.

If throughout her career she's always given primary importance to the message, on Schrei 27 Galás seems to almost forget about it — or rather, the message here becomes embodied in the work itself, which reveals itself to be an epiphany of pain. The unbearable tour de force closes with the seven and a half minutes of "Hee Shock Die", the album's masterpiece and the only track of the '90s worthy of comparison with the likes of "Wild Women" and "Panoptikon". For the entire duration of the piece, Galás does nothing but repeat "ok", let out laughter somewhere between the Luciferian and the desperate, and regurgitate strangled screams. The sense of oppression and the awareness of one's own annihilation reach their final stage: the victim by now is nothing but flesh, a body simply waiting for its own violent death ("kick my head", the artist says at one point, almost pleading), and indeed the absolute delirium closes with a climax of frenzied screams, with the End.

An End that coincides with the drying-up of inspiration for the musician from San Diego. The last ten years on record have seen a full, and apparently definitive, return to Diamanda Galás's musical roots, namely the world of blues, gospel and jazz. A return that coincides with a total, and almost certainly irreversible, artistic collapse: Malediction & Prayer, La Serpenta Canta, Defixiones, Will And Testament and the recent Guilty Guilty Guilty are nothing but dull, interminable, predictable, stale and repetitive live albums, made up entirely of covers (Johnny Cash, the Supremes, Billie Holiday, John Lee Hooker, among others).

While on one hand her accusatory, humanitarian intent never wavers (Defixiones, for instance, deals with the genocide of the Armenian and Greek peoples carried out by the Turks between 1914 and 1923), on the other the artistic quality is extremely low, the music reduced to avant-garde for the living room, for armchair rebels. Across four albums, only one track, "The Dance" (admittedly a piece of considerable length: 34 minutes), is worth hearing.

That said, Galás's recent output has the undeniable merit of having spread her fame internationally far more than her early records did; her name is now known and appreciated even outside the underground world, even though, obviously, she remains an unknown quantity to the less initiated listener.

In 2005, in Italy — the country that had judged her so harshly 15 years earlier — the musician was honored with the Demetrio Stratos lifetime achievement award (followed the next year by the other queen of vocal avant-garde, Meredith Monk); it's fitting recognition for a singer who, despite being in a full and probably definitive artistic eclipse, remains one of the most extraordinary, sincere, radical and revolutionary musicians of our time.

After All The Way (2017), an album revisiting jazz-blues standards, she returned with original material in 2022.

Broken Gargoyles (2022) is a classic work that unites music and literature, experimentation and culture in the broadest sense. The album was recorded as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Sanctuary of the Leper) in Hannover, an old sanctuary where plague and leprosy sufferers were housed from 1250 onward, which during the Great War became a hospital for wounded German soldiers, including those with devastating facial injuries (immortalized by photographer Ernst Friedrich in his landmark "War Against War"), who were forced to wear iron masks and came to be called Broken Gargoyles.

Diamanda Galas thus links the suffering of those who died of Covid in 2020-21 with that of the hundreds of thousands of people who passed through this place over the centuries, returning to her long, tragic avant-garde compositions in which human suffering — not just that of the single individual but of all humanity — is the common denominator. The texts of the German poet Georg Heym (1887-1912), dedicated to yellow fever patients facing a slow and painful death, take on new meaning and new life when read by Diamanda Galas in these two great suites, updated to reflect the horrors of the First World War.

Galas's singing once again becomes a cry of pain for humanity, a scream into the void of existence. In this, the twenty-three minutes of "Mutilatio" are emblematic, featuring Heym's poems "Das Fieberspital" and "Die Dämonen der Stadt", dedicated to a mortally wounded soldier, amid avant-garde sounds, noise, piano and a vocal delivery that is at once extreme yet able to communicate with the listener far more than a thousand other interchangeable voices. The sufferers of the leprosarium, the dying wounded of the World War, scream out in pain, and the almost visual sense of their faces deformed by screams and wounds grows ever more vivid in the mind, minute after minute. "Abiecto" is even more extreme, the voice by now totally inhuman, just like the effects of war on men, at times turning into animalistic cries resembling those of beasts headed for slaughter.

There's no longer any difference between human beings and animals; the suffering caused by war involves every living creature, and Diamanda Galas bears witness to this with majestic, moving power, returning to the heights of her masterpieces.

Contributions by Valerio D'Onofrio ("Broken Gargoyles")

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