Diamanda Galás

Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, visual artist, and activist. Galás has attracted the attention of the press particularly for her voice — a soprano sfogato — and written accounts that describe her work as original and thought-provoking refer to her as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", "a mourner for the world's victims" and "an envoy of risk, honesty and commitment".

As a composer, pianist, organist and performance artist, Galás has presented mainly her own work, but her live performances have also included works by other musicians, such as the avant-garde composers Iannis Xenakis and Vinko Globokar, jazz musician Bobby Bradford, saxophonist John Zorn, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Galás's recordings have also included collaborations, some of which are with the bands Recoil and Erasure, instrumentalist Barry Adamson, and musician Can Oral (also known as Khan), among others.

Background and education

Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California, to a Maniot Greek-American mother from Dover, New Hampshire, Georgianna Koutrelakos-Galás, and an Egyptian Greek father from Lynn, Massachusetts, James Galás. Both parents were Greek Orthodox but considered themselves agnostic. Her father's Greek ancestors were from Smyrna, Pontus, and Chios, while one of his grandmothers was an Egyptian from Alexandria. Galás does not refer to her Smyrniote and Pontic ancestry as "Turkish", but rather as Anatolian.

Galás's first contact with music was during her childhood in San Diego, where her parents lived and worked as teachers. Her father, who was also a gospel choir director, taught her how to play the piano when she was three years old, while introducing her later to classical music, the New Orleans jazz tradition, rebetika and other classics of his Greek heritage, some blues standards, and other historical music genres. Galas also took cello and violin lessons, and studied a wide range of musical forms.

Galás and her brother Phillip-Dimitri acquired a taste for dark literature at an early age. Their inspirations were the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and Edgar Allan Poe.

In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry at the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and hematology studies.

Music

Early years (1970s–1986)

In the early 1970s, Galás and her friend contra-bass player Mark Dresser joined the jazz band Black Music Infinity, which included drummer Stanley Crouch, trumpeter Bobby Bradford, cornetist Butch Morris, flautist James Newton, and saxophonist David Murray. She later collaborated with members of the San Diego band CETA VI, which included, among others, jazz saxophonist Jim French, with whom Galás went on to record and release her first compositions, as part of the album If Looks Could Kill (1979), together with guitarist and sound engineer Henry Kaiser. Globokar was the director of the Instruments and Voice department at the music and sound research center IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), where Galás had been doing further experimentation on her vocal technique. After her return to the US, Galás performed one more work by Xenakis, his composition N'Shima (1975), in the US premiere of it in New York in 1981, alongside soprano Genevieve Renon-McLaughlin, who sang one of the two vocal parts of this piece.

Her first solo album, The Litanies of Satan (1982), was also an operatic work. It included only two compositions: a twelve-minute piece entitled 'Wild Women with Steak-Knives', which was described by Galás in the album notes as tragedy-grotesque deriving from her work "Eyes Without Blood", and another lengthy composition, 'Litanies of Satan', an adaptation to music of a section from Charles Baudelare's poem Les Fleurs du Mal. Her second album, Diamanda Galas (1984), also contained two lengthy compositions. They were 'Panoptikon', which was dedicated to Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast described his experience of the prison system, and 'Tragoudia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos' ('Song From the Blood of Those Murdered'), a Greek-language piece dedicated to those political prisoners who were either murdered or executed during the Greek military regimes in the years 1967–74.

Mute Records (1986–2008)

Galás began writing and performing on the subject of AIDS around 1984, while living in San Francisco. This theme resulted in the trilogy Masque of the Red Death, an operatic trilogy which included The Divine Punishment (1986), Saint of the Pit (1986) and You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988). In these three works Galás detailed the suffering of people with AIDS. Shortly after the recording of the trilogy's first volume began, her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, became sick with AIDS, which inspired her to join activist groups that raised awareness about this new illness. Her brother died in 1986, just before the completion of the trilogy. In 1992, Galás released the album Vena Cava, a series of unaccompanied voice pieces recorded in New York during a live performance at The Kitchen.

In the next three years, Galás returned to collaborations with other musicians. She first worked with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a longtime admirer of her work, to write material for a record, and the album The Sporting Life was produced with him in 1994. A tour that followed the album's release saw the two musicians performing together live on stage as well as on the popular MTV show The Jon Stewart Show. Then, in the same year, two of Galás's songs from her previous album were featured on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers. In 1995, Galás contributed vocals to the eponymous album of British synth-pop duo Erasure at the invitation of the lead singer, Andy Bell, and the following year she took part in the album Closed on Account of Rabies, a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe which also included Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry and Marianne Faithfull, who lent their voices to the tales of the legendary author. Galás' reading of "The Black Cat" was the longest recording on the compilation.

In 1998, Galás released Malediction and Prayer, which was recorded live in 1996 and 1997. In 2000, Galás worked with Recoil by contributing her voice to the album Liquid. She was the lead vocalist on the album's first single, "Strange Hours", for which she also wrote the lyrics, and can be heard on "Jezebel" and "Vertigen" as a backing vocalist.

thumb|Diamanda Galás at the QE Hall in London

Galás's next project revolved around the Armenian, Anatolian-Greek and Assyrian genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923. This work took the title 'Defixiones – Will and Testament' in reference to the last wishes of the dead who had been taken to their graves under extreme circumstances, as 'defixiones' in Greece and Asia Minor is associated with the warnings written on gravestones by relatives of the dead to warn people against desecrating them. This material formed part of the 80-minute long album Defixiones: Will and Testament (2003), which was released simultaneously with La Serpenta Canta (2003), a live album including cover versions recorded between May 1999 and November 2002. One of the unaccompanied vocal pieces from Defixiones: Will and Testament (2003), "Orders from the Dead", was later used on the album Aealo (2010) by Greek black metal band Rotting Christ.

In 2008, Galás released her seventh live album, Guilty Guilty Guilty, a collection of cover songs that she used to play as a piano accompanist in her father's band when she was young. The album emerged from material she began to work on around the time when her parents – to whom it is dedicated – happened to stay in the same hospital at the same time for different treatments; seeing how they handled it and how they held hands and took courage from each other during that time reminded her of the love songs she had learned in her father's band. Galás has stated that these songs also made her explore her own emotions at a time when a long-term personal relationship had ended, particularly Henderson's and Brown's "The Thrill Is Gone", a song performed by Chet Baker and others. This set of new re-interpretations of old, love songs was recorded live at Galás's Valentine's Day concert at New York's Knitting Factory in 2006.

In 2019, Galás regained the rights of her back catalogue and her discography was made available again. The result was the release of a remastered version of her debut album The Litanies of Satan (1982), which had been originally released on Y Records. This was followed by the 21-minute piano work De-formation: Piano Variations (2020), which was based on music for the 1912 poem Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) by the German expressionist writer Georg Heym. The inspiration came from a pre-First World War poem by the German poet Georg Heym that Galás came across in a book about German expressionist art and poetry. This led her to other cultural artefacts from the period, including a 1924 book by anti-war campaigner Ernst Friedrich of photographs showing soldiers with damaged faces, which were also responsible for the album title, as 'gargoyles' was a term used by hospital staff to refer to those soldiers. The album comprises two long pieces titled 'Mutilatus' and 'Abiectio'.

On 14 June 2024, a new album of live recordings was released. Titled Diamanda Galás in Concert (2024), it contained a selection of songs from her 2017 performances at Thalia Hall in Chicago and Neptune Theatre in Seattle. They were both previously unreleased songs as well as different versions of material from earlier albums. In September 2024, Galás released a remastered version of her album Saint of the Pit (1986).

Art

Performance art

Although Galás found herself in the mid-70s studying and practicing music and performance in the West Coast, where performance artists tended to be much more reliant on text and closer to the theatrical event than their European and East-Coast counterparts, her use of text did not restrict her performances to a script, as her introduction of electronically processed sounds shifted her attention towards vocal improvisation to allow more freedom. Her first public performances at New York's The Kitchen and the 1980 Moers Festival reflect this direction, and works such as 'Wild Women with Steak-Knives' and 'Panoptikon', which were developed in this period and used heavily the improvisation element and vocal experimentation, were later recorded and released as music records for her first two solo albums in 1982 and 1984 respectively.

In 1990, Galás selected material from her AIDS trilogy and created a performance piece for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. With a theme addressing the Roman Catholic Church's indifference to sufferers of HIV and Galás's introduction of theatrical props, such as artificial blood and special lights, her performance, for some members of her audience, "combined ululating shrieks, whispers and howls with an intensity that left the audience stunned.

Painting

Galás has stated that, for her, painting acts as "an exorcism of that which is troubling [her] deeply", and that the visual language she uses allows her "to paint an analogue of the experience, the misery, and therefore get rid of it for the time being. But only because of that vocabulary", she adds. One of the Expressionist artists that Galás mentions as influential to her is the Austrian painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, especially with his short play Murderer, the Hope of Women (1909), which has very little text but creates 'explosions' by being immensely expressive. Galás has also been compared to the artist David Wojnarowicz, whose work is seen as falling within the wider limits of neo-expressionism, for the similarities in which they invite horror through immediate and explicit expression. For Galás, the visual art that she does "has the same impulse and subject material" as her music, because she cannot interrupt the creative process when working on a subjects, "so these are simply different treatments of similar subjects."

In 2011, Galás donated a painting to the Coilhouse International Fundraising Silent Auction, which was part of The Black & White & Red All Over Ball organized by New York's digital and print magazine, and corresponding blog, Coilhouse. Galás's work was a luminescent, or a 'glow-in-the-dark fabric painting', as described by the magazine editors, featuring "mysterious and ferocious organic shapes painted on a thick piece of black fabric and adorned with a bright prism″.

Installation

In 1988, Galás provided the music to the audiovisual installation Faded Wallpaper (1988) by British artist Tina Keane, which included a neon sign and a video work that featured, among other material, extracts from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'.

In 2010, a four-minute video artwork entitled A Fire in My Belly (1992), which was made using a composition by Galás from her album Plague Mass (1991) and a film by the artist David Wojnarowicz, was featured in the exhibition Hide/Seek at Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. The artwork was deemed by some groups to be controversial and it was removed from that show, with Galas immediately responding to the Smithsonian's removal with a written statement that was circulated in the press.

In 2011, Galás collaborated with Soviet dissident artist Vladislav Shabalin on Aquarium, a sound installation inspired by the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The event took place at Leonhardskirche in Basel (Switzerland) from June 12 to 19. Aquarium was then installed at the church of San Francesco in Udine (Italy), at the festival "Vicino/Lontano", from May 9 to 12, 2013.

In July 2020, Galás presented via Fridman Gallery's online space a work inspired by poetry and visuals related to physical and mental scars in soldiers who were injured in the First World War. With collaborators such as artist and sound engineer Daniel Neumann, video artist Carlton Bright, and artist Robert Knocke on a guest appearance, Galás produced 'Broken Gargoyles', an installation based on the words of German poet Georg Heym and on photographs by Ernst Friedrich.

Films

In 1984, Galás made a voice cameo appearance, performing the voices for the Japanese assassins and flying weapons in Cannon Films' Ninja III: The Domination. and also offered her voice to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, adding erotically charged moans, breathless sighs, and high-pitched shrieks. She also contributed the song "Exeloume" to the film. In 1995, Galás was commissioned to record a cover version of the Schwartz-Dietz song "Dancing in the Dark" for Clive Barker's film Lord of Illusions, and her song appeared during the closing credits.

While two of her earlier recordings, "Le Treizième Revient" and "Exeloume", appeared on the soundtrack to Derek Jarman's The Last of England (1987), Galás herself also made an appearance in a film, as in 1990 she took part in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary Positive about AIDS in the New York gay scene.

In 2011, Galás premiered Schrei 27, a film made in collaboration with Italian filmmaker Davide Pepe. It was based on Schrei X, a 1994 radio piece which was a co-commission to Galás by New American Radio and the Walker Art Center, and it has been described as an "unrelenting" portrait of a body suffering torture in a medical facility.

Most recently, Galás contributed work to James Wan's 2013 horror film, The Conjuring, and her composition "Free Among the Dead" from the album The Divine Punishment (1986) was featured in Zoe Mavroudi's documentary, Ruins: Chronicle of an HIV Witch-Hunt (2013).

Awards

In 2005, Galás was awarded Italy's prestigious Demetrio Stratos International Career Award.

Activism

Galás's commitment to addressing social issues and her involvement in collective action has made her concentrate on themes such as AIDS, mental illness, despair, loss of dignity, political injustice, historical revisionism, and war crimes.

She has campaigned for AIDS education and the rights of those diagnosed. In 1986, Galás's brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, died from AIDS, and this inspired her to join the AIDS activist group ACT UP.

Cultural references

Galás was mentioned in Michael Kustow's autobiographical book One in Four (1987), which uses the form of a journal to tell the author's story for the year 1986, when he was working as a Commissioning Editor for the Arts in the British TV station Channel Four. Galás's name does not appear directly in the book, but several references to her are made in a conversation between the author and the owner of the independent music label Some Bizzare Records Stevo Pearce, such as the use of cutting-edge technology in her live performances, her singing technique, and her Greek heritage. The following dialogue between these two persons illustrates best how this is an indirect mention of Galás:<blockquote>

My label's called Some Bizzare. ... I've got the best f***ing TV show you'll ever see. Drama, video art, music, films made by the bands themselves. You'll get ratings. Innovation? I can give Channel Four all the innovation it wants. Greek singer, for example. She wears twenty contact microphones round her body, like necklaces, she's an opera singer, it's pure unaccompanied transformed voice. It'll drive your viewers crazy!</blockquote>

Critical analyses

Musicologist Susan McClary has written about Galás in her study Feminist Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (2002). McClary looks at Galás's work in a discussion about the representation of women in famous operas as an example of how Galás's approach confronts the narrow portrayal of women in those works and how she renovated the operatic tradition with subjects created through enactment.

Art historian Nicholas Chare discusses the concert performance Todesfuge (Death's Fugue) by Diamanda Galás in his study Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation (2011). Chare is interested in the Holocaust and representations of it in painting, photography, musical performance and museum artefacts, so in the section where he examines how Galás has transformed the words in the poem Todesfuge, which was written by the Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan, he looks at her work to investigate the relationship between style and horror in music, poetry and art.

Influences

Galás has cited multiple artists as influences on her music, including Maria Callas, Annette Peacock, Patty Waters, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, and Jimi Hendrix.

Discography

{| class="wikitable"

!Year

!Albums

|1982

|The Litanies of Satan (Studio)

|1984

|Diamanda Galas (Studio)

|1986

|The Divine Punishment (Studio)

|1986

|Saint of the Pit (Studio)

|1988

|You Must Be Certain of the Devil (Studio)

|1991

|Plague Mass (Live)

|1992

|The Singer (Studio)

|1993

|Vena Cava (Live)

|1994

|The Sporting Life (Studio)

|1996

|Schrei x (Studio and Live)

|1998

|Malediction and Prayer (Live)

|2003

|Defixiones: Will and Testament (Studio and Live)

|2003

|La serpenta canta (Live)

|2008

|Guilty Guilty Guilty (Live)

|2017

|All the Way (Studio and Live)

|2017

|At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem (Live)

|2020

|De-formation: Piano Variations (EP) (Studio)

|2022

|Broken Gargoyles (Studio)

|2024

|Diamanda Galás In Concert (Live)

|2025

|De-formation: Second Piano Variations (Live)

Compilation albums

1988 – The Divine Punishment & Saint of the Pit
1988 – Masque of the Red Death (The Divine Punishment, Saint of the Pit & You Must Be Certain of the Devil)

Singles

1988 – Double-Barrel Prayer
1994 – Do You Take This Man? (with John Paul Jones)
2009 – A Soul That's Been Abused
2009 – Gloomy Sunday
2009 – Pardon Me, I've Got Someone To Kill
2009 – You Don't Know What Love Is
2009 – O Death
2009 – I Put A Spell On You (with Digitalism)
2010 – The Black Cat
2010 – Tengo que Subir al Puerto (Canto de las Montañas)
2010 – Fernand
2010 – All The Way
2010 – Orders From The Dead (with Rotting Christ)
2011 – Άνοιξε Πέτρα (Anoixe Petra)
2011 – Birds Of Death
2011 – La Sierra de Armenia
2011 – Clash Of The Titans (with Choronzon)
2021 – Die Stunde Kommt (Live At The Murmrr Theater Brooklyn 2017)

Long-form videos

1986 – The Litanies of Satan (VHS)
1993 – Judgement Day (VHS)

Promotional videos

1988 – Double-Barrel Prayer
1994 – Do You Take This Man?

Books

1996 – The Shit of God. London and New York: High Risk/Serpent's Tail, 1996.
2017 – "Morphine & Others", featured in Outside: An Anthology, edited by Doron Hamburger & Amir Naaman. Berlin: Ash Pure Press, 2017.

References

External links

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Diamanda Galás discography on Discogs
Twitchfilm: Interview with Diamanda Galás
run-riot: Interview
Live footage of Diamanda Galás from the Claxon Festival in the Netherlands (Holland Festival 1984) – video starts at 41:16