Screaming for Vengeance
Diamanda Galás paints the blues black
by Damon Orion
Avant-garde
performance artist, horror chanteuse, Greek tragedienne, opera singer
turned to the Dark Side … call Diamanda Galás what you will, but the
bottom line is that she might just be the most sincerely frightening
artist in existence—period. This classically trained pianist/bel canto
vocalist’s concerts have the feel of genuine diabolical invocations, as
if invisible demons are being awakened by her feral,
three-and-a-half-octave-spanning shrieks and growls. This, coupled with
her intimidating appearance—clothes blacker than Norwegian metal, face
paint whiter than the music of Steely Dan—gives us the impression that
we’re face-to-face with the living essence of blatant, undisguised evil.
It comes as no small relief, then, to hear the
friendliness in Galás’ voice as she greets me over the phone from her
home in New York. “Hold on!” she laughs. “I’ve got gold ink on my
hands—I’ve got to wash it off.” It seems that Galás has been creating
drawings of people being blindfolded and hanged for being
gabur: Turkish for
infidel (non-Islamic). The term, she explains, refers to the Greek
populations subjected to genocide by the Turks.
The slant of Galás’ project should come as no
surprise to anyone familiar with her music, which from day one has
expressed outrage over humanity’s manifold injustices, with genocide
(including that resulting from lack of response to the AIDS epidemic)
right at the top of the list. Her Defixiones,
Will and Testament (2003) dealt with the
Ottoman Empire’s massacre of the Greeks in the early 20th century (Galás
herself is of Greek heritage), while such infernal Goth operas as 1988’s
Masque of the Red Death
and 1991’s Plague Mass
took on the topics of AIDS and religious hypocrisy.
“Rage is a very, very unfortunate, intransigent
part of my personality,” the singer says. “People would say, ‘You’re not
supposed to react to things—you’re supposed to act on them,’ and blah,
blah, blah. Well, I haven’t gotten that together. I see something that I
think is absolutely not right, and I react very violently.”
In spite of the rather intense subject matter
we’ve begun to explore, Galás comes across as nothing short of charming.
Contrasted with her Queen of the Damned stage persona, her high-energy
repartee can seem downright bubbly at times … and if you’re
exceptionally foolish, you might just tell her so.
“Oh, bubbly!”
Galás retorts, sounding really and truly pissed. “Oh, darling, that’s
just a lovely word. That’s rather a Doris Day sort of a word. Now you’re
going to tell me I’m vivacious, and then I’m going to have to slap your
face. But I can’t over the phone, so you’ve taken
lots of liberties.”
Well, I … what I mean to say is …
“No, no—you’ve already damned yourself,” she
spits. “Don’t try to turn away from it.” Finally she breaks into a
playful laugh. The black cloud passes, and her flesh-shriveling fury is
revealed to be friendly teasing … or so I can only hope.
In defense of her very real spookiness, Galás
does have a graveyard cackle straight off a Halloween haunted house
record, and it often punctuates humor so dark you could develop photos
by it. Like a welcome mat at Hell’s gates, it’s an eerie mix of whimsy
and foreboding.
“You can always tell a Greek by the way they
laugh,” the musician states. “It’s very aggressive, abrasive, sardonic.
It’s like laughing in the face of your enemy. That’s what I’m doing with
these drawings—it’s like, ‘Yeah, cut my throat! You got me now, but I
got you later.’”
Lest we read too much into this last statement,
Galás is quick to stress that she doesn’t believe in an afterlife. As a
self-proclaimed “Greek Orthodox atheist” (“That gives you the certainty
of the devil with no hope in God”), she explains that the obsession with
death so apparent in her work (“It’s the thing I’m most afraid of”) goes
hand-in-hand with an obsession with life: The terror of death’s finality
forces her to milk life for every drop of pleasure, joy and creativity
that it’s worth.
Galás’ latest exploration of her fascination with
the proverbial Great Gig in the Sky comes in the form of her show
“Guilty, Guilty, Guilty,” which hits the Rio this Tuesday. Billed as a
program of “tragic and homicidal love songs and death songs,” it sees
the chanteuse covering tunes by the likes of Johnny Cash, Édith Piaf and
Ralph Stanley.
Galás says we can expect some surprises from her
concert—in addition to some of the bleaker songs that have comprised
previous versions of “Guilty, Guilty, Guilty,” she’ll be performing some
beautiful, romantic songs that she found herself singing this summer
after “some situation transpired.” According to the artist, these works
offer a glimpse of “a person who has literally opened their veins—in the
most beautiful sense, but in the most vulnerable sense, the most
dangerous sense—rather than the person who’s sitting and laughing two or
three years later, when the relationship’s over.”
Even when she’s singing love songs and blues
standards, Galás tends to push the envelope, bringing a wide array of
styles to her bone-chilling improvisations. The musician, who has
collaborated with everyone from former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul
Jones to Ornette Coleman’s cornet player, Bobby Bradford, says her
amalgamation of influences was never calculated, but is simply the
result of playing music since she was 5 years old.
“You’ll be singing ‘Burning Hell’ by John Lee
Hooker,” she offers, “and suddenly, right in the middle of it, when
you’re doing improvisation … that intonation takes you to another note.
People would say they’re related microtonally, but those words are very
academic. Suddenly you’re singing in the middle of a blues, and you’ve
got a whole section which is distinctly Middle Eastern.”
The blues itself, Galás points out, is actually
informed by many influences. She cites the Islamic takeover of West
Africa as an example: “A lot of West Africans, obviously, were the ones
that were enslaved and taken to the United States. Islam was informed,
in turn, by [many of the rulers’ insistence] that the musicians study
with Greek musicians; they studied the Byzantine music, and so that
means that the influence of Alexandria, the influence of the Greeks, the
influence from the earliest time … all the music was very, very
informed—and Islam is a later religion. It was influenced by much
earlier religions, and those religions ultimately influenced the blues.”
As our hour-long conversation winds to a close,
your narrator cautiously ventures a second compliment on Galás’
unexpectedly pleasant demeanor, telling her she doesn’t emote the “diva”
attitude one might have anticipated. This time, his offering is
gratefully received.
“I don’t know what the word diva means anymore,”
Galás muses. “I think the word diva now means anything that sits down to
piss. It refers now to something as ugly as Martha Stewart to something
uglier, presumably. It used to mean someone who was able to sing a range
of three octaves of an unbroken timbre, as in the bel canto tradition,
but it certainly does not now. I think it means someone who has gone to
manicurists or something.”
Her diva status notwithstanding, Santa Cruzans
with a sweet tooth for the macabre are invited to witness Galás’
phenomenal vocal control—and get a chronic case of the creeps—at the
Rio. Leave the kids at home, and don’t think for a minute that knowing
what to expect will keep you from getting spooked at her show. Trust
me—you will.
Diamanda Galas plays at 9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 24
at The Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. Tickets are
$25/general, $40 Section Noire (first eight rows). For more information,
call 423-8209 or visit riotheatre.com.