Freq.org.uk
The following article was borrowed from
http://www.freq.org.uk/live2003.html
Excerpt:
Diamanda Galas, October 17, 2003.
Perhaps the most astonishing and
powerful performance in Mind Your Head comes from Diamanda
Galás, an artist of another stature to every other performer on the
bill. Her voice is capable of such a range, and her compositions of so
involving a level of melodaramatic anguish that anything else seems tame
and trivial by comparison. Her dark-shrouded two-part solo appearance in
the Festival Hall is one where no spine is left without some severe
tingling on the trembling ullalations and raging squalls of a voice
which could probably be trained to kill. That Galás has directed her ire
against the repressive forces of the world is admirable, and if only her
words and almost tangible vocal exertions could strike deep into the
souls of genocidal mania, then the feeling she generates is that all
human evil would be swept away in the purifying drive of her voice.
Instead, the ultimate result is a
wailing lament, a searing indicment of the miseries and utter inhumanity
of crimes on a scale which pass everyday media understanding. Delivered
with a passion that finds her eyes rolling back in the intensity of her
performance, she sings the Blues like no other, a Blues which
encompasses the Nazi death camps, the blasted villages of ethnic Greeks
in Turkey, the existential Parisian decay of Gérard Nerval and the US
South itself. Throughout, Diamanda is a poised and tortured figure,
flitting between multiple microphones and piano, touched by a
chiaroscuro which heigtens the drama as much as it obcures the concert
hall surrounding, pinpointing the technical accomplishment of her
singing with crimson washes and stark uplit counterpoint to the minimal
drones and thunderous chords of her compositions.