defixiones reviews

Diamanda Galás: Jazz?
Wednesday 22 September @ 12:58:08 by Holly Day

For some odd reason, the All Music Guide categorizes Diamanda Galás a jazz performer. Maybe it’s because she plays the piano, usually unaccompanied, and that’s something jazz performers do. If Diamanda Galás is considered a jazz artist, then I hold great and high hopes for the future of jazz. Jazz that includes Diamanda opens the door to a potential horde of intense, wild-eyed performers that scream in multiple octaves and utilize Tibetan throat singing and operatic wails, sometimes all in the same song. Because this is what Diamanda does in her music, and whether you’re frightened or intrigued by her performances, one thing’s for sure—you will never forget having been in her presence.

Over the twenty-some years of her recording career, Diamanda’s released fourteen imposing and mostly thematic albums. She’s written entire albums about AIDS (Plague Mass, Masque of the Red Death), imprisonment (Panoptikon), sexual oppression (Wild Women with Steak Knives), dementia (Vena Cava), and torture (Schrei X). She also does some awesome and frightening covers of blues standards, and has collaborated with artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and cornet player Bobby Bradford.

“Spend one week with a Greek family, and all the darkness and despair and melodrama will find its way to the surface,” says Diamanda of her choice of subject matter. “It’s a culture that is kind of a dark culture. It’s dark by the standards of what Americans consider to be ‘normal’ culture. [The Greek people] are very concerned with things like death, and very concerned with the politics of genocide, because that’s how the culture was shaped. That’s the experience of the culture. For the Greeks, life is a celebration, so the thing they’re most afraid of is death. So that would be an obsession. The discussion of death is a mirror of the brilliance and the gift of life, you know, the beauty of life, and so that is why there’s so much of that discussion. And also, the issue of mortality has to do with the fact that this was a culture that was invaded so many times by Italians, Germans, Turks. And so I think that has something to do with the darkness in my work, because I’ve heard lots of stories since I was a little girl of deportations, and genocide, of the Greeks by the Turks, because my father is from Asia Minor.”

It’s those stories passed down to her by her father that form the basis behind her newest release, Defixiones: Will and Testament (Mute Records), which covers the mass exodus and genocide of the Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians by the Turks in the years between 1914 and 1923. The two-disc collection contains poems and journal entries from survivors of the exodus, as well as many writings from those who didn’t make it. Ali Ahmad Said’s “The Desert,” a first-hand account of being forced to march across the desert with hundreds of other refugees, says, “My era tells me bluntly/You don’t not belong …You die because you are the face of the future.” Diamanda relays the story in the original Armenian in a dizzying volley of operatic screams that rise up in anger and throb low in hopelessness within heartbeats of each other. “Orders from the Dead,” one of only two songs here that Diamanda wrote the words to herself, provocatively summarizes collection with a scream of, “I am the man unburied/who cannot sleep/in forty pieces!”

“The Defixiones refers to the verb ‘to fix,’ to fix, to mark,” says Diamanda. “It’s like a needle that goes into a doll. It’s marking a territory as your own, and it says that, with the marking of that territory, you have certain power. Whether this is the power to, say, put a curse on a competitor, or an enemy, or to say, ‘If you desecrate this grave, your daughter’s daughter’s daughter will perish slowly from a horrible disease.’ That’s the nature of this type of curse. It’s something that was and still is practiced throughout the Middle East by people who have very little power, and this is their response, these curses are their only resource available. For example, if you had Greek, Assyrians, Armenians, living under the power of the Turks, the Turks, because they could, could easily dig up a grave to steal the jewels, or steal anything that’s buried in the grave. So there would be curses on the graves to warn them, and maybe, that would be all they had, were those curses. That would be the only thing they had to protect them, and that may have been quite a delusional kind of power, but nonetheless, it was the only power that was had by these people. So that’s pretty much what this album is. I am saying, you cannot desecrate this memory,” she explains, wrapping up the interview. “You cannot pretend this grave, and these people, did not exist by digging it up. It exists, and when you dig it up, the power of these people’s anger will outlast you, and it will drag you down screaming.”

Diamanda Galás performs on Tue., Sept. 28, at the Fitzgerald Theater. 7:30 p.m. All Ages. $27 adv/ $29 door. 10 E. Exchange St. 651-989-5151.