The hantologie of Diamanda Galas, OR Cabaret in the Underworld
Fosco is a secret
Goth. Sure, he doesn't participate sartorially in the
movement, preferring khakis and button-down oxford shirts.
However, he does frequently wear eyeliner. And, whenever he
takes of those "which
high school clique would you belong to" quizzes,
he ends up as Goth (with
Emo Kid a close second). (Strangely enough, Fosco was
not a member of either clique when he actually was
in high school, but these cliques were merely incipient back
then.)
Perhaps Fosco's advisor Jody can sense his hidden gothness,
as she suggested yesterday that he cut out of his evening
class early in order to see Goth chanteuse
Diamanda Galas in Santa Cruz last night. Although Fosco
knew almost nothing about Diamanda Galas, he was willing to
go for several reasons:
- the title of the
show was "Guilty
Guilty Guilty," which is really an irresistible
title. How can that be bad?
- it was described
as a "program of tragic and homicidal love songs and
death songs." How can that be bad?
- he had actual faculty permission to leave class early to attend a concert. How can that be bad?
Before you think that
I'm setting you up for some ironic reversal, let me make it
clear: the concert was PHENOMENAL. Now let me tell you about
it.
Diamanda entered the auditorium from the back and walked spotlit
down the aisle to the stage where she took her seat at a piano
enveloped in fog. She certainly makes an entrance. She was
dressed in black, of course, looking a bit like a less-purposefully
sexy
Elvira. For her first song, the curtain behind the piano
was lit deep funeral-home blue, with a red spot on the piano.
The opening chords were funereal (and there was some electronic
distortion added to the sound). This was all great fun, of
course, as Fosco likes a good spectacle. But then she opened
her mouth...
And THE VOICE came out.
That's actually a direct quote from Fosco's notes (he was
taking notes for you, my pretties). Right in the middle of
the page, after his descriptions of the show so far, Fosco
suddenly writes: "THE VOICE."
Her voice is not like anything you have heard (at least on
this side of the grave). She opened with "My World Is
Empty Without You," a track that is available live in
iTunes (should you desire to hear it). You can get a sense
of THE VOICE from it, but you have to imagine hearing it in
person. This is not a pleasant voice, rather, it COMMANDS.
It seems it can do almost anything, actually. Over the course
of the program, she yowled, she whispered, she howled, she
screeched, and she did some kind of thing where, like the
throat singers of Tuva she produced two notes at once.
According to one of the press clippings available on her website:
Galás plays the piano like driving rain slapping on concrete, and she sings like a demon going to war, a Valkyrie scatting, a lizard queen seeking revenge for the dead… Galás is profound, rigorous, vocally unlimited, terrifying and utterly compelling.
That sounds about right.
The program was almost entirely covers (as far as I can
tell), but I would be surprised if the ordinary listener could
recognize most of them. She did a version of "Autumn
Leaves" (at least I think it was "Autumn
Leaves") that can only be described as Evil. There were
several songs in French (one of them supposedly an
Edith Piaf cover--imagine that, if you can) and one in
Spanish (I think, although it could have been Italian). The
final encore was the bone-chilling "Let
My People Go," which haunted me for the rest of the
night.
It is no accident that I used the verb "haunt" here.
I would like to suggest, in a
Derridean moment, that there is a "hauntology"
(or hantologie in French) at work in Diamanda Galas.
She reminds us of what is not there in these songs
(and in music in general). This is music that acknowledges
the power of ghosts, of the dead--and, perhaps, channels those
spectres into actual appearance.
As I struggled throughout the concert to figure out how to
describe her, I finally settled on this metaphor: Diamanda
Galas is what Cabaret is like in the Underworld. By the "Underworld,"
I mean the Greek Underworld (specifically, probably the
Asphodel Meadows) where normal souls are not rewarded
with Heaven or punished with torment, but rather mill about
in a less-pleasant version of life on earth, haunted by memories
of their life on earth and desirous of news of the living.
This is what Diamanda Galas evokes for me. And I hope she
is in The Underworld when I get there.
The other question that I kept thinking was this: does
David Lynch know about her? And, if so, why hasn't she
appeared in one of his movies yet?
