An overwhelming event in every sense. Diamanda's only British performance of Malediction and Prayer is a bleak and beautifully brutal experience. She sits alon at the piano, somewhere in the blackness of the Festival Hall, bathed in an unearthly glow.

From the opening throat-eruption of the most recent "Schrei X" material, the entire venue is completely filled with Diamanda's voice, and the air around her becomes almost motionless,such is her command of sound-as-space. With slightest of modulations, her voice seems to take on layers of drone and shift, yet there's so much more. Diamanda is far from the one-trick hysteric that she's sometimes pegged as.

Tonight she makes apparent what in retrospect seems obvious--her place in a lineage that runs back through the violent blues of the likes of Son House, the siren call of The Supremes, the dark outsider rumble of Johnny Cash, and, tonight most of all, the depth of vision and otherworldly benevolence of Odetta. It't telling that she includes a text from Pasolini in tonight's performance, inviting comparisons with Odetta's mournful rendition of "Sometimes I Fell Like a Motherless Child" in Pasolini's "Gospel According to Saint Matthew." Tonight's performance is full of that same inarticulabe longing, that sense of something lost but not forgotten.

Afterwards, while all the "late Show" types suck tomatoes at the after-show, Diamanda is downstairs in the bar signing autographs. Laughing and chatting with her fans she seems, bizarrely enough, real__nice__.