malediction & prayer reviews

She appears as the very face of horror and rage: dripping with blood, stripped to the waist, eyes rolled skullward, screaming, moaning and growling into multiple microphones, singing of plagues, madness, isolation and brutal revenge.

Off stage, other faces of Diamanda Galas emerge: the literate and expressive Greco-American musician, who has been around since the early 1980's, immersed in the worlds of gospel, jazz, opera, blues, contemporary composition and literature; the flamboyant raconteur who compares the rigours of her craft to professional boxing.

"I have to be able to deploy in an hour a lot of serious emotions that people go through, and I think that's a serious job, and I have to work through my technique beforehand to make it sound spontaneous," she says, her piercing gaze breaking into an easy, wide smile. "But when I'm not doing that, it's not like I'm going to put on some rock-star attitude."

When she takes the stage at Toronto's Massey Hall tonight, Galas will bring to life her uneasy relationships both with rock-star attitude and high-art gravity. Her performance, titled Malediction and Prayer, is a succession of songs by the likes of Johnny Cash and Phil Ochs and verse by Baudelaire and Pasolini, their inner passions and horrors released through her powerful voice.

The audience will be a strange mix of multi-pierced youth dressed in black, avant-garde music aficionados and political activists. The songs of Galas are always songs of resistance – against the forces of institutionalization, rape, fascism, mediocrity and, above all else, AIDS and its offspring of social prejudice – in her words, about "isolation, claustrophobia, invisible populations that are being experimented upon." The fingers of her left hand are tattooed with "We are all HIV positive." (Her brother died from AIDS in 1986.)

Yet she dreads the thought of becoming another "political" musician, and feigns retching at the mention of Bob Geldof. "We don't need another rock 'n' roll pretend singer coming into our country and telling us what it is that we should be doing," she says. "That's not for me. I don't want to be the Joan Baez of anything."

For Galas, music is not about sympathy or solidarity; it must create actual despair and anger. "If you're talking about a cathartic thing, about music that is equal to the suffering of the people it's discussing, that has this dynamic intensity and has the ugliness of the emotional shit and the desperation, then I'll do it."

Whether her performances are abstract compositions such as Wild Women with Steak Knives (1986) and this year's Schrei X (her 11th album), or more popular, crowd-pleasing songs like those she will be performing tonight, her works draw upon a rich vocabulary of blues refrains, Greek rituals, voices of insanity and Catholic liturgy.

She has been rejected by liberals for not being politically correct enough (for her embrace of guns and knives, her sexual narratives, her lured vocal scripts of female gangs castrating their rapists), and accused of blasphemy in Italy (for her 1989 Plague Mass, and explosive onslaught of scripture and vitriol that has become an anthem among AIDS activists).

Her work is deeply religious, she explains, but it is not the religion of easy comfort or empty tradition; rather, it is a prayer against the destructive forces of heaven.

Of the Johnny Cash song 25 Minutes to Go, she says: "I've re-appropriated it so I do it my way, like a dirge. The Greek women would stand at the side of a grave and they were screaming about the necessity of avenging that person's death. They weren't doing it in an accepting way, because I have no interest in the passive ritual."

Her oft-repeated rendition of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is infused with just such a surprising sense of non-acceptance: A band of angels comin' for to carry me home like bloodhounds dragging me into the grave. Yet she dreads becoming a caricature of herself ("a cross between Bela Lugosi and Shirley Bassey," as a fellow musician described her), frequently taking on new genres and unexpected approaches. Two years ago she recorded an album of hard-rock songs, The Sporting Life, with ex-Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and she hopes to make a recording of bel canto arias.

Though her performances sometimes appear to be spontaneous eruptions of madness and rage, she takes care to infuse her work with self-effacing humour and ensures that every moment is calculated, honed and backed with careful research and rehearsal. "For me that's what art should be, because otherwise it's just someone emoting in public."

Some listeners will find her work unbearably disturbing, inaccessibly avant-garde and downright threatening, but it is hard to dismiss as mere emoting in public. After musing about the fine line she must walk between crowd appeal and artistic experimentation, she dismisses the risk of falling into cliché with a warm laugh: "I think I'm much too cold-blooded to be maudlin."