|
THE OREGONIAN
DIAMANDA GALAS SNARLS SONGS OF BEAUTY AND
GRACE
by Bob Hicks
It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night.
Even darker and stormier inside the nightclub La Luna than on the
streets outside, where the sodden November splash was drumming its
promise of six more months of rain rain rain. Nothing like the grays
to bring out the blues.
And on Wednesday night it was the blues, surprisingly, that dominated
La Luna's tattered stage, where the night queen Diamanda Galas,
beloved by the arts crowd for her yawping death drones and yowling
ululations, was holding the house in thrall.
Shining sleekly in her sunken-cheeked ghoul makeup and her flashing
red eyes, Galas looked for all the underworld like the bride to
Beetlejuice. But despite the vampire prowl of the evening's ambience,
there was more Son House than Anne Rice in her voice.
Galas is well-known in the world of New York performance art for such
strident shows and recordings as "The Litanies of Satan" and her
horrified requiem "Plague Mass," an outcry against the epidemic of
AIDS. She's seemed to use her voice as a weapon, screeching and
scrapping against the bounds of artistic form to create a new beauty
out of extreme ugliness.
Like a knife streaking out of smoke, Galas' voice is an instrument of
deep dark thrill and power, bleak but brimming with a raw sad
pleasure. And Wednesday's show was Galas is a mellow, almost
traditional mode. Sure, the snarl was there, but it was a _musical_
snarl, a technique, a rhythmic attack to stretch and challenge the
songs' underpinnings. Call it a shock of grace.
Billed a CD-release party, the hour long show, sponsored by the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, was mostly a reprise of
"Malediction and Prayer: Concert for the Damned," which Galas brought
here two years ago. Part of that show was taped for the new CD.
The sheer size of her voice, augmented by her canny use of the
microphone for staccatos and sensory overload, is the base from which
Galas makes her surgical strikes of sound--a growl, a moan, an
octave-leading yelp, one of her tongue-waggling screeches that imitate
John Coltrane's saxophone at the barrier of chordal improvisation. On
Wednesday, she gave it minor-key intimations of a muezzin, a
chanteuse, a sentimental lounge singer gone too far in her cups.
But with her piano rumbling mostly through the lower half of the
keyboard, Galas sang mainly her striking variations on the blues.
Spookily reshaped versions of "Dancing in the Dark," and "The Thrill
Is Gone." A selective piano beneath the hole-in-the-woul sound of Son
House's "Death Letter." The stopped time of Willie Dixon's "Insane
Asylum." A chilling country blues on the Johnny Cash hit "Twenty-five
Minutes to Go," trailing into eternity.
Underneath, above and overflowing it all was the voice. A hard
beautiful winter's voice, capable of comforting you, sternly, through
another season of rain.
|
|