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WIRE MAGAZINE LONDON JULY 1998
DIAMANDA GALAS: CONCERT FOR THE DAMNED
by Mike Barnes
Diamanda Galas has various modes of presentation, none of them easy.
She has staged her AIDS trilogy as a multivoiced one-woman opera;
she's sung her PLAGUE MASS in houses of the very same Lord she has
elsewhere cajoled, pleaded with, and vilified; and she’s also
conceived an experimental radio piece on extreme sexual terror. Though
this Concert of The Damned reprised the song recital format she
originally devised for her 'conventional' song collection THE SINGER,
and l996's MALEDICTION AND PRAYER performances (the latter just
released as a CD), which featured Galas alone at the piano, it was
scarcely less exacting. Yet it also a lower a glimmer of light in to
relive the otherwise unrelenting bleakness that characterizes much of
her art.
Galas is a unique song interpreter, and her choice of material allows
her voice license to explore all points between rage, tenderness and
untrammeled despair. Her approach to blues is free of any bogus
authenticity. Instead she brings to it a personal musical vocabulary,
introducing elements from her Greek roots and her training with Berio
(sic) and Xenakis. More crucially, she really _means_ it. What
emerges is a very personal hybrid, at times close to the spirit and
form of Andalucian deep song ("Cante Hondo").
Her flexible, dexterous piano playing shadows, counterpoints or
intensifies the mood and the meanings of the songs with ominous bass
rumbles, jazzy inflections and a style of blues phrasing that hovers
on the edge of atonality. In Son House's 'Death Letter,' she moved
from deft piano syncopation to fragmenting keyboard lines, as the
singer's disbelief at the fate of her lover passes from hope to
hopelessness, resignation and grief. The Supremes' hit 'My World Is
Empty Without You' has rarely sounded so forlorn as in Galas'
rendition, while' The Thrill Is Gone' was driven by her anti-bel canto
shrieks.
Her simple concert staging--the singer clad in black at the piano, on
a darkened stage, with few spotlights--effectively commands you to
listen to the songs with a single minded commitment equal to her
performance of them. Her tour de force is Willie Dixon's "Insane
Asylum', which catalogues the despair of discovering her lover's been
sent to one. Galas turns Dixon's blues into an astonishing monodrama,
running the vocal gamut from malevolent cawing, supplication, sweet
blues moaning and speaking-in-tongues delirium. For her adaptation of
Baudelaire's 'Abel and Cain,' she mirrored her vocal ululations with
piano arpeggios. Other highlights included her setting of the Pasolini
poem "Supplica a Mia Madre," and the 'Greek hashish music' of the
rembetiko song 'Keigome Keigome.' An overwhelming experience. |
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