Diamanda Galás
Los Angeles Times Monday November 1, 1993 By LEWIS SEGAL
Weekend Reviews Music Galas Vents Her Fury in 'Mass' By LEWIS
SEGAL, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Los Angeles Times Monday November 1, 1993 Home Edition Calendar,
Page 3 Type of Material: Concert Review
On a candle-lit platform onthe stage of Royce Hall, UCLA,
composer-performer Diamanda Galas anoints herself with blood as she
chants the words Christ spoke on the night of his betrayal and that
priests repeat in the Mass:
Hoc est signum corpus meum,
Hoc est signum sangre meum.
However, Christ has no place in Galas' "Plague Mass." For her,
people with AIDS embody the ultimate betrayal, the ultimate suffering,
and it is their bodies, their blood, that she invokes in this
simultaneously breathtaking and unbearable 90-minute solo on Friday.
Can the Mass be a curse? This one can, for its unyielding
confrontational intensity springs from Galas' fury at the profiteers,
power-brokers, hypocrites and voyeurs of the AIDS crisis: "The killers
let us die, one by one . . . ," she sings, consumed by anger. "Die!
And faster please. We've got no money for extended visits."
Beyond expressing the hatred for the straight world gathering force
among homosexuals and their allies as AIDS shows societies at their
worst, "Plague Mass" also offers a potent statement of the New
Paganism. Bare-breasted and defiant, Galas reincarnates one of the
oldest religious images in Western art: the Minoan snake-goddess or
priestess from Crete, carved 1,600 years before the birth of Christ.
However, instead of snakes, Galas holds microphones in her hands
and into them pours a virtuosic collage of classical vocal techniques,
pop idioms, Bible texts and her own poetry that could belong to no
other era. Indeed, she distills in solo vocalism all the restless
sound-sampling, tape-editing and remote-control switching of a society
fatally close to input-overload.
Although her music incorporates prerecorded vocals along with
percussion tracks, electronic effects and her own piano playing, most
of the time what you hear is a single voice violently ricocheting from
one style-language-accent octave to another. "Were you a witness?" she
growls, piercing the verb with a high, long-held wail of pain. "And on
that bloody day, were you a witness?"
"Plague Mass" draws a line between those who consider themselves
unaffected by AIDS and those who have lost a brother (as Galas has),
friend, lover, colleague or culture-hero to the disease. Approach the
event as an outsider and Galas will seem just another Hollywood
Boulevard banshee, howling at the moon.
Share her perspective, as most of her audience did, and the
performance becomes an outlet for all those primal feelings (outrage,
betrayal and blind hate) you'll never find in any sentimental AIDS
movie-of-the week.
Fiercely prowling the stage under apocalyptic smoke and lighting
effects, Galas ultimately becomes AIDS itself ("I am the plague, I am
the Antichrist") and she issues a warning in the voice of its victims:
"We who have died shall never rest in peace.
"There is no rest until the fighting's done."
Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times, 1993.
SEGAL, LEWIS, Weekend Reviews; Music; Galas Vents
Her Fury in 'Mass'; Home Edition., Los Angeles Times, 11-01-1993, pp
F-3. |