schrei x reviews

A Step into the Past Presented in Darkness

Diamanda Galas Knitting Factory

On Wednesday night, the avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galas sang "Schrei X," a half-hour piece that she delivered in complete darkness. For 13 years Ms. Galas has been presenting works that are more performance based than this, most of them a response to AIDS. "Schrei X" was a step back, into a solipsistic blackness. Instead of being overtly political, the piece, based on a radio work she created in 1994, favored the more general themes of anguish and isolation present in her music from the early 1980's.

Ms. Galas stood in front of five microphones, and as she delivered "Schrei X" she moved her head around them, sending her voice swirling through a quadraphonic sound system. She alternated sec- tions of abstract utterances and si- lence with a mix of her own texts and passages from the Book of Job and St. Thomas Aquinas. The narrative sections were about transitions be- tween life and death, salvation and condemnation, sanity and madness, with Ms. Galas powerful voice con- veying the agony of being trapped in an intermediate are (such of being institutionalized or buried alive).

More revealing than the meaning of "Schrei X" was the sound. "Schrei" is German for shriek, but Ms. Galas did more. She growled, cackled, screeched, pleaded, wailed and sang, jumping as much as two octaves between utterances.

With a sparing use of digital ef- fects, she often mad it seem as if multiple speakers wer fulminating at the same time or as if the sounds were electronic and not human. In the darkness, "Schrei X" conjured not Dante's "Inferno" but a claustro- phobic internal hell where the same demons lurk.