back	la serpenta canta reviews
	Galás paints the blues very black By ELISSA POOLE Special to The Globe and Mail Monday, November 11, 2002 – Print Edition, Page R3 Diamanda Galás At the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on Saturday When Diamanda Galás sings about a broken heart, we remember with a jolt that a broken heart doesn't work. It'll kill you. The metaphor shivers, not a cliché any more, its shock value restored. In the same way, Galás's appearance -- the black gown, white makeup and cavernous eyes that situate her somewhere between Delphic priestess and Bride of Dracula -- gets past the visual cliché of the goth subculture. There were plenty of young women in the audience dressed just like her, but most of them were making a fashion statement. Galás, on a dark stage with only her piano for company at the tawdry Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on Saturday, is the original goth, and there's no question that's about death. She has been labelled the Diva of the Dispossessed, and she exposes the latter word for what it is: a euphemism. Because what the Dispossessed stop possessing is life, and death stalks the underdog, whether its name is genocide, AIDS or capital punishment, all running themes in Galás's repertoire. As she so pointedly says in one song, there are no rich men in the electric chair. The blues, ever an underdog's music, are a point of departure, but Galás paints those blues very black. And one of the ways she does it is by accessing other music about death. We recognize the keening, ululating wail of a Middle Eastern mourner; we hear Chopin funeral marches. And we hear harmonies worthy of Schubert, that other poet of death, enriching a basic 12-bar blues progression. Galás pounds out her accompaniments in the low register of the piano, whose sound is amplified and occasionally manipulated enough so that it seems more metal-edged industrial machinery than musical instrument. She favours obsessive, spiky ostinatos that don't modulate, and she hammers out the tonic at the bottom of the keyboard at arbitrary intervals with a brutality that reminded me of the quadruple fortes one sees in scores by the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya. When she keens an Armenian folk song, she shadows every note she sings with her right hand, matching every trill, every turn. She also busies that right hand with nasty, repetitive curlicues in the tenor register, moving up into the treble only rarely, and to powerful effect. She closed her set with the song of a condemned man waiting for the noose to end his life, moving minute by minute through the amount of time left ("only 21 minutes to go . . . only 20 minutes to go"). As we get down to those last couple of minutes -- and they've been speeding by -- Galás not only starts to drag her voice over the beat, she takes the accompaniment up into an ethereal treble of impressionistic harmonies. Life hangs by a thread. Probably many in the audience were too young to know the original songs that Galás covers, songs such as John Lee Hooker's Burning Hell or Screamin' Jay Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You, but no matter -- they are almost unrecognizable after Galás reconfigures them. How many times has a cover seemed bloodless when it's stacked up against the original? Even some of the originals pale next to Galás, who for good reason has been called a "vocal terrorist" -- she wields her voice like a weapon. She may have a four-octave range, but only a few notes would ever be called pretty. Janis Joplin sounds like a choir boy in comparison. That's not gravel in her voice, it's broken glass. Galás can shred her voice into partials, so it sounds as if she's accompanying herself with a bow dragged across the strings of violin. She whips the volume to painful levels with electronic echoes and delays, or bellows out her text in the range around middle C and below, only to scoot suddenly up into falsetto and spin the phrase around like a jazz singer. Galás gives us gospel, Nina Simone, Rachmaninoff, early-American parlour music and the kind of folk music that's cranked loud from cheap tape recorders in the plazas of Greek villages. But none of it sounds borrowed, processed or merely clever. It's raw and honest. Artful. And emotionally overwhelming.

la serpenta canta reviews

Galás paints the blues very black

By ELISSA POOLE
Special to The Globe and Mail
Monday, November 11, 2002 – Print Edition, Page R3

Diamanda Galás

At the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on Saturday

When Diamanda Galás sings about a broken heart, we remember with a jolt that a broken heart doesn't work. It'll kill you. The metaphor shivers, not a cliché any more, its shock value restored.

In the same way, Galás's appearance -- the black gown, white makeup and cavernous eyes that situate her somewhere between Delphic priestess and Bride of Dracula -- gets past the visual cliché of the goth subculture. There were plenty of young women in the audience dressed just like her, but most of them were making a fashion statement. Galás, on a dark stage with only her piano for company at the tawdry Vogue Theatre in Vancouver on Saturday, is the original goth, and there's no question that's about death.

She has been labelled the Diva of the Dispossessed, and she exposes the latter word for what it is: a euphemism. Because what the Dispossessed stop possessing is life, and death stalks the underdog, whether its name is genocide, AIDS or capital punishment, all running themes in Galás's repertoire. As she so pointedly says in one song, there are no rich men in the electric chair.

The blues, ever an underdog's music, are a point of departure, but Galás paints those blues very black. And one of the ways she does it is by accessing other music about death. We recognize the keening, ululating wail of a Middle Eastern mourner; we hear Chopin funeral marches. And we hear harmonies worthy of Schubert, that other poet of death, enriching a basic 12-bar blues progression.

Galás pounds out her accompaniments in the low register of the piano, whose sound is amplified and occasionally manipulated enough so that it seems more metal-edged industrial machinery than musical instrument. She favours obsessive, spiky ostinatos that don't modulate, and she hammers out the tonic at the bottom of the keyboard at arbitrary intervals with a brutality that reminded me of the quadruple fortes one sees in scores by the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya.

When she keens an Armenian folk song, she shadows every note she sings with her right hand, matching every trill, every turn. She also busies that right hand with nasty, repetitive curlicues in the tenor register, moving up into the treble only rarely, and to powerful effect.

She closed her set with the song of a condemned man waiting for the noose to end his life, moving minute by minute through the amount of time left ("only 21 minutes to go . . . only 20 minutes to go"). As we get down to those last couple of minutes -- and they've been speeding by -- Galás not only starts to drag her voice over the beat, she takes the accompaniment up into an ethereal treble of impressionistic harmonies. Life hangs by a thread.

Probably many in the audience were too young to know the original songs that Galás covers, songs such as John Lee Hooker's Burning Hell or Screamin' Jay Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You, but no matter -- they are almost unrecognizable after Galás reconfigures them. How many times has a cover seemed bloodless when it's stacked up against the original? Even some of the originals pale next to Galás, who for good reason has been called a "vocal terrorist" -- she wields her voice like a weapon. She may have a four-octave range, but only a few notes would ever be called pretty. Janis Joplin sounds like a choir boy in comparison. That's not gravel in her voice, it's broken glass.

Galás can shred her voice into partials, so it sounds as if she's accompanying herself with a bow dragged across the strings of violin. She whips the volume to painful levels with electronic echoes and delays, or bellows out her text in the range around middle C and below, only to scoot suddenly up into falsetto and spin the phrase around like a jazz singer.

Galás gives us gospel, Nina Simone, Rachmaninoff, early-American parlour music and the kind of folk music that's cranked loud from cheap tape recorders in the plazas of Greek villages.

But none of it sounds borrowed, processed or merely clever. It's raw and honest. Artful. And emotionally overwhelming.