The hantologie of Diamanda Galas, OR Cabaret in the Underworld
Fosco
is a secret
Goth. Sure, he doesn't participate sartorially in the
movement, preferring khakis and button-down oxford shirts.
However, he does frequently wear eyeliner. And, whenever he takes
of those "which
high school clique would you belong to" quizzes, he ends up as
Goth (with
Emo Kid a close second). (Strangely enough, Fosco was not a
member of either clique when he actually was in high
school, but these cliques were merely incipient back then.)
Perhaps Fosco's advisor Jody can sense his hidden gothness, as she
suggested yesterday that he cut out of his evening class early in
order to see Goth chanteuse
Diamanda Galas in Santa Cruz last night. Although Fosco knew
almost nothing about Diamanda Galas, he was willing to go for
several reasons:
- the title of the show
was "Guilty
Guilty Guilty," which is really an irresistible title. How
can that be bad?
- it was described as a
"program of tragic and homicidal love songs and death songs."
How can that be bad?
- he had actual faculty permission to leave class early to attend a concert. How can that be bad?
Before you think that I'm
setting you up for some ironic reversal, let me make it clear: the
concert was PHENOMENAL. Now let me tell you about it.
Diamanda entered the auditorium from the back and walked spotlit
down the aisle to the stage where she took her seat at a piano
enveloped in fog. She certainly makes an entrance. She was dressed
in black, of course, looking a bit like a less-purposefully sexy
Elvira. For her first song, the curtain behind the piano was
lit deep funeral-home blue, with a red spot on the piano. The
opening chords were funereal (and there was some electronic
distortion added to the sound). This was all great fun, of course,
as Fosco likes a good spectacle. But then she opened her mouth...
And THE VOICE came out.
That's actually a direct quote from Fosco's notes (he was taking
notes for you, my pretties). Right in the middle of the page,
after his descriptions of the show so far, Fosco suddenly writes:
"THE VOICE."
Her voice is not like anything you have heard (at least on this
side of the grave). She opened with "My World Is Empty Without
You," a track that is available live in iTunes (should you desire
to hear it). You can get a sense of THE VOICE from it, but you
have to imagine hearing it in person. This is not a pleasant
voice, rather, it COMMANDS. It seems it can do almost anything,
actually. Over the course of the program, she yowled, she
whispered, she howled, she screeched, and she did some kind of
thing where, like the
throat singers of Tuva she produced two notes at once.
According to one of the press clippings available on her website:
Galás plays the piano like driving rain slapping on concrete, and she sings like a demon going to war, a Valkyrie scatting, a lizard queen seeking revenge for the dead… Galás is profound, rigorous, vocally unlimited, terrifying and utterly compelling.
That sounds about right.
The
program was almost entirely covers (as far as I can tell), but I
would be surprised if the ordinary listener could recognize most
of them. She did a version of "Autumn
Leaves" (at least I think it was "Autumn Leaves") that
can only be described as Evil. There were several songs in French
(one of them supposedly an
Edith Piaf cover--imagine that, if you can) and one in Spanish
(I think, although it could have been Italian). The final encore
was the bone-chilling "Let
My People Go," which haunted me for the rest of the night.
It is no accident that I used the verb "haunt" here. I would like
to suggest, in a
Derridean moment, that there is a "hauntology" (or
hantologie in French) at work in Diamanda Galas. She reminds
us of what is not there in these songs (and in music in
general). This is music that acknowledges the power of ghosts, of
the dead--and, perhaps, channels those spectres into actual
appearance.
As I struggled throughout the concert to figure out how to
describe her, I finally settled on this metaphor: Diamanda Galas
is what Cabaret is like in the Underworld. By the "Underworld," I
mean the Greek Underworld (specifically, probably the
Asphodel Meadows) where normal souls are not rewarded with
Heaven or punished with torment, but rather mill about in a
less-pleasant version of life on earth, haunted by memories of
their life on earth and desirous of news of the living. This is
what Diamanda Galas evokes for me. And I hope she is in The
Underworld when I get there.
The other question that I kept thinking was this: does
David Lynch know about her? And, if so, why hasn't she
appeared in one of his movies yet?