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Biba Kopf recently wrote
about La Serpenta Canta. Here is an excerpt:
La Serpenta Canta aka The Serpent Sings, is a song recital
recruiting blues, R&B, Motown, southern soul, Country & Western and
her own "Baby's Insane" (from This Sporting Life, her duo album with
John Paul Jones) in Galás's ongoing campaign against forgetting.
A highly inventive composer and pianist, Galás's compelling low
end piano settings draw on her background in free jazz – overtly
acknowledged in La Serpenta Canta's version of Ornette
Coleman's "Lonely Woman" – modern composition and the electronic
avant garde. Bonded by Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is
Kept Clean", which features on both sets, Defixiones and
La Serpenta Canta variously illuminate, extend and support each
other's ways of grieving. With songs like James Carr's deep soul
classic "Dark End Of The Street" (covered earlier on her duo album
with John Paul Jones), Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"
and Screaming Jay Hawkins's "I Put A Spell On You" bookended with
John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell", La Serpenta Canta may start
in a familiar place but Galás's vocal methods of interrogating the
popular memory of such songs examines each word and note from every
angle, in the process reinvesting them with the full weight of
meaning and emotion that might have been hitherto eroded through
familiarity. The Supremes' "My World Is Empty Without You" – which
Galás first assayed on her 1998 song cycle Malediction And Prayer –
has never before sounded so desolate as in her sounding of its
abyssal depths here. The songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland
might have conceived it as a lovers' breakup song, but in Galás's
reading, "My World Is Empty Without You" serves as a portal to both
La Serpenta's darker companion, Defixiones, Will And
Testament, and, indeed, the entire canon of mourning music that
Galás has amassed since her 1979 international debut in a French
staging of composer Globokar's Un Jour Comme Une Autre. |