Tag Archive for 'Diamanda Galás'

Diamanda Galás: No Rest For The Wicked

Published
by
JR
on May 22, 2008
in Music
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Several years ago, I had the extreme pleasure of sitting front row and center at a Diamanda Galás concert at Melbourne’s Art Centre. It was one of the most amazing gigs I have ever been to. With her new album now out ‘Guilty, Guilty, Guilty’ - Diamanda is getting some cool media attention. See below for an awesome interview via out.com and stay tuned to Dogmatic for a full review of her new album…

Diamanda Galás

Though considered by some to be in the service of Satan himself, Diamanda Galás tirelessly wages a chilling musical war on behalf of the forgotten, the voiceless, and the doomed.

Diamanda Galás has been called ‘the Bride of Satan’, ‘the Diva of Disease’, and ‘a cross between Elvira and Morticia Adams’ - and that’s just by music journalists. The classically trained pianist with a three and a half octave range - the staggering use of which regularly inspires comparisons to Greek opera singer Maria Callas - is known for her controversial (to say the least) opinions and her you’ve-got-to-see-them-to-believe-them concerts featuring an arresting combination of performance art, political protest, and punk bravado.

Galás is perhaps most widely recognized for The Plague Mass, which she performed covered in cow’s blood at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in 1990. Considered by many to be her masterwork, the Plague Mass is drawn from excerpts of her trilogy of albums collectively entitled The Masque of the Red Death begun by Galás in the early ’80s at the dawning of the AIDS epidemic. The piece serves as a scathing indictment of both the Roman Catholic Church and society at large for ignoring and condemning those suffering from or killed by AIDS - including her brother and many of her close friends.

Never one to mince words, Galás is infamous for her biting, often shocking commentary on politics, culture, and art and her interview with Out.com certainly does not disappoint. She phoned from Spain - where her current European tour had just landed - to talk about her new live cover album of homicidal love songs, why she thinks Elton John is a ‘horrible little midget corpse’, and the similarities between Britney Spears’ voice and radioactive worms.

More…

The Queen Of Scream Diamanda Galás

Published
by
JR
on May 6, 2008
in Asides and Music
. 0 Comments

The Queen Of Scream Diamanda Galás.
With a voice that can shatter windows and a taste for the dark, Diamanda Galas is not for the weak.

Diamanda Galás Australian Tour

Published
by
JR
on September 28, 2005
in Gigs and Music
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Diamanda Galas Australian Tour

The completely enigmatic Diamanda Galás with her three-and-a-half octave voice will be touring Australia throughout October. My girlfriend and I saw her on her last Australian tour in 2001 and were transfixed and mesmerized at the stunning performance of this avant garde performer. Now we just gotta decide which of the two Melbourne shows to attend. I’m kinda leaning towards the October 7 performance as that is the night of my birthday and it will be the performance of ‘Defixiones: Orders From The Dead’ - an operatic sacred mass dedicated “to the forgotton and erased of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontic Greek genocides that occured in Asia Minor, Pontos, and Thrace between 1914 and 1923,” genocides that the American and Turkish governments refuse to recognise to this day. Like the Eumenides - the mythological creatures charged with administering justice - Galas seeks to pursue the criminal with the memory of his crimes. Note her inclusion of the Turkish poem Hatred published by Hurriyet on the eve of the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, which advocates the large-scale decapitation of the Greek giavouri (infidels).

Defixiones draws its title from the “curse tablets”, the small lead charms engraved with curses that were laid on graves throughout the eastern Mediterranean to discourage desecration. With her fifteenth concert creation, Galas directly engages the Greek heritage that has always - occasionally directly, more often obliquely - informed her work.

The rest of Australia will be treated to the ‘Guilty, Guilty, Guilty’ performance - a mixture of blues, jazz and song-spiel techniques exploring the darker side of life.

Cannot wait!

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