Terrible beauty

Diamanda Galás' closest brush with mainstream culture may have been in 1994, with her contributions to the soundtrack of Oliver Stone's controversial film Natural Born Killers, where she delivered dark gospel renditions of such songs as "Judgment Day" and Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You." They were a perfect fit with Stone's blistering take on celebrity culture, with both the film and the music about as far as you can get from Hollywood's manufactured Golden State myth.

In 1982, when the Greek-American released her debut LP, Litanies of Satan (on Mute Records, subsequently re-released on CD EMI), even lovers of avant-garde music had a hard time getting their heads around Galás using the full range of her three and a half octave voice to summon the beatific demons of Baudelaire. To others, the power Galás was able to leverage driving her voice through live electronics via multiple microphones expressed a long-overdue antidote to a 20th-century Pacific Rim industriously avoiding its own post-Hiroshima pathos.

Galás' background includes studying cutting-edge theories at the University of California's Center for Music Experiment in the late 1970s, a time when new musical instruments were being invented to give expression to the concepts of just intonation and microtones. But it's also the Greek-Anatolian music that Galás heard early in life, listening to her parents' record collection, combined with years of paying dues as a gospel singer and free-jazz pianist, that remain key to her inspiration.

These experiences have left Galás with a practical approach to music that often puts her at odds with contemporary music in general. As she confided to The Prague Post in a telephone interview, "The thing I never really understood about microtonal music is I don't think we hear it the way it's notated. Like with [Iannis] Xenakis - I did a piece of his, and, with all due respect to Xenakis, there were these glissandi that were notated in microtones, and at the end of the day I thought, it's just a load of crap. If you have one of those organs that is divided into semitones that is being played as a fundamental underneath the singers, then that makes sense. But I always prefer to think of the style of singing we get in Amanes or the Makamia from the Middle East or Greece as a much more organic way of hearing."

Amanes and Makamia are musical forms from Asia Minor with roots in antiquity. These historical melodies not only shape Galás' tonality, but also the content she takes on, as traditionally these laments begin with the cry "Have mercy!" This primal empathy runs throughout Galás' work, with recurring themes of mental illness, political massacres, AIDS and torture.

Although her latest CD, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty (Mute Records, 2008) features more of Galás' rootsy blues sound, she says the set list for her upcoming performance in Prague will draw from the full spectrum of her piano and voice repertoire. This includes the thread she began early in her career by combining Baudelaire's work with her own compositions.

Lately, Galás has been creating fresh music based on the work of French poets Celan, Nerval and Michaux and unique interpretations of songs by Jacques Brel. From the Mediterranean shores, Galás sometimes includes a work made famous by Egypt's Om Kolthoum, "Ta Filia Sou Einai Fotia" (Your Kisses Are Like Fire), and interpretations of the poem "The Diary of Beirut Under Siege" by Syria's Adonis.

Those going to Galás' upcoming concert at Archa should brace themselves for an experience that goes far beyond the pale limits of everyday music, into the realm of extreme theater. As Galás told journalist Andrea Juno in 1991, "The voice is the primary vehicle of expression that transforms thought into sounds, thought into message. And beyond the words -with all due respect to them - the combinations of vocal and verbal energy can be overwhelming."

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at
features@praguepost.com