In November of 2002, as part of a conference honoring the late novelist Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás' multi-octave voice bellowed and howled through the midrange speaker's of NYU's Fales Library. Due to a previous engagement in Canada, the vocalist was unable to perform in the flesh, so she sent a multi-track recording in her stead. As preferable as it is to watch her unleash her intense Siren songs onstage, I enjoyed the disembodied presentation and the wraith-like shadow it cast upon the proceedings.
As well as textual linkages, the two artists shared a mutual admiration. In a brief article on her performance at London's Royal Festival Hall, Acker called Galás the Maria Callas of her generation. In my mind, generations are broad and formless; so more specifically, Galás is a graveyard Callas (sans corpsepaint) who channels anonymous victims and sings their eulogies. In keeping with her baroque oeuvre and aesthetic, Defixiones, Will and Testament and La Serpenta Canta, Galás' first full-lengths since 1998's Malediction and Prayer, are densely wound, parabolic double albums. Released concurrently, each documents a very different approach, though both are by far creepy enough to make even the gothest shiver.
Defixiones, Will and Testament is a meditation on the Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greek genocides carried out by Turkey from 1914 to 1923, and the Turkish and American denial of the atrocities. According to a statement about the project at Galás' website, "'Defixiones' refers to the warnings engraved in lead that were placed by relatives of the deceased on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor. These warnings cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under the threat of extreme harm. 'Will and Testament' refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under unnatural circumstances." Like 1990's Plague Mass-- a work for people with AIDS, inspired in part by the death of her brother, the playwright Philip Dimitri Galás, who succumbed to the disease in 1986-- once Galas affixes her sound to something concrete, the effects are often near sublime.
As we chalk up important numbers of the dead (on calendars, and outlined out sidewalks) and commemorate days of mass murder, Defixiones issues a creepy formal purity, as Galás discusses ethnic cleansing: choirs rage, skies are torn, Galas speaks in tongues. In "Orders from the Dead", "Our dead watch their daughters butchered, raped, and beaten in the still burning of those flames." In light of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, notions of genocide and violence are currently in the forefront of many minds (and even USA Today). Certain lines like, "A man without a God/ Cannot be burned alive/ He never was alive/ Not as a man, giavour/ But as a dog," coupled with recent imagery of Iraqis on leashes, expands Galás' anger to encompass more than her initial subject. Towards the song's end, she turns her phraseology towards the humanizing first person and achieves the voice of victimhood: "I am the man unburied/ Who cannot sleep/ In forty pieces."
Elsewhere in the cycle, she incorporates and expands traditional compositional forms from Smyrna and Asia Minor and poems and by Armenian poet Siamanto, Syrian poet Adonis, Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and Rumanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan. Throughout Defixiones' 99 minutes, Galás accrues packs of identities, all looking for remembrance. It's a chilling agglomeration: More about absence than a cult-of-personality, the soul-catching proves an angry and unmanageable lament riddled with grief, often as laden as it is uplifting.
La Serpenta Canta, on the other hand, is surprisingly playful, tackling major standards and classics of American blues, country & western, R&B;, Motown, and soul. Each, of course, becomes hers alone. For instance, when Galás holds a particularly cackling note towards the three-quarter mark of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You", it's the stuff of a real hex, not just an interpretation of another's poetry. This is followed by a restrained take on Chip Moman and Dan Penn's "At the Dark End of the Street", which proves more Tom Waits than the violently cascading Pandora's Box that erupts at the coda of her reprisal of John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell", a song she performs twice here with equally glorious results. Elsewhere, her guttural "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" transforms Hank Williams' tear-in-my-beer ballad into a spiraling downpour that carries with it a banshee wail from the top of Mount Olympus.
But despite these warped old favorites, it's her own "Baby's Insane" that steals the show. Taken from The Sporting Life, her unlikely but surprisingly fruitful 1994 pop-art collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones becomes the campiest of torch songs in a live setting. Recorded at Joe's Pub in NYC on August 31st, 2001, the cabaret lilts, and she jokes with the audience about the song's macabre subject matter before issuing the central warning: "Baby's insane/ Baby's insane/ Baby's on a trip to the morgue again/ Hide all the knives/ 'Cause baby's insane."
Though La Serpenta Canta consists of lighter fare than the gorgeously pained Defixiones, Will and Testament, there are stylistic linkages (Galás, after all, is Galás). In both, the palette consists of her voice, piano and minimal electronics. Another less stylistic connector is the across-the-board inclusion of the traditional "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". Equally powerful on both releases, the song's central request ("There's just one last favor I'll ask of you/ See that my grave is kept clean") carries more intense resonances in the context of Defixiones. What's a grave keeper to do, for example, if the site's left unmarked or there's no burial at all?
Yes, Galás' caustic voice is at times overblown, and you won't likely plop these discs into your stereo after a rough day at the office; like a complex modernist tome, their richly idiosyncratic materiality demands patient intelligence. At times, listening to these records is like treading water in the Black Sea: To experience them fully involves unraveling codes, grabbing after spirits, and immersing yourself into sinking shadows. It's an effort, but with more and more classifiably ephemeral and easily digestible sugar blasts erupting in the underground, breaking a sweat now and again with something that feels like it's been shot straight out of hell provides a nice change of pace.
