The most arresting facet of Diamanda Galás’s music is that it treats terror as an affecting, illuminating experience. Her 1982 solo debut, The Litanies of Satan, combines tape music with her commanding vocals to capture (as she wrote in the liner notes) the “emeraldine perversity of the life struggle in Hell.” Her landmark 1986 album, The Divine Punishment, became the first installment in a trilogy titled Masque of the Red Death that testified to the horror of the AIDS epidemic, which took the life of her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, shortly before she completed the final recordings. Wherever Galás finds inspiration, though, her art can never be mistaken as a dilettantish exploration of the occult. “I am not a goth—I’m a Greek,” she explained in a 2008 interview with Arthur magazine. “They’re screaming all the time, it’s part of the culture that came up with Greek tragedy.” Indeed, her songs have always drawn from tradition and research, and Greek mourning rites have provided a crucial source of inspiration for records such as 1986’s Saint of the Pit.
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Galás’s new album, Broken Gargoyles, due later this month on her Intravenal Sound Operations imprint, is all mind-warping chaos. Originally presented as a sound installation in a sanctuary built in 1250, the record features verses by early-20th-century German expressionist poet Georg Heym that deal with yellow fever and the approach of World War I (it started in 1914, two years after Heym’s tragic death at age 24). The title of the album refers to a 1924 book by German anarcho-pacifist Ernst Friedrich that documented the horrors of war—including soldiers whose faces were so disfigured that they often died by suicide when forced to reintegrate into society. “Mutilatus,” the first long-form piece on Broken Gargoyles, begins with an industrial clang that settles into an ominous drone. As piano melodies pound and looping noises summon a dark, looming dread, Galás’s voice soars above the noise and transmogrifies into unwieldy shrieks and howls. Her spoken-word passages sound like incantations, and the atmosphere is unrelentingly bleak. She’s always understood how to make her voice a vessel for extremely intense emotions, and when she cackles you can’t focus on anything but the fear she provokes. “Abiectio,” the album’s other long-form composition, is even more dramatic. Galás’s shrieks are awe-inspiring: at times, they’re as sharp as the metallic screeching in the backing tracks. Whirlwinding electronics and her varied vocal techniques act as a lash to keep you trudging through this world of hopelessness and rotting flesh. This is the power of Galás’s music: it forces listeners to consider often neglected histories of human suffering.
Diamanda Galás’s Broken Gargoyles is available through Bandcamp.
