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Interview
by SashaS
21-11-2003
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| Diamanda Galas: one kinda music giant |
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Come what darkly and augustly... Chrona, my slayer
Diamanda Galas: warning - tough talking
There are some women who are hard-to-handle and we are not talking about diva-ish behaviour of the Beyoncé, Aguilera, Britney-kinds… The dames we are [turned by] on all have some vintage hue about them, some fatale aura and intellects backed by femme-ness that pours out of every pore: Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux, Madonna, Diamanda Galas, Laurie Anderson, Shirley Manson… What they also share is an air of admire-but-keep-your-distance; the Greta Garbo syndrome, it should be known as.
During years of talking with myriad of artists, very few haven’t been concerned with their favourite subject - themselves. Of the ladies we name-checked above, only one of them has caused some mental anguish [and a seed of inferiority] and going to meet her again, all-black clad and as knowledgeable, informed and passionately opinionated as we recall, anticipation was brewing as violently as hormones in a horny bud. The woman is so clued in that she even finds time to diss the blockbuster-in-making, ‘Troy’, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, and visibly recoils, like many other Greeks, one supposes.
Diamanda Galas is that rare commodity, a unique artist who is hard to copy and can’t be cloned. What she does would sent many a record company executive into a local hospital’s cardiac dept. - releasing two albums on the same day: ‘Defixiones, Will And Testament’ and ‘La Serpenta Canta’ (i.e. ‘The Serpent Sings’). A few days after Ms Galas’s staging this music - like a requiem with a voice - we faced the lady to be inquisition’d as much as firing the Qs.
At your London show, in the tradition of requiems, one expected that there shouldn’t be clapping after each song…?
“That’s correct, from the very first time I performed it in 1999 and our premiere was on 09 September in Ghent (Belgium), imagine, and ever since then, people never clapped but here. I didn’t care, I didn’t want them to clap, it is a requiem, it is a mass and I keep on adding sections to it. That’s the way I do it, work like electric music composer and have to rehearse all the time. To pay for that I have to keep performing.”
Dressed as an Orthodox widow, Diamanda onstage is solo, often outside of lights, hovering on the edge of shadowy memories. White light, black piano, dark pain - claustrophobic. Free-form includes snatches of conversation where compositions only form basis for setting the story, while Galas acts the vocals. It is a quasi-classical, post-operatic, experimental, powerful and unnerving. Diamanda can summon some dark forces just by her voice!
Although the album is about specific events [Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923], it actually addresses all the atrocities men can do and usually get too enthusiastic about, from Korea in 1952 to Kosovo a few years ago; in other words, for an American, you are anti-war?
“Of course I am, because as half-Greek I can’t be tolerant of Muslims! What is there to be tolerant about? In an American newspaper recently it was descried as ‘Gentle religion’?! I wonder who paid him, or the paper, to write that?! It is the only religion where you are not allowed to think and question but obey blindly. It’s religion set up as any army and people in America get paid to say it was ‘peaceful religion’? People call me racist but I don’t care, I just want you to ask anyone from Eastern Orthodox religion and you’ll hear something new.”
“We know what Muslims are really like but all these people, Greeks, Armenians, Serbians, they’ll tell you the truth. But, these people are not important, just some small nations and America listens to no one.”
Her other cycle of songs, ‘La Serpenta Canta’ (i.e. ’The Serpent Sings’, in case you forgotten) is a selection of blues, R&B [classic, not what passes for nowadays], Motown, southern soul, C&W and her own ‘Baby‘s Insane’ (from ‘This Sporting Life’, her duo album with ex-Zeppelinista, John Paul Jones). If you think you’ve heard everything, listen to Galas’s version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and discover what true black really is like and not that faux-Goth shade. One King Crimson album title appears rather apt for this post-noir sound-drama, ‘Starless and Bible Black’.
Libertine ideas
Diamanda Galas has been enticing lost-Goths and morbid-teens by enchanting necro-vision for around 15 years, if you are to believe her detractors. However, she hasn’t softened her tongue, dulled her ‘I’m A Camera’ focus nor mellowed her approach to musical extremism. If you think HM is intense, you should undergo a short cure of the lady’s new, double albums, ‘Defixiones - Will And Testament’ and ‘La Serpenta Canta’.
Galas was raised in San Diego, California, by parents who had deep roots in Asia Minor, and her Greek Orthodox background prevented her from singing at home, although her musician father encouraged interest in every kind of music. But, she only started on her own road while studying biochemistry at university. Her formidable range is five octaves and she can hibernate blood in your veins as well as get your knees rattling and emotions collapse. But, her creativity and tonal expression has the Marmite-like appeal, no middle ground.
How do you view importance of an LP as ‘Defixiones’ at this time of war? Aren’t people too desensitised by the TV images to have turned off their compassion?
“The thin line between reality and fiction is totally blurred and I’m totally pessimistic. The whole process of desensitisation is so great that is incredible… Even the World Trade Centre, unless you live in New York, it is something you saw on television, it was a ‘disaster movie’ for most of the people. American public’s perception is so far removed from the reality and public opinion is created by television.”
You deal with the subject of war and nation-annihilation while the music, as well as the entire entertainment industry, have miserably failed to address the 9/11 catastrophe?
“You are right; Hip-hop has become just a parade of faces who all want to be Italian Mafia but are not as smart as those guys were and it looks stupid because they are the wrong colour. They all actually try to be Aristotle Onasis but he was the smartest man in the world. Rappers are just doing a Minstrel act for white people, it is the lowest form of entertainment and it is an embarrassment for their people. Singers like Ashanti, Beyoncé and Blu (Cantrell) are embarrassment for women.”
While most of showbiz is geared to take you out of a misery we know as daily survival, fashioned to be as light as a springtime breeze, DG takes you inside the darkness, into the eye of the [sonic] storm. In the new age of dumbness, the effect of her music - even just a piano and voice - can do much more than a whole army of near-naked pop ’divas’.
The fluff flavoured chart contenders are opposed by austerity, intensity and obsession… Counter culture of the highest order, if you wish.
Drug of nations
Sometime in not so distant past, just about the mid-1950s when television was taking off big time, culture started to divide, first age-wise [our 1960s forefathers termed it - gen gap] but then it got so complicated that there is total segragatation of poetry-music-literature-cinematography-design-commerce… Where once there was a unity and an album related to books, paintings, poems, theatre… and life.
The cosmic interconnectedness was reflected in society but we, as well as the show world, have abandoned it in favour of hype, celebrities and sales. Success has become quantifiable in figures and the size of a bank account is the measure of talent and looks-fashion-choreography have overtaken instruments as the main music quality. Then, people are dying while ’bling-a-nation’ carries on as if to save us from the pollution!
“Everything has become so sanitized, so bland, so non-threatening… The industry, after 9/11, simply shrunk away from it all and everybody is afraid to say anything. Americans are masochistic country, just as anyone who has a power, and when I performed ‘Defixiones’ in Los Angeles, it wasn’t even reviewed once.”
“There was even hostility towards it and my father warned me that I had committed a commercial suicide. I don’t care, I have to express my opinions, the guy who wrote a story about me in an LA weekly, got in trouble, I’ve been called anti-Semite…. I just laugh, ‘Add to the list!’ but I’m not going away… If you call me ‘boring’ I may rethink my approach and perhaps leave…”
15 years since the debut LP [‘Litanies Of Satan’], your music still sounds challenging, thought-provoking, disturbing, multi-idealistic, polemic, engaging…?
“Pop music is not capable of expressing any the things I’m talking about, it can’t deal with real issues. We also know that sonata-form, requiem-form, symphony-form, all have been based upon ritualistic behaviours in reaction to death and disease. There is a whole ritual that goes on and classical music has always addressed this but pop music has always ran away. Each [pop] song addresses one idea.”
Diamanda Galas will continue to introduce even more themes while broadening the canon of her mind-boggling artistry. In the world hell-bent on remaking most of the commonest crap for a new generation, translating it [down] for new [ignorant] consumers who can relate to the stars if not to the stories, Diamanda Galas is not only unique, but genuinely invigorating and vital artist.
For a woman like this, I’d have a sex-change operation!
SashaS
17-11-2003
‘Defixiones - Will And Testament’ and ‘La Serpenta Canta’, both double albums, are released 24 November 2003 by Mute
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