Diamanda Galás

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Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter.

Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror." Her works largely concentrate on the topics of AIDS, mental illness, despair, injustice, condemnation, and loss of dignity. She has worked with many avant-garde composers, including Iannis Xenakis, Vinko Globokar and John Zorn, and also collaborated with jazz musician Bobby Bradford, and John Paul Jones, former bassist of Led Zeppelin.

Background and education

Galás was born and raised in San Diego, CA to Greek Orthodox parents. She studied a wide range of musical forms, and played gigs in San Diego with her father, also a musician, performing Greek and Arabic music.

Early career

After moving to Europe, Galas made her solo performance debut at the Festival d'Avignon, in France, in 1979, performing the lead in the opera Un Jour comme un autre, by composer Vinko Globokar, based upon Amnesty International's documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Her first album was The Litanies of Satan, released in 1982. Her second album, Diamanda Galas, was released in 1984.

Diamanda Galas (album)

Diamanda Galas is the eponymously titled second album by avant-garde musician Diamanda Galás, released in 1984 by Metalanguage Records. The album is now out of print.

Musical Style

Panoptikon (named after Panopticon, a type of prison building designed to allow all areas of a prison to been seen from one vantage point), deals with imprisonment, isolation, torture and extreme alienation as well as homicidal mania and vengeance. It incorporates tape, electronic manipulations and distortion. Composed by Diamanda Galas, with additional lyrics from In the Belly of the Beast by criminal and author Jack Abbott.

Tragouthia Apo To Aima Exoun Fonos (Songs from the Blood of Those Murdered), recorded in 1981, consists solely of vocals in numerous vignettes. The recording is similar in texture to Wild Women With Steak-Knives, but when the latter was hysterical and loud, Tragouthia is slow, ghoulish and mournful. The singer was inspired by the tradition of Greek mourning rites, where women mourn the dead as well as seek revenge for the person responsible for the death. The words of Songs from the Blood of Those Murdered are sung in Greek and refer to the victims of the Greek junta regime that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.