The Woman
Who Knows
Too Much
A conversation with Diamanda Gal‡s, avenging queen of
the damned
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Diamanda Gal‡s made her solo
recording debut in 1982 with The Litanies of Satan, a bloodcurdling blast of
screaming, sighing, sneering, spitting sonority based on texts by the
poet Charles Baudelaire. Recorded in a freezing cold basement studio in
London after sheÕd been awake for 24 hours, Litanies is a glossolalic galaxy further
perverted by insane floods of reverb, spatial delay, complex signal
processing and overdubbing. Twenty-eight years later, it remains quite
terrifying in effect.
That initial recorded
outpouring established Gal‡s as a troubling and troublesome singer of the
avant-garde and beyond, one who boasted a multi-multi-octave voice of
unparalleled power and technical command, along with a
contemporary-classical/new-thing piano style the equal to and great leap
forward past the storied prowess of your baddest dudes of the modern
jazzbo scene. But all thatÕs just the mechanics of it; her performances
have combined these vocal acrobatics with electronics and triple- and
quadruple-mike techniques thatÕd fling the voice around in horrific
battles between the Devil, God and all us poor victims ÐÐ sometimes with
her back to the crowd. Her topics? AIDS, rape, torture, genocide.
Gal‡s was born in San
Diego in 1955, daughter of an Anatolian-Greek father and an
Armenian-Syrian mother. She grew up in a very strict and isolated kind of
environment ÐÐ no TV, no radio, no nothing like that. She wasnÕt allowed
to wear a two-piece bathing suit, couldnÕt go on any dates, not until she
left the house at the age of 19. So she and her brother Philip-Dimitri, a
future renowned playwright, got real good at creating their own very
individual worlds holed up at home, where they both dug the dark stuff
from early on: Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonin Artaud, and
Edgar Allan Poe, especially.
(continued)
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