St Galás of the plague. Obviously now is the perfect time for a re-issue of this most excruciating of records. Insofar as the general fuckedness of everything is front and centre and needs a soundtrack.
Diamanda Galás, it’s fair to say, isn’t easy listening. By any stretch of the imagination. And this is her at her most foreboding. When I say it’s peak intensity, it’s worth wrapping that in a bunch of context.
So there’s a point about “extreme” music that’s important here. A lot of “extreme” music rests upon a proposition and doesn’t move very far: most noise music is devoid of dynamics, meaning it’s an initial shock and then not much else; same for a lot of guitar traditions, plus the tendency towards shlock cod-Satanist nonsense. My point is that very few people have the musical chops to make a musical assault twist the knife. In fact, a separate essay looks very much like Galás being one of the only people who manages it and, further, it’s only at the edge of a refined technique that blood can be drawn.
But also besides vocal technique — and there is a criminal amount — there’s a load of musicality here; which is to say that migrating tempi and shifting vocal textures, staccato punches and long held tones, a vibrato that’s closer to Albert Ayler (in terms of control and variation)… There’s very little here that resembles any music I’m aware of, including a litany of vocal experimentalism. While a Meredith Monk or Sainkho Namtchylak nominally exists in a similar world of vocal extremity, there’s nothing like the pointedness of Galás to either. Not so decry either, but Galás’s, at least this Galás, is a sustained inhuman assault; most vocal experimentalism barely arrives at vaudeville by comparison.
-Kev Nickells-
