Like No Other: Diamanda Galas in SF

For the first time in over ten years Diamanda Galas played a couple of San Francisco shows last week at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has been ambitiously playing many dates across Europe and the US recently. The scope of this tour is astonishing because she isn’t just performing one of her works in every city, she’s planned separate and distinct shows for every date. The incredibly driven and talented vocalist/composer/pianist has used her seven octave vocal range and extensive knowledge of religious ceremony, ancient text, the AIDS epidemic, dementia, death and classical to avant garde music for composition of multiple operatic works of unequalled intensity and emotional scope. They deliver messages of rage, pain, sadness, injustice, anger and fearlessness with an otherworldly sense of power to a world that won’t listen or likes to forget, and never acknowledge their atrocities and abandonments.

Galas is an artist that cannot be ignored, handling the truth and truths of victims that shall not be forgotten as her vocalizations not only give life to a multitude of spirits, souls, people, demons and the lost, but all of their unsettled, victimized, raw emotions, their stories, what fate has left them with and the sound of their pain, the noise of their affliction, the voices in their heads, the screams they heard, the screams that were unheard, haunting the history all but wiped clean of genocide, haunting the future with cast-off pariahs littering the streets because the human race has progressed so very little and learns nothing from what they’ve endured over and over again.

This is the scream of Diamanda Galas, the one and only artist who can literally give voices to ghosts so that they may finally be heard, the incredible virtuoso whose developed instrument defies the confines of the average voice and can sound like more than several people simultaneously, children, sirens, whispers from near death, men, women, the insane, the guilty, the condemned, the tortured, the dead who were never allowed to rest, robbed of life and then robbed in death. The sounds she creates can make your mind whirl over the impossibility that one human could produce it. It’s as if she channels spirits who use her as a host in the trance-like state, but you know that’s a cheap notion. She knows the how and why of every single sound she makes. There may be some supernatural forces at hand, but she’s not turning over her finely honed tools to any force other than her classically trained unparalleled self.

She has taken vocalization into bold new territory and as far as I know she’s alone—completely. Nobody does what she does, there are no other artists she even begins to compare with, and no genre that can contain the breadth of her body of work and its intensity, commitment and depth. Political issues have been at the genus of many of her greatest works, like the Plague Mass, which addressed AIDS when so many leaders and our government wouldn’t utter the word. Then she explored dementia and other mental illnesses as a sort of continuation of the Plague Mass, with The Vena Cava, yet the work stood on its own as one of her more revealing, visceral, searing and creepily humorous works, and again it dealt with another disease related situation that America has consistently failed to properly address..

Her choice of work to present in San Francisco this week was Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, a harrowing and painful piece based on texts related to the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Massacres of 1915 and 1922 by the Turks during which genocide was actively implemented and entire cultures were raped and nearly destroyed, people were degraded to nothing, starved, tortured, slaughtered, drowned, burned, forced to walk to their deaths in the deserts, and more unspeakable horrors. It struck me as completely unusual and frightening in itself that I had no knowledge of this event in history. I had heard or read nothing of these holocaust-like events.

Diamanda yet again had chosen a topic that needed to be acknowledged, like AIDS, only this situation came from the early part of the last century, and considering current world events and modern terrorism, new relevance just rolls forth from these texts. The Defixiones is, in performance, so undeniably evocative of the original victims and the time period in which this horror was endured. With the sparse black stage with just a piano in the center and two stations on each side stage and a center ramp ending with two microphones at the ready for the Diamanda-is-really-getting-the fuck-down-and-brutal portions of this poignant and complex, multilingual retelling of a forgotten time and crime against humanity. From the opening readings in total darkness and the incidental drone of traditional Greek instruments punctuated by industrial strength percussions so jarring you’d bolt upright in shock, the story unfolds and huge projections of photographs of headstones and victims of starvation and masses of dead bodies near roadsides would barely make their grave impression, then would wave away like flames and fade into another huge image, then fade into flames then to black.

I had seen Diamanda three times before, once with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin when they made a great record together and toured with it, and the other two times were with her solo on piano singing her interpretations of some old standards. I had never witnessed her perform one of the more major works like the plague mass or this one, and as I expected, this was worlds away from the other shows, a different beast entirely, and one that completely dumbfounded and mesmerized me. This is when that voice is showcased at its heights and depths of resonant power, at its most inhuman, at its most simultaneously intricately layered. It is practically hallucinatory, trance-like, even occasionally soothing like a lullaby, a brief doze that you’ll soon be ripped out of by vocals that lick and lap like searing flames, or wail in multiplied vibrato the loss of a thousand lovers, the hysterical and sporadic voice of a woman mourning the death of her child, an entire race of people being robbed of their past, present and future, threatened to be fucked with even in their death. She hadn’t even hit the center stage yet.

When that occurred I was really taken by her incorporation of physical movement to such magnificent effect. Genocide is pretty difficult to effectively put across in a game of charades, but her every motion exuded the devastation, brutality, torture and the rage and power the victims could only reserve and concentrate for their graves, the will to curse those who dared a final desecration upon them, a desfixione. Of her vocal performance at the center stage, it’s difficult to describe the complexity of this assault. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard before. There aren’t a lot of artists in the world who specialize in extended vocal technique. In fact, I can’t think of any this side of those throat singing people. And extraordinary as they are, they are just a one trick pony compared to the prowess and infinite catharsis of this original and unique performer, so concentrated yet infinite. I could list a thousand words right now, but likely couldn’t capture it all.

Two final thoughts occurred to me on her curtain call. Elegant and Maria Callas. I also can’t believe I failed to say a thing of her incredible piano playing—yet another monumental talent that can leave you utterly speechless. I finally caught the definitive performance by a talent of no compare. I’ll never miss a chance to see her again.