Diamanda Galas 'La Serpenta Canta' album

After a recording hiatus of over five years, the groundbreaking singer, pianist, and composer Diamanda Galás returns with her most ambitious project yet...

... , two double albums recorded live. Armed with a three and a
half octave voice and a passion for exposing forgotten events and
excavating texts, Galás’ current work is as immediate and prescient as
her landmark Plague Mass project that tackled the AIDS epidemic in a
way no one else dared.
Defixiones: Will and Testament, a song cycle composed mostly by Galás
herself and dedicated "to the forgotten and erased of the Armenian,
Assyrian, and Greek genocides that occurred in Asia Minor, Pontos, and
Thrace between 1914 and 1923." Genocides that the American and Turkish
governments refuse to recognize to this day. It draws its title from
the "curse tablets," the small lead charms engraved with curses that
were laid on graves throughout the eastern Mediterranean to discourage
desecration. With this, then, her fifteenth album, Galás directly
engages the Greek heritage that has always - occasionally directly,
more often obliquely - informed her work.
La Serpenta Canta, might be considered a greatest-hits collection, if
one conceives of hits, as Galás does, "in the Mike Tyson sense of the
word": acoustic body blows aimed at the audience rather than musical
bullets aimed at the pop charts. All 13 pieces on Serpenta are by
American songwriters, curiously enough, and they cover a territory that
stretches from Hank Williams's country lament, "I'm So Lonesome I Could
Cry," to Ornette Coleman's mournful jazz classic, "Lonely Woman." Most
of the other songs fall loosely within the region of blues, soul, or
rhythm-and-blues, but there are a couple of anonymous traditional songs
as well, along with two pieces that previously appeared on The Sporting
Life, her CD with former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. For
anyone not familiar with Galás's work, the range of musical sources
cited here might seem almost absurdly wide, but, as her fans know,
Galás has an iron esthetic will, and has shown herself capable of
pulling the most diverse material into the widening gyre of her
apocalyptic vision.
On the one hand, a collection of songs from the American popular
tradition; on the other, a sweeping work of historical memory that
exhumes and confronts the holocausts from another continent and
century. Yet despite their differences, both works are in their own way
concerned with memory, and both manifest Galás's steadfast refusal to
stay within the lines that attempt to demarcate high culture from low.
For all that Serpenta draws on American popular forms, most of the
songs are retrieved from earlier, half-forgotten eras, and Galás brings
to them her prodigious voice and virtuosic piano technique. And for all
the deadly seriousness of Defixiones, Galás does intersperse a number
of folk songs: defixiones were, after all, a folk tradition, on a par
with wearing a fylachto (amulet) to ward off the evil eye or spitting
three times after complimenting someone. Most of all, of course, both
CDs revolve around the experience of loss and isolation, whether
figured culturally or individually. Released in the UK last November,
both albums received five star reviews from Uncut and made the top 50
albums of 2003 in The Wire.
Biography
After a hiatus of over five years, the singer, pianist, and composer
Diamanda Galás has reappeared with two separate CDs - both double
albums recorded live - that encompass some three hours of music between
them. On the surface, at least, the two collections are quite
different, yet given the monolithic nature of Galás's artistic vision,
it's not surprising that both are driven forward by very similar
concerns, albeit in quite different directions.
The first, La Serpenta Canta, might be considered a greatest-hits
collection, if one conceives of hits, as Galás does, "in the Mike Tyson
sense of the word": acoustic body blows aimed at the audience rather
than musical bullets aimed at the pop charts. All 13 pieces on Serpenta
are by American songwriters, curiously enough, and they cover a
territory that stretches from Hank Williams's country lament, "I'm So
Lonesome I Could Cry," to Ornette Coleman's mournful jazz classic,
"Lonely Woman." Most of the other songs fall loosely within the region
of blues, soul, or rhythm-and-blues, but there are a couple of
anonymous traditional songs as well, along with two pieces that
previously appeared on The Sporting Life, her CD with former Led
Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. For anyone not familiar with Galás's
work, the range of musical sources cited here might seem almost
absurdly wide, but, as her fans know, Galás has an iron esthetic will,
and has shown herself capable of pulling the most diverse material into
the widening gyre of her apocalyptic vision.
The second, even more imposing, CD is Defixiones: Will and Testament, a
song cycle composed mostly by Galás herself (although drawing again on
a wide range of sources) and dedicated "to the forgotten and erased of
the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides that occurred in Asia
Minor, Pontos, and Thrace between 1914 and 1923." It draws its title
from the "curse tablets," the small lead charms engraved with curses
that were laid on graves throughout the eastern Mediterranean to
discourage desecration. With this, then, her fifteenth CD, Galás
directly engages the Greek heritage that has always - occasionally
directly, more often obliquely - informed her work. As far back as
1991, Galás (whose mother's family is from Mani) invoked the power of
Greek mourning songs to explain what she was after in her work. Before
that, her 1981 Tragouthia apo to aima exoun fonos (Song from the Blood
of Those Murdered) responded to the reign of the colonels.
More often, though, her voice has found its immediate inspiration in
other, more contemporary catastrophes: AIDS (Plague Mass, Masque of the
Red Death), imprisonment (Panoptikon), sexual oppression (Wild Women
with Steak Knives), dementia (Vena Cava), or torture and human
experimentation (Schrei X). Because her father is descended from Smyrna
Greeks, however, it may have been inevitable that she would eventually
tackle the disaster that informed her childhood, the one that was
passed down like a bloody relic from her grandfather to her father to
her. "You don't hear these stories for 20 years and then forget them,"
Galás has said, "you don't."
On the one hand, then, a collection of songs from the American popular
tradition; on the other, a sweeping work of historical memory that
exhumes and confronts the holocausts from another continent and
century. Yet despite their differences, both works are in their own way
concerned with memory, and both manifest Galás's steadfast refusal to
stay within the lines that attempt to demarcate high culture from low.
For all that Serpenta draws on American popular forms, most of the
songs are retrieved from earlier, half-forgotten eras, and Galás brings
to them her prodigious three-and-half-octave voice and virtuosic piano
technique. And for all the deadly seriousness of Defixiones, Galás does
intersperse a number of folk songs: defixiones were, after all, a folk
tradition, on a par with wearing a fylachto (amulet) to ward off the
evil eye or spitting three times after complimenting someone. Most of
all, of course, both CDs revolve around the experience of loss and
isolation, whether figured culturally or individually. This is clear
enough with Defixiones, but even on Serpenta, words like "grave,"
"hell," "insane," "lonely," "frenzy," "empty," "spell," and "dead" run
like a dark vein beneath the recording's skin. So while Galás has
herself suggested that these sorts of popular-song performances are a
way to financially support and build audiences for her more ambitious
projects, the two poles of her career are not that dissimilar.
Serpenta follows in the footsteps of the remarkable Malediction and
Prayer (1998), which drew from an even wider range of composers to
hammer together a cycle that was relentless in its tragic vision. With
its collection of gospel, country-and-western, blues, folk, protest
ballads, and European poems set to music, Malediction might almost have
collapsed like a musical Tower of Babel. What held it all together were
Galás's performances, which
found beneath the songs a common, though terrifying, stratum of human
experience. Malediction's genius was not just to reveal the
possibilities of those particular songs, but to illuminate more
generally the possibilities that still remained unexplored within much
of popular and folk music. Greil Marcus has famously said that Harry
Smith's folk anthologies of the late Fifties brought to light "the old,
weird America," and Malediction did something similar, showing how
weird America - and the world - still was, if you were honest about it
and capable of expressing it.
In fact, what all of Galás's popular-music forays reveal is that there
is a gigantic subterranean network that connects American blues with
French symbolist poetry with Greek rebetiko with the darker strains of
country-and-western with chanson with the untold millions who have died
songless over the past century in various holocausts, ethnic
cleansings, evictions, and displacements. One might argue that these
connections exist only because Galás herself has excavated them, but
there is something so chthonic in her performances, so primeval and
cathartic, that they seem much closer to revelation than invention.
Listen, for example, to her version of Willie Dixon's "Insane Asylum"
on Malediction and Prayer, where the repeated refrain of "Save me
please" descends into an inferno of cackles and cries that sound like
something pitched halfway between Jimi Hendrix and a swarm of Furies
loosed from their prison. Or Serpenta's 10-minute version of John Lee
Hooker's "Burning Hell," which starts softly and builds to a furious
left-hand attack with the melody splintered across the higher registers
- yet all the while retaining the rolling, bluesy rhythm of the
original. Just when you think that you might be listening to
avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, Galás's breathy voice sweeps in
from the lower registers, caressing the lyrics softly before it, too,
builds to a crescendo that imports Middle Eastern scales.
Song after song on Serpenta performs this sort of transfiguration. "I'm
So Lonesome I Could Cry" slows the song to a standstill, with the words
whispered like a wind off a prairie, the heavy sustain on the chords
mirroring the electronic echo lightly applied to her voice. "I Put a
Spell on You," already a frightening and obsessive trip in the original
Screamin' Jay Hawkins version, crosses here into some borderland of
bluesy piano and tightly coiled vocal restraint. Part of the power of
these performances, of course, lies in the sense of the uncanny that
they elicit as once-familiar-but-now-forgotten material returns to
haunt us in strange new forms. To hear Galás sing, for example, the
Supremes' "My World Is Empty Without You" is to be confronted by the
ghost of something we realize we never really knew when it was alive.
These songs would not resurrect like this if they were still sung in
the voice of the past - or of a present that has condemned them to
forgetfulness. They do come alive, however - with a vengeance - in the
radical difference with which Galás reinterprets them, fulfilling in
them a possibility that the past has denied them. This is most obvious
in her renditions of the blues, where she retrieves the songs from the
respectful purity currently crippling the genre and restores to them
the devastating power found in performers like Blind Willie Johnson or
Son House.
As extreme and violent as her interpretations may be, therefore, they
seldom seem arbitrary or disrespectful. This is due, I think, to
Galás's radically egalitarian experience of musical culture. Raised by
strict Greek Orthodox parents in San Diego, she was classically trained
on piano (performing Beethoven's First Piano Concerto at age 14 with
the San Diego Symphony), but at the same time sat in on weekends in a
band led by her father, playing the full range of popular tunes you
might expect from an early-Seventies Holiday Inn cover band. Add to
this that her father also led a gospel choir and a New Orleans jazz
combo, and Galás's next incarnation - performing with Bobby
Bradford, Ornette Coleman's cornet player, on the outer edges of the
jazz avant-garde - scarcely seems a reach. (Surprisingly, it was only
after these experiences that she turned to singing, which had been
forbidden to her as a child.) The effect of all this was to give Galás
command, both technically and emotionally, of nearly the full range of
music available to us from the Western and Middle Eastern traditions.
Of course, to take a folk or blues song and do a respectfully
innovative performance of it is a sort of gift, regardless of how much
the song's author may or may not appreciate Galás's particular brand of
generosity. By infusing new life into the song and carrying it to new
listeners, Galás still stays well within a long tradition of
interpretation and re-interpretation of popular forms. Since the
beginning, however, Galás's primary project has been the works of
mourning and catharsis that Defixiones is a part of, and it's here that
she has both made her name and drawn criticism for her approach.
Perhaps the most notorious of these works is her stridently angry
Plague Mass, which veers between long rants at the ignorance and apathy
that abetted the AIDS epidemic to beautifully sung gospel passages to
moments of extreme eeriness where she seems to be channeling a wide
range of voices: patients in advanced AIDS dementia, fundamentalist
Southern preachers, Old Testament prophets. Add the sections where a
thunderous backing drumbeat supports her liturgical chanting of parts
of Revelations, Psalms, and Tristan Corbiere's poem, "Blind Man's Cry,"
and you have a truly unsettling work. (Galás first performed it,
stripped to the waist and drenched in blood, at the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine in New York City in October 1990.)
It's not just the content of the work that is severe, but Galás's
extremities of form. Her voice, imposing on its own, becomes all the
more overwhelming when funneled through separate mikes and
electronically distorted by her sound technician, Blaise Dupuy. The
piece is excessive, to be sure, but one has the sense that the
excessiveness is a conscious esthetic choice, the vocal equivalent of
the title of one of the Mass's most powerful songs, "Let's Not Chat
About Despair." Galás's firm control of her three-and-a-half octave
voice seldom allows one to think she is merely emoting for emotion's
sake. Nonetheless, because of the topical nature of the work, and its
implied political commitment to a particular issue, Galás has often
been criticized for creating a piece of music that is so aesthetically
challenging as to be unlistenable by the very people she is presumably
singing for and about. (It's worth mentioning here that Galás is no
tourist in the land of AIDS: her brother, the playwright Philip-Dimitri
Galás, died of AIDS, as did many of her friends. She has also been
arrested at ACT-UP demonstrations, and has "We Are All HIV+" tattooed
across the knuckles of one hand. To this day, her Website is a
clearinghouse for information on the disease, just as it is now for the
genocides and ethnic cleansings of Asia Minor.)
While this critique can be dismissed for its simplistic dichotomy
between pure art on the one hand and political art on the other, Galás
deflects it differently, by simply insisting that she never presumes to
speak for anyone but herself. Again, it's the place of memory in her
work that's important. In many ways, Galás is less concerned with the
victims carried away in any particular flood than in the closing of the
waters of forgetfulness over them. One senses, although she has never
said this herself, that if the dead of Anatolia had been properly
remembered, Defixiones might never have been created. Like the
Eumenides - the mythological creatures charged with administering
justice - she seeks to pursue the criminal with the memory of his
crimes.
Since Galás is a musician, of course, these memories are first and
foremost musically encoded. Where Plague Mass and Masque of the Red
Death melded gospel, Catholic liturgy, and techno drumbeats, Defixiones
sinks its roots into
the rich cultural soil of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. "Ter
Vogormia," which begins the piece, is melodically structured around an
Armenian liturgy - more or less a prayer for deliverance - composed by
Marar Yekmalian. It begins with a minute of shifting, droning organ
tones before Galás's voice enters in a long keening cry that, over a
period of four, beautifully suspended minutes, gradually coalesces
around the words of the title. She sings the liturgy and then, during a
pause, we hear a different woman's voice, dry and factual, reciting a
poem by the Armenian poet Siamanto that details the horrors of watching
young Armenian girls tortured by a Turkish crowd. It's a brilliant
juxtaposition, less for the texts themselves - in its English
translation, Siamanto's poem is a blunt description of an atrocity that
scarcely reaches for any figurative language - than for its pure
sonority. The recitation sounds like an ancient radio broadcast,
delivered either from or to some place at the very borders of
civilization, and it perfectly sets off the restrained purity of
Galás's singing.
Following this comes "The Desert" by the Lebanese writer Adonis, from
his 1982 Diary of Beirut Under Siege. Galás alternately sings, wails,
and spits out the poem to a gradually intensifying backdrop of howling
winds and periodic, almost martial attacks on the piano. As wide as
Galás's octave range is, her emotive range surpasses it here, moving
from guttural growls through tender sweeps to Middle Eastern modes. The
dry recitation of Siamanto recurs, crisply juxtaposed again to the
passion of the singing. A cascade of piano-playing then leads into
"Sevda Zinciri," a popular Turkish love song that Galás virtually
caresses with her voice before moving into "Holokaftoma," a selection
of texts that includes Pier Paolo Pasolini's "A Desperate Vitality,"
which she sings over yet more recitation of Siamanto - or rather,
sings, declaims, and wails while her voice is electronically looped,
echoed, and distorted. It's a collision of the piece's leitmotifs
before a stately reprise of "Ter Vogormia."
The piece isn't over yet, however: the chanting of a Syrian Orthodox
boys' choir begins "The Eagle of Tkhuma," while another voice, a man's
this time, recites a poem by Freidoun Bet-Oraham about the destruction
of the Assyrians, which in turn leads into the final eleven-minute
"Orders from the Dead." This is Galás in full didactic mode, as if all
that has been suggested and left unspoken thus far has to tumble out in
a long, angry litany of atrocities in both English and Greek (these
latter passages drawn from Dido Soteriou's Farewell Anatolia) over a
shifting sequence of drums.
I've tried to detail all this as a way of suggesting the complexity of
the materials, both textual and musical, that Galás layers together
here. If Defixiones's beginnings were in the stories she heard as a
child, her instincts are far too eclectic to allow her to create a
narrowly personal or nationalistic work. By pulling together texts in
Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Turkish, Italian, and English, the work
suggests that what has been lost in these disasters is not just the
lives of the particular populations, but the life of a shared culture
that drew from them all. Defixiones has, apparently, drawn the ire of
certain nationalist Turkish groups, who brand Galás as anti-Turkish,
but who, like the critics of Plague Mass, misunderstand her position.
You don't sing a Turkish love song as tenderly as she does unless you
have the capacity to open yourself to the culture that created it. In
fact, Defixiones continues into a second part, "Songs of Exile," which
works the theme of destruction both more broadly (in terms of its range
of sources) and more narrowly (insofar as it deals with the experiences
of isolated individuals). In it, Galás incorporates rebetiko,
Armenian-Turkish songs, and poems by Henri Michaux, César Vallejo, and
Paul Celan that she has set to music herself. It closes, appropriately
enough, with a harrowing rendition of the traditional blues, "See That
My Grave Is Kept Clean."
"Never again will the Eumenides speak to the Greeks, and we will never
know what was said in that language," wrote the French critic Maurice
Blanchot, although he hastened to add that it is equally true that the
Eumenides have never yet spoken, and that when they do one day, their
language will be an original one. If any artist alive nowadays has a
claim to fulfil that promise, it's Galás, who has managed to forge an
entire genre for herself against enormous odds, somewhere at the
crossroads of formally radical oratorio, politically charged opera, and
demonic rituals of catharsis. Like the devil's crossroads where
bluesman Robert Johnson legendarily received his talent, or the
cultural crossroads where the populations of Anatolia lived, it's a
perpetually threatened and threatening place, always on the verge of
its own apocalypse, and like the fragile transmissions of the poems
recited in Defixiones, it always seems we could lose contact with it at
any moment. Let's hope we don't have to wait another five years for the
next dispatch.

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Diamanda Galas - La Serpenta Canta