Diamanda Galás
Schrei X

The backlash of Serpenta's most destabilizing side, the last neuron-disintegrating testimony before the definitive blues turn—a blues reworked à la Galás, of course.

Schrei X is composed of two parts: Schrei 27—the album proper—and a 'live' extension, with remakes and improvisations. Schrei 27 is precisely this: 27 minutes of screams and multifaceted vocalizations. One can notice a certain closeness to the first two works, but here the electronic noise is absent, and the vocal instrument is not subservient to long compositions with spires of trills and abysses of howls; the vocal depredations paint, with quick brushstrokes, the reality of a sick and enclosed mind, illustrating a catalog of madness enclosed in 11 tracks, the most disturbed and disturbing tracks produced by the mind and feral throat of the austere spokeswoman for the oppressed.

Meditations of dissociated personalities, conversations between demons, vocal waves flowing into pitch-black cosmos, verses of nonexistent beings, the drama of a forbidden and torn mind, regurgitations of a shattered, destroyed, abyss-thrown individuality.

"Kick my head," implores Diamanda, amidst the laughter of the mad, in the disarming and concluding "Hee Shock Die" (seven and a half minutes, against the 1 or 2 minutes of all the other entries in this catalog). Disturbing oscillation between laughter and despair, vocal bestiality of a sabbat where Serpenta is alone, dancer and officiant—but along with the thousand other hunched figures woven by her voice; the multiple in the one.

The mad laughter, slowly, dissipates, and into the distorted mind breaks consciousness: the dance of the sabbat slows, then stops; the figures vanish; the echo disappears; the madman's laughter gives way to the cries of the desperate, cries that—in the final seconds—seem to testify an ultimate awareness. There is no more madness; it seems to say: "I know who I am, and it is terrible."