Diamanda Galás
Litanies Of Satan

Diamanda Galàs revolutionized the notion of singing by integrating its current, classical sense with vocal techniques that draw upon the most diverse human experiences.

Galàs restored to singing every organ of phonation, each contributing as desired with carefully controlled methods to the vocal result. Singing includes not only tempered sounds, the notes produced by the singer, but every sound, every phoneme emanating from the human body. She assimilates into singing even the psychic alterations and their linguistic manifestations in a sort of psychological babble with stunning results, a product of Galàs’s visits to mental hygiene institutions during her stay at the Living Theatre.

Stutters, neighs, obsessive screams, and more form the singing of Galàs, attributing her journey to the great artistic coordinates that investigate the relationship between linguistic expression and reality, like Joyce in Finnegan with his grammatical chaos or the experiments of Zanzotto on borderline languages, from children's petèl to the frenzies of the mentally ill. Galàs goes further by grafting onto her body the most varied technological tools, expanding her body and her singing with the use of electronic devices, modern gadgets to modify the voice and make it last beyond the human, forming a new vocality suited to the technical era. Like Cronenberg's "biological" cinema, Galàs's story is also a desperate attempt not to alienate her human dimension in the modern age. The first long composition of the album Wild Women With Steak-Knives exemplifies a bit of all the techniques used by Galàs; her Greek origins also suggest a sort of Dionysian ritual: an ecstatic, epileptic, orgiastic maenad in contact with the god, torn, in the act almost of decapitating Orpheus, the Apollonian, a fictitious reality unmasked by madness. It is useless to judge the singing; one must simply let oneself be dismembered.

The other track is Galàs's electronic masterpiece and a descent into the human psyche through the poignant verses of Baudelaire. The voice is tortured and the landscape is desolate, traversed by galvanic shivers, the form of the litany, repetitive, is a ritual to probe the dark abode of man, to wrest the black regions of the soul from the occult. The contortions seem to calm down in the beautiful prayer to Satan only to resume more violently than before.

The result is an exceptional, moving, thrilling, Plutonic album even if, when you read the Litanies of Satan, it is consoling but beware: it will be the hand of the Lord of the Flies that rocks you ahahahahahahahah ;).