Diamanda Galás Gives Voice to Unbearable Pain, Once More

SAN DIEGO — It was 1984, and Diamanda Galás — then in her late 20s, a moaning, screaming singer who wrote music with titles like “The Litanies of Satan” and “Song From the Blood of Those Murdered” — was visiting a friend’s lover in a hospital in New York.

As in so many early ’80s New York hospital rooms, the man was dying of AIDS.

“I didn’t know much about the AIDS epidemic at all,” Galás said recently in the rambling house she grew up in, near Balboa Park here. “And it looked as if prongs were stuck into the middle of his body. The idea of such excruciating treatment and excruciating pain, just — I had to come to terms with it.”

“And he said to me,” she recalled, “‘Would you do a piece about this — you know, about what you’re seeing right now?’ And I said yes, I would.”

Released two years later, her answer was “The Divine Punishment.” Over pounding, seething electronics, Galás groans, whines, chants, squeals, mutters and gags, bellowing lines from Leviticus and Psalms, sometimes guttural, sometimes wailing.

“This is the law of the plague,” she claustrophobically intones, as if she’s lashing the listener in a dungeon. “To teach when it is clean and when it is unclean.”

She followed it with two more albums radiating fury at the silence surrounding AIDS, which claimed her brother in 1986. Then came a milestone performance piece, “Plague Mass,” that condensed the trilogy into a blood-soaked cry of anguish. “I couldn’t imagine how she could do this to her vocal cords — such power and technique,” the Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry said in an email; Harry promptly started seeing Galás’s vocal coach.

In the decades after its arrival, this music ended up more discussed than actually heard, lost in the shuffle as Mute, the label that released it, was swallowed by one conglomerate after another. Galás, 66, has spent years wresting the material back and beginning to reissue it; a remastered “Divine Punishment” is out on June 10 — in all its blistering glory, and in the midst of yet another plague.

“I think she’s the most important singer of the past 40 years,” the vocalist and songwriter Anohni said in an interview. “She’s expressing reality: not her reality, the reality. She’s always been willing to offer her body as a channel for reality, as a conduit for the expression of the moment.”

Those jeremiads of the ’80s forever intertwined Galás and AIDS. But her work both before and after the trilogy shared many of its preoccupations, with her classically trained yet brutal tone blurring the line between observing suffering and becoming its mouthpiece. The content was enigmatic — sometimes wordless, sometimes poetic — but the evocation of apocalyptic distress was indelible.

In album after album, performance after performance, she has screeched for those left voiceless by physical infirmity, totalitarianism, mental illness, incarceration, sexual violence, exile, right up to what she calls “the genocide of the old” that’s been wrought by the coronavirus pandemic — though she’s never spouted the popular slogans about the fashionable issues of the day. Her next record, “Broken Gargoyles,” coming in August, takes as its inspiration the disfigured German soldiers who were ostracized in the wake of World War I.

“I’m really addressing the same thing over and over again,” she said, draped in black, her eye makeup vivid, sitting on her sofa. “The issue of a person who is isolated from society — either through choice or through necessity, through a sort of legal structure.”

“Broken Gargoyles” finds her voice as singeing as ever. The question is when audiences will hear it in person. Galás’s last live performances were four years ago, in Los Angeles. Over a long period she spent stretches in San Diego, then finally moved back here for good, to care for her ailing parents — the age-old role of a Greek daughter.

“I always was working,” Galás said, “but I wasn’t working in the public eye.”

Her father died in 2009. The death of her mother — “my best friend and confidante” — in 2018 was particularly difficult: “After that, I thought, what’s this idea of being a singer? Because I realized I was singing for her.”

“This time has not been about performing,” she said. “But I feel that it’s coming up. I’m ready to perform.”

THERE IS SOME cognitive dissonance in learning that Galás lives in San Diego, better known for fish tacos and grinning surfers than for saturnine musical prophets. But on May mornings, the fog rolls in, a misty chill: Diamanda weather.

Though no domestic goddess — “I had to ask my therapist, ‘How do I turn on the stove?’” — she heated up spanakopita on a recent Saturday and sipped strong coffee as she sat in the sprawling Victorian’s front room, in which, she said, her mother had died.

The house is covered in images of giraffes, an animal her mother fell in love with on a trip to Africa, and the upstairs rooms are crammed with books. The dining room table was piled with black fabric, a horse-head mask and a set of bells fastened to thick leather straps — like the ones, Galás said, that lepers had to wear to announce their presence.

Her speaking voice has a hint of rasp in it. And her flood of conversation is warm, intelligent and bawdy, until it rises in expletive-filled squalls of indignation — at writers who have misunderstood her, artists she thinks are lazy — that vanish as quickly as they came.

These days she sees only a handful of people and doesn’t leave the house much. “I’ve never really excelled in outdoor enterprises,” she said, though the next morning, she was walking up the block, again dressed all in black but otherwise cheerful, carrying a bright pink box of biscuits.

“With people in their 60s,” she said, “this is going to happen, you know. You’re going to be the only one left in the big house like this.”

The house was rumored to be haunted even back when Galás’s father, a professor and musician, first found it — deserted, with spiders crawling on the walls — and moved the family in when she was a young girl.

From him came a grounding in jazz and in Greek and Middle Eastern folk music. She then studied piano and voice. Even early on, her teacher must have recognized a budding gift for oracular authority, giving her diva titans like Norma, Medea and Lady Macbeth to work on.

But she also studied Strauss’s lyrically autumnal “Four Last Songs.” The score for the third, “Beim Schlafengehen,” was open on the piano in the front room, and Galás praised, of all singers, the lush legato of the soprano Renée Fleming.

Her early training and powerful technical abilities were crucial for what was to come; of the virtuosic so-called extended techniques for which she and other experimental vocalists are renowned, she said sharply: “Extended from what?” But she was never quite suited to being a strict classical interpreter, since “what happens is that my composerly side comes out.”

Jedediah Wheeler, who helped produce “Plague Mass” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1990, said: “She knows her music; she knows her voice. She was developing her own operatic tradition, unique to herself and based on an understanding of the repertoire. It wasn’t casual.”

Early on, Galás performed avant-garde works in Europe with the likes of Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis, and back in San Diego was part of a raucous band that would play “free jazz to standards to total free-for-all.”

Recorded in a basement in England, the title track of “The Litanies of Satan” (1982), her first album, set Baudelaire’s poetry to a crunching background. The message was simultaneously terror and power, harshness and grandeur: “The palace of despair,” she called it in the even more aggressively distorted “Panoptikon,” released on her self-titled second album in 1984.

She wrote “Deliver Me From Mine Enemies,” the first part of “The Divine Punishment,” in San Francisco, at a studio called the Decapitation Center that had an expensive array of synthesizers that roar under her raw howls on the finished album. Her style here can seem of a piece with industrial and death metal music of the period, but then suddenly swerves into folk keening and ululation. The thundering incantations of the second part, “Free Among the Dead,” were formed out of improvisations with the producer Dave Hunt.

By the time the album was released, her brother was seriously ill, but he insisted on listening to it. “I sat outside the room,” Galás recalled, “and I was crying. And he was sitting there, you know, like when someone’s really sick, they’re just holding themselves together. He was listening with his boyfriend on the couch, and I thought, ‘that’s really cruel.’”

Over the coming years, though, she began to realize that those who were sick didn’t find her music offensive or cruel. Finally, they would tell her, someone had acknowledged their desperation and helplessness.

Her performances grew more complex and ambitious, her theatrical vision meticulous and demanding. For “Plague Mass,” Wheeler said, “the major question as I recall was trying to figure out the consistency of the blood to pour on her body. There was much experimentation with consistency, the viscousness; how would it hold onto her body; how would it flow.”

Alex Poots, who in the late 1990s programmed “Defixiones, Will and Testament,” her work about the early-20th-century genocides carried out by Turkey, said that “while there was always care and preparation, there was also a slight anarchy she would bring to the actual performance — the tension between the precision and the freedom.”

Trent Reznor used her music on his soundtrack for “Natural Born Killers.” She performed hissing diatribes in total darkness; recorded sepulchral versions of standards like “The Thrill Is Gone”; and, on “The Sporting Life” (1994), collaborated with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin on rowdy renditions of songs fantasizing about taking sadistic vengeance on wayward men. In an interview, Jones said Galás had done the feverish vocal for “Skotoseme,” the opening track, in a single take. “At the end of it,” he recalled, “we were shaking. It was shattering.” But he dispelled the notion that Galás is always serious: While touring together, he said, “she’d turn around between verses and grin at me. She actually enjoyed herself.”

Anonhi said that our society “is under such a spell about the power of the male body. She physically embodied an undoing of that spell.” Even Galás’s perspective on gender identity is a punkish part of that undoing.

“I identify as a bat or a reptile,” she said. “I don’t ascribe to that woman thing, because for me ‘woman’ means ‘breeder.’ And I ain’t playing that, ever.”

She had barely listened to “The Divine Punishment” in decades before embarking on its remastering last fall. “It’s heavier now,” said Heba Kadry, her audio engineer. “It’s dark material and this is taking it even darker.”

Galás’s gradual revisiting of her earlier work is happening alongside the creation of new music. “Broken Gargoyles,” which has been unveiled in several iterations as an installation over the past couple of years, is a vision of fornicating animals, rasped poetry and dreadful mutilation.

“It’s as if a person’s entire vocal apparatus has been shattered,” she said of one smothered effect.

It is ferocious. But Galás’s anger doesn’t feel diluted in an era when so many people are shouting, nor does it feel like overkill. In her sustained passion, her grounding in the body and its processes, her somber focus, her technical rigor, she is still a tonic: grim yet reassuring, a granitic testament to the truth.

“Her voice is a portal for these feelings that I’ve experienced that have no words — just a sound,” said Haley Fohr, who records as Circuit des Yeux with a dusky voice that’s been compared to Galás’s. “It’s a message. It’s a place. And I hear her voice and know she’s been there, too.”

When her mother died, Galás fantasized about painting the house’s interior entirely black, covering the windows with duct tape, and soundproofing the structure so that she wouldn’t hear anything from the outside. She was shaken and enraged by the violent death of her longtime voice teacher, Barbara Maier Gustern, who was shoved to the sidewalk in Manhattan in March. Her losses seem to have added to what feels like some ambivalence about returning to the stage.

She described the ancient Greek torture of the brazen bull, the mouth of which was shaped in such a way that the screams of the victim — roasting in the metal belly — would sound beautiful to those outside. There could hardly be a more fraught parable of the artist and her audience. On the “Broken Gargoyles” cover, Galás’s face is blurred into the image of a bull’s.

And yet, she said, “I definitely think it’s time to emerge. I have been thinking about the type of performance I want to do, whether it would be voice and piano, or whether it would be within the installation. That would be a very new thing for me to do. I’ve never done that.”

“The gift of being an artist,” she said, “is that you can figure out how to survive if you can continue to work in such a way that you can answer the questions that otherwise are going to damn you.”