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BY JAMES McQUILLEN |
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Diamanda Galás PICA LaLuna 215 SE 9th Ave., 242-1419 8 pm Wednesday, Nov. 4 $18, $40 patron ticket (includes reception with the artist) Galás has worked on soundtracks for directors as diverse as Derek Jarman, Oliver Stone and Wes Craven. Diamanda Galás invites sinister allusions. No one, it seems, can speak of her without some reference to demonic possession, derangement or damnation. Yet the singer and performance artist, whom PICA presents this week in conjunction with the recent release of her CD Malediction and Prayer (Asphodel), also commands enormous respect for her unsparing honesty and unparalleled artistry. As San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman has written, "Diamanda Galás has been called the Bride of Satan. Satan should be so lucky." A 31Ž2-octave range is only one facet of her extraordinary voice. In the vocal torrents that flow and sometimes crash over her piano accompaniment, pure notes appear alongside wails, chattering and guttural choking sounds. A throaty, threatening whisper may be followed by a piercing shriek that leaves you feeling flayed, your nerves exposed to the cold wind. She seems to be perpetually breaking out of musical strictures, bending and coloring tones as she stretches music into something verging on madness. As an extension of excruciating pain and loss, death has never been far from her music, but the theme has been pronounced since the mid-1980s, when she became engaged in AIDS activism. (Her brother Philip-Dmitri was one of many people close to her who died of the disease.) Plague Mass, an AIDS requiem, and Vena Cava, based on AIDS-related depression and dementia, are two of her most prominent pieces of the last 10 years. Malediction and Prayer is similarly steeped in morbidity, but unlike the majority of her work, it is largely not of her own composition. It incorporates original works, including settings of verses by Baudelaire and Pier Paolo Pasolini, but it draws heavily on pop and traditional sources--which is not to say that it's a mere collection of covers. On a song cycle including "Gloomy Sunday" (famously recorded by Billie Holiday) and Phil Ochs' "Iron Lady," the raven-haired diva of death imbues familiar tunes with her trademark unsettling sounds. She transforms "The Thrill Is Gone" from soulful blues to soul-searing dirge, and "25 Minutes to Go," already hauntingly sung by Johnny Cash, attains a heightened level of despair; when the song's condemned prisoner reaches the end of her sentence with a noose around her neck, the bottom drops out from under the listener as surely as it does from under the narrator. Compared with Galás' early work--such as the near-hysterical "Wild Women with Steak Knives" and Litanies of Satan--Malediction and Prayer may sound uncommonly melodic, even tame. Every one of the songs has moments, however, that evoke the terror of her earlier work, and her take on Willie Dixon's "Insane Asylum" comes particularly close to the spirit of those works. Kathy Acker, who was in some respects Galás' counterpart in prose, called her "the Maria Callas of my generation," which is about as apt a label as anyone has ever applied to her. Like the great soprano, Galás puts incredible demands on her voice and gives each performance with an all-out, unsparing commitment. But Galás is also distinguished by her direct, Cassandra-like gaze in blackest reality, and that makes her a unique, explosive and compelling artist--even if it does convince people that there's something diabolical about her.
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