A fantástica Diamanda Galás vem de novo acordar-nos os ouvidos! É já no dia 10 de Maio, na Aula Magna de Lisboa! Claro que não quero perder. Já tive o prazer de assistir a três concertos em Lisboa e não me canso. Isto, apesar de não ter o costume de ouvir muito a música dela no meu dia-a-dia. houve tempos em que ouvia muito, mas agora não. Enfim, fases...
Aqui fica um artigo interessante:
"The queen of scream -
With a voice that can shatter windows and a taste for the dark, Diamanda Galas is not for the weak.
"HATE can move mountains," says the grand diva of darkness, Diamanda Galas, her voice husky, volatile, ready to cackle and ready to skewer. The avant-garde superstar is perspiring on a humid morning in the nocturnal enclosure at New York's Central Park Zoo and she draws aside her webbed shawl to air her bust. "Love? Hmm, I don't know. But hate, yeah. Hate can move mountains; anger is fuel."
The singer coos at the hanging bats - "gorgeous" - and then pours a little top-shelf vitriol. "You know those f---ing uptown bitches that parade around with their disgusting handbag dogs? They were campaigning to have New York's wild bats poisoned, talking shit about rabies and disease. What it really was, they were scared one would swoop down and carry little poochie away," she says, spreading her fingers like wings. "I want every f---ing chihuahua in New York snatched by bats."
Venom turned an inhibited Greek-American girl from San Diego into a solo performer unique and ferocious, the psychotic standout of recent years at the Sydney Festival, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Adelaide Festival, and a headliner in Italy, Spain, Mexico and other nations with a taste for emotion served up strong. She's a manic-depressive, not desirous of anyone's sympathy or brain-chemistry interpretations but one of that rare breed whose curse is coupled with the will and talent to turn the extremes into powerful, structurally sound art.
So venom takes but it also gives. Just like Galas, who has a little news for the columnist and ABC talking-head Andrew Bolt. He dissed her shows at the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival without even seeing them, calling them "incomprehensible, if not pretentious" and got sweaty about taxpayers' money going on performances in which Galas sang in foreign tongues without surtitles, asking why import "this kind of act" at the expense of "the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra or our top actors and singers?"
"That Bolt, he's a real f---ing idiot, man, a real halfwit," says Galas, in a cab from the zoo to an air-conditioned patch of her home turf in Manhattan's East Village. "If you have questions, as you would in any operatic production, be it Tosca, be it Wagner, get the f---ing notes." Galas called Bolt a masturbator at her next Melbourne show "in Greek, and half the audience laughed, even if that motherf---er expects everyone in Australia to only speak English".
Detractors are old hat to Galas, who in 1991 contributed to AIDS awareness (the virus killed her brother) by performing a show, Plague Mass, at New York's Cathedral of St John the Divine, complete with the song Confessional (Give Me Sodomy Or Give Me Death) and clad only in red paint and a loincloth. She's used to a bit of stick.
"Hey, I'll tell you what, I survived hepatitis C; I took chemotherapy; I survived all sorts of shit. Unless you put a gun to my head, I'm not dying in the near future. I'm going to sing until I drop dead, so f--- you."
Hepatitis came from sharing needles in the 1970s, in the aftermath of her unconventional studies in biochemistry at the University of Southern California.
"You see all these people researching on the rats and I had a perfect opportunity to inject myself with all this shit," she says. Galas and a pack of medical students hit the labs hard: "We decided we were going to do research on ourselves. We did some crazy shit and that's why I think I ended up making music."
It was through such methods that Galas found her trademark vocalisations, the multi-octave hurricanes of sound that seem to carry all the terror and madness in the universe. They manifested when she locked herself in anechoic chambers on high doses of LSD. "You can scream and you can do whatever you're going to do that's governed by your mental state and nobody's going to hear you, so there's no censor. I wanted to have that freedom and I did it and the vocal stuff came out of that," she says.
With hepatitis came abstinence - "You got to decide whether you want to live or die" - but not born-again wowserism. The danger for artists pushing the limits, she says, is forgetting the "edit mode". If they don't know when to slow down, not only might they die, she says, but worse, they will produce self-indulgent trash.
Galas uses her depressive phases, when they ease from pushing her off the circle of the earth and towards the embrace of a noose, to slash the fat from the compositions she races through in her manias. "All sides of my abilities have to come forward to make a product good, because at the end of the day, it's either a good product or it's a bad product," she says.
Given her mania for exactitude, she has cancelled concerts when the pianos supplied and acoustics were sub-par, and Galas has little tolerance for people who talk through a show. "I can make cracks for a while but if somebody doesn't shut up, I show them how to get the f--- out," she says. "Honey, I don't do dinner theatre."
Diamanda Galas sings traditional blues and laments on Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, released on Monday (Mute Records).
"Hey, I'll tell you what, I survived hepatitis C; I took chemotherapy; I survived all sorts of shit. Unless you put a gun to my head, I'm not dying in the near future. I'm going to sing until I drop dead, so f--- you."
Hepatitis came from sharing needles in the 1970s, in the aftermath of her unconventional studies in biochemistry at the University of Southern California.
"You see all these people researching on the rats and I had a perfect opportunity to inject myself with all this shit," she says. Galas and a pack of medical students hit the labs hard: "We decided we were going to do research on ourselves. We did some crazy shit and that's why I think I ended up making music."
It was through such methods that Galas found her trademark vocalisations, the multi-octave hurricanes of sound that seem to carry all the terror and madness in the universe. They manifested when she locked herself in anechoic chambers on high doses of LSD. "You can scream and you can do whatever you're going to do that's governed by your mental state and nobody's going to hear you, so there's no censor. I wanted to have that freedom and I did it and the vocal stuff came out of that," she says.
With hepatitis came abstinence - "You got to decide whether you want to live or die" - but not born-again wowserism. The danger for artists pushing the limits, she says, is forgetting the "edit mode". If they don't know when to slow down, not only might they die, she says, but worse, they will produce self-indulgent trash.
Diamanda uses her depressive phases, when they ease from pushing her off the circle of the earth and towards the embrace of a noose, to slash the fat from the compositions she races through in her manias. "All sides of my abilities have to come forward to make a product good, because at the end of the day, it's either a good product or it's a bad product," she says.
Given her mania for exactitude, she has cancelled concerts when the pianos supplied and acoustics were sub-par, and Galas has little tolerance for people who talk through a show. "I can make cracks for a while but if somebody doesn't shut up, I show them how to get the f--- out," she says. "Honey, I don't do dinner theatre."
Diamanda Galas sings traditional blues and laments on
Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, released on Monday (Mute Records)".
