ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING // Diamanda Galás - Broken Gargoyles II. Abiectio // Composer Reaction
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
- Bryan reacts to and talks about his thoughts on Broken Gargoyles II. Abiectio
ORIGINAL VIDEO // • Broken Gargoyles II. A...
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0:00 Intro
00:49 Reaction
18:14 Analysis - I Did Not Like This
20:56 Analysis - Is This Music?
24:36 Analysis - Wild Production
28:13 Analysis - Skillful Vocal Usage
32:35 Analysis - It Can Get Absurd
36:35 Analysis - An Oppressive Atmosphere
39:24 Analysis - Lyrical Dive
41:43 Outro
#reaction #diamandagalas #experimentalmusic
As an American she's of greek descent, a classically trained opera singer AND pianist. She's done more digestible stuff, but she always had this eerie otherworldly quality to it. In the 80's she did music about AIDS, having a brother that contracted the disease and died in 1986, drawing parallels to biblical passages about lepers and "the plague". Had the incredible luck of catching her live in London back in 1989. It was just her and a grand piano and prerecorded sounds. All in a concert venue. Part of the audience left during the concert - probably because it was really loud! Me, I thought it was a fantastic experience.
Here, she's drawn her experimental sounds further, to the extreme. I can't say I enjoyed this as much as her earlier stuff, but I haven't followed her career since maybe the new millennium.
Nobody plays gospel and blues like she does. She gets to the roots of the blues and unravels it, that has impressed me a lot. I saw her a couple of times here in Mexico with a more traditional album and it was amazing, I am a classical pianist and her way of playing the piano left me mesmerized. I love listening to all their bootlegs live
I have no idea how in the world this landed in your react pile. I have been not a fan but a fanatic about Galas for nearly 40 years. And I am completely flabbergasted by how amazing this track in her "late catalogue" is. You are listening to part 2, but when I heard the first 5 seconds of part 1, I was already ready to pay to acquire it. [I'm not a mindless fan of her work. I didn't think "Shrei X" was very successful, and I feel like I ought to be attentive to "Vena Cava" but it just doesn't do it for me.]
Listening to this piece for the first time, with headphones, I was stunned by the absolute and complete hellscape that this thing is [part 1 is more "busy" while part 2 is more "sparse" if that's the right word, more abject (abiecto)]. Hellscape in the most visceral, metaphysical sense. Unrelenting agony. I don't think I have ever heard such sustained intensity from her at this length, such sonic brutality. (Of course, the odd thing is that for me, I feel extremely at home and cozy in this music. That's why I've always been drawn to her, from the first time I heard just a snippet of "Wild Women with Steak-Knives," at my college radio station.) I have followed her career, got to see her live once (amazing). And the performance on UA-cam from her in San Francisco in 2017 is a completely representative recording (again, impressive that it is so "late" in her career). . There's a sound (I don't remember if it is in this section, I think so, or part 2) that sounds like a baseball bat repeatedly hitting the corpse of a cow; maybe it's hitting a wet punching bag, but it goes on and on and on, and is emblematic of the whole thing.
To say "it's not for everyone" is the height of understatement. But certainly, her music can be violently cathartic for me, pulling out my insides with a hook through my nose, or extricating my soul from the black, abyssal tar-pit that life can be emotionally sometimes. (Just for the record, Cyndi Lauper is another intense favorite of mine, with Nina Hagen and Kate Bush ... just for context.) I've been listening to "Litanies of Satan" (a setting of a Baudelaire poem) for decades, and I promise you: close analysis of it yields compositional insights.
This would unironically be a desert island disc for me [well, certainly something by Galas, and Kate Bush's Dreaming], with Bach's Johannespassion, King Crimson's USA (40th Anniversary), Kansas' Two for the Show, Van der Graaf Generator's Vital and a thumb-drive of all the songs I want to listen to every time they come on.
Since you're a classical composer I would recommend listening to her album the singer by her
She shreds the piano and the vocals and it is also very accessible as compared to her more avant garde stuff
I have mad love and respect for this lady and her work. She's in many ways the precursor and main inspiration to Lingua Ignota, alongside Jarboe. What she does goes way beyond the scope of music. Her work in the 80s in particular had a strong activist bent, where she framed an antichristian imagetic as a way to give voice to the communities afflitcted with AIDS. Believe it or not, her work is driven by an incredible sense of empathy and care and revolt towards human suffering. The context of this album, while rooted in those yellow fever experimentations, is also meant to draw paralels to the inhumanity with which we handled our currentCovid pandemic with a nod to how callously gay men were treated during the monkeypox outbreak in 2021. There is always something there beneath the gruesome and it's informed by compassion rather than mere morbid voyeurism more common in so many gore metal stuff. It's also satanic in a sense of rebellion rather than the mere pantomine of black metal.
It should also be said that often music was just a component of an overall performance. Most of her stuff is meant to be experienced in a live setting. Don't know if that's the case with this particular piece, though, but she is, like Lingua Ignota, more performance art than just a musician or a composer. And it must also be said that this is on the far end of the experimental and the abrasive; her career is incredibly varied and encompasses an almost funky rock collaboration with Led Zeppelin's bassist that's only drums, bass and her vocals, 80s synth wave, spoken word, and jazzy/bluesy piano and voice performances and even a narration to a Rotting Christ song. She has a live rendition of BIllie Holliday's "Gloomy Sunday" somewhere on UA-cam that almost never fails to bring me to tears by virtue of how commanding her voice is, it's really a visceral emotional reaction. Her voice is that incredible, especially in how she uses her ridiculous vocal range of over 4 octaves. She was 66-67 when this came out, by the way, which is amazing to think. Many more mainstream singers don't reach this age with their vocal chords in such good shape.
So yeah, this might not have been a good first introduction, I don't think. There's challenging you with a difficult song and there's... well, this. Not even I, with all the praise I'm showering this lady, can say I really enjoyed this, at least not without chcking a bit into the context. Her 80s work, feels much more impactful and purposeful, maybe because I'm familiar and know the contect, but there she displays the same intentionality that elevate Lingua Ignota's works beyond being mere soundscapes .
I'd recommend anyone to start with her "Masque of Red Death" Trilogy, especially "You must be Certain of the Devil" for what's still pretty bonkers but much more recognizably music about the AIDS epidemic, and Plague Mass, a live album/performance on the very same theme.
Thank you for such an eloquent run down of points☝️👌saves me from trying to do the same…lol
I saw her perform Litanies of Satan live naked and covered in literal chicken blood ☝️
I have never had the context to imply bragging rights under any other circumstances lol so thank you
"You Must Be Certain of the Devil" is indeed a good introduction. Myself, I send people to the Plague Mass because immersing yourself in that will change you. But we fight an uphill battle here; the vast majority of people will bail within a minute. It's kind of like me trying to get people to listen to Magma.
@@ambassadortourettes753 yeah, I also came across her without much context in the 90s, and being a teenager into metal all I needed was "creepy satanic sounding" as context. Was floored anyway.
Saw her only once in 2002, one a show more or less inspired by the 9/11 aftermath. Even in a more subdued, less flamboyant form than the covered in blood days, she's still pretty damn imposing and intense.
While I definitley appreciate your effort here, but this IS a concept piece / art performance, and you’ll never get the full and intended experience without reading the words and poems that the performer, in this case Diamanda Galas, provides in the booklet. The words are vital, and without them you’ve just listened to some disturbing, but well crafted, sounds. It’s like someone trying to analyse an opera or theatre play while having ignored the libretto or dialogue. It’s possible, but not wholly.
Sounds like I'm going through Dante's layers of Hell
17 minutes of pure audial hell. Reminds me of a 90's band called Abruptum that played some improvised / experimental dark music similar to this, they were signed to Mayhem's deceased guitarist Euronymous label Deathlike Silence Production.
Funny- I just listened to this after I watched a different reaction of Lingua Ignota.
I haven’t dove too much into the discography but I was a bit shocked at this track. It was pretty grating, and I don’t mind grating. I did enjoy the atmosphere that was created overall.
When I think of “horror” it usually takes things to the extreme on purpose to evoke something. That’s what I felt from this track. Thanks Bryan for checking it out!
Props for getting through that. Diamanda is....unique. You're spot on about this being performance art and having much more value experiencing it live.
Dee-uh-mon-duh Gah-LAS, Bryan. And this piece is nowhere near as scary as her Plague Mass, which is far and away the most terrifying piece of music I have ever heard. Ever! And this one here is plenty scary. She is, as people have noted, classically trained, has been driven by the death of her brother to AIDS (which is where the Plague Mass comes from) and is a proponent of Schrei-opera, of which this piece is a great example. She has played at times inside rock- she recorded a record with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin- and has done a series of discs with her singing and just piano, often doing scarifying blues covers. But her electronic pieces, such as the Plague Mass, Wild Women with Steak Knives, and Panoptikon, are the ones that reach the heights. Vena Cava is a composition based on the interior thoughts of women who is losing her mind to disease. A version of the Plague Mass live is available on youtube- it has to be seen to be believed, with Diamanda stripped to the waist, blood dripping down her torso and the most otherworldly and truly scary vocalizations I have ever heard. She is unrelenting in her commitment to her music. I have her book, whose title is not something I would willingly list here. This is not music I listen to every day, but when I do listen I am astonished at how deep she goes and how willing she is to push her limits. Bryan- here is a link to the full Plague Mass live: ua-cam.com/video/vwTUFC-fX7Y/v-deo.html
That pronunciation is what I initially thought but then I found an interview with the way I said it in the video and figured that would have been right. That Plague Mass video sounds absolutely bonkers though.
@@CriticalReactions you have no idea! This is likely the most extreme piece of music you’ll ever hear. And I say that having listened to many Nonesuch electronic music discs in my day.
I think this track sets out to be as unsettling as possible rather than just scary. Conjuring fear is just 1 for the song to be unsettling. Being very weird, absurd, unexpected, and at times even ridiculous are other ways to achieve the same goal.
Legend! I absolutely adore Diamanda Galas. I don't think this is very representative of her work, but yes, it's incredible still. One of my top five, surely.
PS: I went to see her live about 3 years ago. Ive seen her before, but this show really had THE most diverse crowds Ive ever seen (this was in LA). It was wild and great, but beautiful and serene.
Her and Jarboe are fire🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Also, just to say: it's easy to miss that Galas, while often an interpreter of other people's work, is definitively a composer. While there is interpretative leeway in the realization of specific sections of her music, she can reproduce Litanies of Satan, the Plague Mass, this piece, because she has composed them. It's not just, "No, not anyone can do that" but that people also cannot assemble disparate elements into a composition this way. One could make analogies with Penderecki's "Threnody" except that the title was the suggestion of his publisher, apparently, not the composer. Ah well. I'm not always in the mood to go through the hellscape with her, but there are pieces of hers that I have on high rotation (shorter one).
This piece is truly, truly a monster in her catalogue. I am so impressed that she could still do it (although the backbone was recorded some years ago).
Always wondered when Diamanda would make it on the channel! She's an artist I've heard quite a bit from without having done a discography run, but she's done everything from solo-vocal "sound art" to more mainstream stuff in collaboration with John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin's bassist). This is definitely more towards her avant-garde side, but I'd say she has even less accessible stuff. This sounds like it takes a lot of influence from modern, heavily dissonant classical (minus the vocals). It's definitely meant to be more of an artistic sonic experience than traditional music, but that's part of what makes her so unique. Perfect choice for the spooky season, too! I know she was heavily influenced by really old blues music, and a lot of the original blues artists were seen as pretty scary in their own time/context too and sang about a lot of really dark subjects.
I saw a few comments saying she has more accessible works but I wasn't expecting to hear she has *less accessible* works. I can't even fathom what she would do in those.
@@CriticalReactions For me, his most inaccessible album is "Vena Cava", a purely vocal album, a work that shows absolutely everything that the phonoarticulator system is capable of doing. If you want to hear the most accessible thing about her, I recommend the cover she did of the song "interlude (tine)" it's wonderful
@@rickswhispers8666that is definitely her most craziest album given the subject matter is literally that but its one of my favorites
For me, the way who I interpreted this is as for the first part like screaming from chronic, crippling, gory pain, so intense and tortuous that alters your senses and cognition, like falling in a downward spiral of horrid hallucinations due to the pain and sensory deprivation. The first poem is called Der Blinde, and I guess here it’s either someone locked in a dark cell or someone who lost his eyes and face and wounds and pain drove him insane.
I think on the animal sounds as the screams or moans of someone who lost their face, and their humanity, in a social (being isolated), somatic (it does no longer look human) and sensory way (it does no longer feel like a human), so becomes some sort of beast, whose only company are the bats, mice, insects etc that live in the cell. But then he seems to find a way out, and scapes to an open sky, where ghostly beings sound like they fly in the night sky (maybe some other broken Garygoles) and find some kind of joy, then he’s welcomed by a mysterious, grotesque, alien entity that whispers in an otherworldly language, and other creatures laugh and play while his senses start to become numb, giving you the sensation you’re slowly waking up from a nightmare or a hallucination. I feel the dark entity does speak towards the listener like breaking the fourth wall unlike the other voices, who seem to be more in a scene and don’t really interact with you. //I guess the more you think about it the more you listen to it you continue unpacking more elements that makes this audio more more frightening
It would probably really help to know the inspiration for this composition (reposting from elsewhere): Composed in 2020 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first incarnation of the work was played as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Leper's Sanctuary)
in Hanover, Germany. This sanctuary was built around 1250 and served as a quarantine for those who suffered from the plague and leprosy in the Middle Ages.
This first presentation of Broken Gargoyles featured verses by German poet Georg Heym, “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Stadt.” The work was finalized in 2020 in collaboration with the artist and sound designer Daniel Neumann. In “Das Fieberspital” Heym describes the horrific state of people suffering from yellow fever who live in paralyzing fear of death and swirling delirium owing to their brutal treatment and isolation in medical wards in early 20th-century Germany. “Die Dämonen der Stadt” also addresses such grim portents of World War I; in this poem, the god Baal observes (like a gargoyle) a town from a rooftop of a city block at nighttime and lets a street burn down during dawn.
Employing a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques, Broken Gargoyles is arguably Galas’ most intellectually, sonically and viscerally formidable work to date. The album finds the visionary artist deftly probing the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased. The album’s first part, “Mutilatus,” contains the Heym poems “Das Fieberspital” and “Die Dämonen der Stadt,” and concerns the suffering of the soldier in the trenches and during innumerable operations in the hospital.
“Mutilatus,” was originally recorded in 2012-2013 in collaboration with recording and mix engineer Kris Townes and serves as a welcome into a parallel world of doom and delusion foretold. Sustained, portentous low-end piano rumble and Galás’ solo and multiplied voices create evanescent masses of tonality and, pertinently, a resonant frequency clash or harmonic distortion. You can hear it and feel it: she is inside her subjects, as if to emphasize with the sweaty diffusion of the patients’ feverish minds. When this extraordinary introduction of “Mutilatus” recedes in an approaching chilly ill wind, Galás intones over subdued whining electronics, cawing birds, semi-human verbalizations and something somewhere between these things. Representing the doomed, their punishers and perhaps her listeners in all our delusional wisdom, she rasps out words, or the sound of words; the electronic whine rises and falls. Then piano, left-hand low, and “vocalese” so high in deliberately splintery disfigurement, which gives way to the piano’s pulsing beat-figure darkly looming over the hill amid a babble of human voices and dark clouds of ravens.
The often sisyphean sound throughout Broken Gargoyles plumbs great depths in the album’s second part, “Abiectio” (humiliation, dejection, despondency), which draws from the Heym poems “Der Blinde” and “Der Hunger” and the last verses of “Das Fieberspital.” Feedback moans over impending piano thunder, Galás rough-grain wheezes, bawls and howls. Multilayered voice becomes a flock of winged creatures. The effected vocal throngs reach out diseased limbs, mangled faces. Where humans become beasts become…A blind man is forced outside of an asylum to die, with the order "Look into the sun!" Galás makes the inference that the sun burns him alive. A man made delirious and dying through hunger and the sun (again) forces open the jaws of a hound in order to devour him and ends up falling into a dark crevice, where he disappears. The voice at the end of “Das Fieberspital” speaks as one with a burned throat might, through what sounds like an electrolarynx -- again a herald to fire, dehydration. This part of the poem observes the patients laughing in derision and delirium at the priest who approaches the bed of a man dying of yellow fever in order to give him the Last Rites. The dying man impales the priest with a stone he had been sharpening.
The album’s title references Krieg dem Kriege!, a photographic book by the German anti-militarist Ernst Friedrich from 1924 documenting the atrocities of World War I, including the album’s nominal “broken gargoyles,” which is how the facially maimed soldiers were termed by their hospital keepers; the disfigured soldiers also had to wear metal masks to better hide their monster faces -- blown apart by shrapnel, burned by mustard gas and further mutilated by medical “researchers” -- from public view.
Who is the beater and who is the beaten? What about the pain of the punisher? Galás stirs the damaged minds of the hospital surgeons and guards with the victims’, obscuring her cries as the pain ebbs and flows, panting or pummeling. She creak-croons as each party to this disaster would, sinister though not altogether cruel. Her piano’s stout low end comes down like a jail door; her voices hover, theremin-like. Her people, her “characters,” ascend and descend, haltingly reharmonizing, weakly but determinedly pushing forward toward their demise, or what their fates have in mind for them. Galás’ highly original use of studio effects and electronics melts down to amplify and ambiguize her soundstage, its storm clouds of sonority tormenting, perhaps comforting a roomful of zombified mummies surrendered to those who likely regard them as hunks of meat to root around in like hogs, to wade through like puddles of putrid chaos.
I wrote all the other stuff before watching your video, so I could be "fresh" for your reaction, which I anticipated. [Also, thank you for the awesome opportunity to react to a reaction to this piece! Thank you![ There are basically three things I want to say:
First: Not denying this is music. I very much appreciate your correct emphasis to "push back" against the question "is this music"; most of the people I share Diamanda Galas with don't get around to "that's not music," they just find it overwhelming unpleasant (or, like me, they are instantly drawn in). I am a composer; I spend too much time defending John Cage to trolls online, and I'm simply very glad to see another composer who recognizes that music is "organized sound" and that (I'm extrapolating here), each piece can be thought of as asking a question (or questions), and the piece is an embodiment of an answer to that question, perhaps successful or not. (I like to think of pieces as "interesting failures".) In particular, that you described the "this isn't much" strand as something "dangerous" is very welcome to hear. As a practicing composer unable to make a living with music because my stuff can be dismissed as "not music" is going to be a sharp piece of glass in my soul.
Second: Working past your reaction to begin to locate the composition. In the spirit, it was heartening to watch you really having to fight past your basic response to the piece and, given that, it won't surprise me if you never come back here to read this. However, I did not that you came around to the idea that "not everyone can do this"; Galas is definitively a composer in the proper sense of the word. Given her body of work, I'm sure she curates the entire piece herself, however with help from sound engineers (just as a composer relies on the violinist to play what they can't play). Because this is a piece, it is the case that you only listened to half of it. I don't expect that you would want to listen to part 1, much less the whole thing again, but some of the heightened absurdity in part 2 is "mellow" compared to part 1, and so it is contextualized in that sense. In fact, part 2 (consonant with "abjection") is much more mellow. Given what you learned about Heym's poems, it is clear that you would have suffered more to know the pieces background. Nonetheless, in form, this is a classical "setting of poetry to music" piece in Galas' body of work.
Third: the absurdity. I'll spare you going into the gruesome details (you have some idea from reading about the poems Galas uses), but we all know that sometimes sufficiently intense or overwhelming things can evoke involuntary laughter. I'm sure you've decided by now that Galas doesn't do "camp" (and, what's more, unlike many who attempt "horror" she is genuinely able to reach it in a composition). Compositionally, the "excess" is situationally motivated; the soundscape she evokes, while hellish, is unfortunately earthly, capturing Heym's hospital ward after hours, when people should be asleep, when the "bustle" of the place is at its lowest. What I admire most about Cage's compositions are that he has an idea (a question) and then (usually with incredible deftness) elaborates an adequate form to carry the idea, to answer the question. Abiecto asks, "What does the condition of abjection look like sonically?" And I think your reaction is quite authentically correct. Part 1 ("mutilation") is equally rough. But along with those who suffer in those places (or the other spaces Galas explores, the AIDS dementia of a dying patient, someone locked in solitary confinement in prison--the live version of Willi Dixon's "Insane Asylum" remain a most astonishing in-person experience--the soul damned to an eternity in Hell, the people who were burned alive in their church during the (never discussed) genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, etc--there are also those who were there: whether the jailers, the murderers, but also (in this case) the nurses, those who were somehow able to "be" in that space and not, like most of us, have the fight or flight kick in and have to get away. I think one could fairly ask of Diamanda Galas' work whether she is "too blunt" in pulling back the shroud on historical and experiential spaces that the majority of people would prefer not to be exposed to. I think she is too committed in her work (above all, visible in the "tact" she exhibited in placing culpability for the silence and judgment around those dying of AIDS in the 80s) to be charged with exploiting these things. In Broken Gargoyles, Galas has very literally transformed the platitude "war is hell" into a sonic reality. It is, in that sense, one of her most general statements. It gives a particular voice to soldiers, as she gave voice to people in prison, insane asylums, dying of AIDS in hospitals, in burning churches, in hospitals for the disfigured. The situations she exposes us to are factually absurd, extreme to an inexcusable degree, and I think her method is well-suited to that point (in the same way that Schnittke's musical predilections are absolutely perfect for incidental music to a play featuring Gogol's work). On a personal note, in all of these works, Galas places us in the position of a witness. We are not imprisoned, we are not institutionalized, we are not dying in a hospital, we are not trapped forever in Hell--rather, we are a witness to these existential extremities. Generally, one might say the "unpleasant" aspects of that witnessing place us more in the position of a fellow sufferer (with those depicted), as opposed to one of the perpetrators causing the suffering (some devil, some landmine, some prison warden or guard). Yet, although we suffer (and may be scarred by our witnessing), we also survive. Galas has survived extreme situations. I have survived extreme situations. Coming to realize one's resilience, especially when you didn't realize you had it, is the definition of empowering. I think people coming through Broken Gargoyles (or other works by Galas) might "console" themselves about how "some people call that music" and other such reactions, because they felt it necessary (perhaps for good reason) to hold what Galas is presenting to us with an exceptionally composed way. Maybe they're cheating themselves of insight. But I think this is why I feel at home in Galas' music; the horror she depicts is emotionally familiar to me, even as I did not have my face burned away by mustard gas. But I certainly did grow up feeling like I was trapped in Hell with no possibility of escape (Galas actually musically encodes the possibility of escape in her "Litanies of Satan" I think). I also know there are a lot of non-heterosexual men from my generation who recognize Galas as virtually the lone, and certainly the most ferocious, denouncer of the homophobia that was fine with letting gay men die to a disease with no cure. It's typically reported that her brother died of AIDS, and I'm sure that inspired a "turn" in her work toward social suffering, and not just the individual suffering of people in Hell or prison; even so, on the other side of her first release is a piece dedicated to the Greek people who suffered during the junta from 1967 to 1974. For those familiar with such terrain, it is possible to move through the spaces, and be inundated by the sublimity of it; again, this is why it sounds like home to me. But I also acknowledge that Broken Gargoyles is incredible savage, even by her standards. Making us a witness to atrocities is not intended to evoke despair. I don't think you ended with a sense of hopelessness, just (human) relief that it was over. Which is what one hopes for suffering, that it ends. And having ended, we leave scarred, but resilient. I don't find her work nihilistic or disabling, which is more than I can say for a lot of serious and popular art. Equally, I don't feel her purpose is "entertainment" (much less exploitative gawking), so she's automatically "niche" as much for the typically unbearable extremity of her work but also because she isn't out merely to gratify the ego of the listener. She's not there to give you Rachmaninoff "feels." She doesn't just have something to say; she approaches how to say it with considerable compositional intelligence. I have a composer friend who is equally attentive in this regard (he's the one who taught me to think about pieces as answers to questions). For him, and Galas, and Cage, as a composer I learn from their compositional intelligence, however much I languish in obscurity. As you can tell from the absurd length of this section on absurd, my ability to find an adequate way to express that is still in need of more work.
I've seen her live twice, when I was in my 20s so 30-40years ago & would go again. Weather she is surrounded by microphones thrashing on the floor naked and covered in blood or in a black evening gown sat at a piano loosing herself within the blues to the point that the audience is forced to leave or endure locked in anguish with her she creates an art that transcends all context and is neither ugly or beautiful, it just is. I personally don't think when pushed to 11 it becomes absurd more it kind of breaks you such that you are forced to resonate with the work, certainly her early albums stated that 'accurate recreation of the intended sound was only possibly with the volume turned up to max on what ever device you are using' It is only then that you properly feel the soundscape with all its complexity and can be part of it. very like the live concerts but possibly ill advised if you have headphones or neighbours. You will not enjoy her work, I do not 'enjoy' them, but experiencing them for me is essential, the sound becomes part of who we are. You can live without it but once it is part of you why would you want to?
You got thrown in the deep end. Worth hearing her more more disgestable material first. When you do, you'll hear a vocalist with a magnificent range, dynamics, styling, control, and a killer pianist. Amazing technique thats only used to tell the story. The emotional side is ever present. Genius.
Her music is about bringing to the public, those who have suffered and been forgotten. Themes such as the aids epidemic, the Armenian holocaust, mental suffering etc...
Check out her cover of The Supremes "My World Is Empty Without You", from the album Malediction and Prayer.
This music has been created to disturb. It has not been made for pleasure. Diamanda is an great artist, misunderstood by the world. Her creations are amazing!
I remember the first time I heard Diamanda Galas was in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers movie. It was an interesting use. The music was captivating and served decently in the movie. But when you listen to the full track outside of the movie, it stands so well on its own that it seems impossible to conceive how it can be used in any movie without removing the core energy of her work. It doesn't hit the same when it's condensed and summurized just for a short scene. NBK features two of Galas' work: I Put A Spell On You and Judgement Day. Both fantastic. And she was hired to be part of the original score for Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, so her work retains her complete energy and focus. It's so mesmerizing to hear her voice.
Diamanda Galas is the neutral evil version of Nina Hagen's chaotic good.
y’all got this man listening to Diamanda Galas now?? 🤣🤣🤣 let him rest!!
Has anyone recommended Fantômas - Delìrivm Còrdia for this theme? Would be good to see you take a dive on that
The artist sounds familiar but I'm not sure about the song. I'll see about checking it out some time.
@@CriticalReactions Fantomas are one of Mike Patton's many side projects. Very experimental and challenging. Delìrivm Còrdia is a single song album (or an album-length song) based on undergoing surgery without anesthetic
I think the first album ("It Threatened the World") is a more interesting deconstruction of film music and the nature of song. Has Buzz Osborne from the Melvins, the drummer from Slayer (I think), Mike Patton, and Trevor (from Mr Bungle) on bass. I could have looked the names up. But, you know. Very satisfying. "Director's Cut" is more accessible (being covers horror movie music).
@@CriticalReactions You'll just crap your pants. Beep-beep.
This is a bad album for an introduction to her work. For the best piece of experimental vocals ever recorded, listen to Wild Women with Steak Knives. (Preferably at full volume and in total darkness.) For a great example of her blues work see the live video of I Put a Spell On You. (The one where she is bathed in red light) Diamanda uses her voice in ways that no other artist ever has. Her strength and control are exceptional.
Enjoyed your commentary about the skill level and the "anyone can do that" criticism that's often leveled against a wide variety of modern/post-modern. It's always been a subject that's interested me in general. While I've always appreciated technical virtuosity, over time I've come to realize that the primary point of music is to write something that moves people in some respect (aesthetically, emotionally, rhythmically, intellectually, etc.), and there is always a "skill" to being able to do that regardless of how much skill it takes to get there (if that makes sense). Part of me realizing that was getting back into pop and realizing that if everyone could write hooks that everyone enjoyed hearing then there would be far more Max Martins out there, and the fact that there's only one speaks to the rarity of that skill. With someone like Diamanda I think part of the "skill" is just the ability to transform sound into an aesthetic/artistic experience that doesn't follow the "rules" of traditional music. I very much don't think just anyone could start off making audio-art that's this disturbing. I think people get caught up on the fact that it's so difficult (if not impossible) to assess creative skill, while technical skill is much more apparent, especially for anyone who's bothered learning to sing or play an instrument.
That's a wonderful way to put it.
It's understandable why people recoil from Galas and get stuck on the "noise" part, but the fact is: she composes this music and can reproduce it. She is a composer, not just a performer. And I don't think you're saying she doesn't, but it is absolute 1000% the case that she composes music in ways that uniquely affect me.
Galas grew up in San Diego.
THIS IS LITERALLY BETTER THAN 5 ALBUM REVIEWS OF ULCERATE!!! I am not done! BUT I WOULD HAVE PAID LIETERALLY 100-200$ for you do an analysis... Would NOT have picked this tracks however...
This woman is bananas. I recommend you a cover of one of her songs made by rotting christ..."orders from the death".. go and listen it, it is very worth and it makes this woman much more "listenable".
With lyrics ☝
This goes so hard in the whip
I watched a video of Diamanda Galás in the early to mid 2000's, and I did enjoy her live version cover of "I Put A Spell On You", but yes, 17 minutes of whatever that was is a bit much.
The live performance of Litanies of Satan on UA-cam is a real treat. I mean it.
[Paused 2 mins into song.] So good watching the suffering and knowing I can hit FFWD but you can't!
I think about that often with less accessible songs. And trust me, I don't blame anyone who skips around my videos 😅
It reminds me of that mentos commercial
This is a poor intro to her catalogue. Try something more accessible like the video for "Double Barrel Prayer, which MTV banned in 1988. Diamanda's been making music this intense and experimental since the early 80s. She's definitely an influence on Ignota.
On the contrary, in some ways, this is the best intro. :) The fact that she was still making music like this at her advanced age (compared to Litanies of Satan, etc) is encouraging.
@@talastra I respect your opinion but I think if the average person starts with the more accessible work they are more likely to continue to explore her catalogue and work their way up to this, instead of starting with this and immediately being putt off by it and assuming all of her work is this avant-garde, for lack of a better term.
@@stevegans3517 @stevegans3517 That's why I put the smirk after "best". I don't know of any "average" person who has ever gone on to dig Galas. Either people fall instantly in love with her work after a couple of notes (like I did with Wild Women with Steak-Knives, of all things) or are permanently put off. Even something "accessible" like "Sporting Life" has Skotoseme on it, or "You Must Be Certain of the Devil" has "Birds of Death." You could play something from the Singer, some blues standard or "I Put a Spell on You" (which she plays for wicked camp) as a kind of way to "sneak" her up on someone. Where would you put her devastating version of "You Don't Know What Love Is" (which is technically my favorite "completely straightforward" performance by her; even the version of "Insane Asylum" that I heard live by her went absolutely bat-shit during the "save me save me save me" section, to absolute spine-chillingly memorability). Something like "O Death" from her San Francisco performance is hardly a place to start. I would just really feel like I was misrepresenting what one is getting into with her by trying to expose her to an "average" person.
I don't mean this in a patronizing way, but I honestly think Diamanda Galas is not for the "average" person at all. It is a particular kind of person who feels represented and at home in her renditions of music and compositions. I am no doubt generalizing from my own experience, but there's a reason that her particular brand of excruciating outcry evoked such a chord among gay men with her Trilogy, or the BDSM intensity of Fever Hospital (and Broken Gargoyles, or Litanies of Satan, or Panoptikon). My experience is that her aesthetic embodiment of something that echoes my own experience can't be "taught" to someone else; like me when I first heard Wild Women With Steak-Knives (or much later, when I heard the first notes of Broken Gargoyles), the music already speaks for itself.
I'd be happy to learn that I'm overstating the case. In college, I proselytized Diamanda Galas. I called a local radio station and requested they play Litanies of Satan to the entire San Gabriel Valley (in the middle of the night, but they did it). I don't know what I accomplished by those efforts, but I know that if I had been my teenage self, lonely and sad in the middle of that night, hearing that music coming over my radio would have been a complete epiphany. I hope it was for someone else too. So, I don't know if there is any "converting" people to Galas. There may only be "exposing" them, letting them know that that thing they always hoped existed (or didn't realize they wanted it to until they hear it) actually exists.
Sweet, sweet Diamanda Galás!
you're in over your head.
Not like I’d listen all the time but I liked this. The overanunciated german part was a little lame tho
Yeah, she usually does Latin and it works, but this... yet another example of people asking Bryan to react to the absolutely wrong track by an artist.
Man, you’re gorgeous and the faces you make throughout the video are so sweet. The song is great but well, sadly it was not enjoyable for you. ❤
We truly do not care about your attractions to the persong giving the review.take it to a hotel honey.
It is mandatory for a person reviewing the performance of poetry to READ the poetry before reviewing the performance of it. Comments like (paraphrazing) "I don't even know if
this is just made -up words or not," which admits that you have not even looked at the text, and therefore cannot imagine what the work is about, the mispronunciation if the poet's name, and the dramaturgy of a hair dresser upon your face---is more nauseating than anything you could possibly say about this work. Please study the formula of music and leave us alone with the Grecian formula you employ. We aren't invested in it.
Man, the broken gargoyles are her weakest work. This work was not worth listening to at all. Diamanda Galas is the greatest musician of our time. But gargoyles are weak (non agressive, non original etc). I would recommend listening to any of her work other than gargoyles. Then you will understand what Diamanda Galas is.
Maybe her weakest but I very much enjoy the album. I've been listening, sorry, experiencing Diamanda Galás since late 90's and I just adore her work. I don't play it too often tho nowadays. Diamanda Galás (almost anything from her) is very scary while tripping with shrooms/acid. I don't recommend it to anyone anymore.
I disagree. It's an excellent drone metal album. Arrangement-wise, it's her richest release yet. Yes, when isolated, distinct instruments aren't as stimulating as her other releases (deformations was really underwhelming), but in conjunction it works for me very well. Heba Kadry's mix is straight up infernal, I had a chance to listen to it on a $3000 system. I was destroyed. As an experienced extreme vocalist, I was ecstatic (maybe you'll understand me better if I told you that my favorite song of hers is Cris d'Aveugle). She's, like, 71, and still delivers. Also, I need to mention the album has resonated with me thematically. I'm Russian. My compatriots are fighting an unjust war where they are the villains. There already are hundreds of thousands traumatized and mutilated men, who, unlike the brave Ukrainians fighting for their independence, will not be treated as heroes. It's going to be worse than what happened to the Vietnam veterans in the US fifty years ago. Abandonment and ostracism from the state and people alike. I'll give it to you that when I first heard those muffled groans I laughed my ass off. When I learned the context and understood what they are supposed to represent (i.e. anguish of a person who does not have a face anymore to speak properly and who is rejected by society because of their look), they became terrifying to me. So it's highly subjective. But I disagree
Also, to be fair, I find her German distracting.
@@Bloodrammer Конечно, все это субъективно, еще бы. Просто мое мнение. Диаманду я люблю. И Деформация (соло-фортепьяно ее альбом) мне - на удивление - очень понравилась (жаль, народ ее не заметил). А Разбитые гаргульи я, к сожалению, слышал в разных вариантах, начиная с 2011 года, кажется (когда она еще называлась Чумной госпиталь). Ранние версии прекрасны. А вот то, что вышло, меня сильно разочаровало абсолютным отказом от катарсичности (субъективное мое мнение, конечно) и концентрацией на медитативности. Я прослушал BG более сотни раз. Работа в любом случае крепкая. За счет сотен шумовых слоев, аранжировки интересной, тематики, да всего чего угодно - кроме собственно музыки. например, ее джаз-госпел-песни... даже не обсуждаются - просто гениальны. А авангардные... В Диких женщинах, например, есть бешеная скорость. В Вена Кава - безумие (прямо натуральное). В Шрай Экс - ярость и ужас. В БГ эмоций как таковых вообще нет. там все очень умеренно, все острые углы сглажены, приглушенно, взывает к спокойному, вдумчивому настрою. Это не Галас. Это не ее фишка. Если я верно разобрался, Гаргулий сделал (как минимум, превратил в результат) Дэниел Ньюман - Диаманда просто присылала ему свои вокальные сэмплы разных лет. А ему далеко до таланта ДГ. В ютубе гуляет отрывок новой репетиции Гаргулий (2023 года), с барабанами, - вот он ооочень крут. И там узнается старая добрая Диаманда. Так что с самой ДГ все отлично, ее талант и не должен затухать (вспомнить хотя Скота Уокера - тот в старости еще лучше стал). Но БГ для меня шаг назад. Ни в коем случае не навязываю. просто мои мысли. Я уж знаю, что народ от БГ восторге (потому что не совсем это Диаманда). Не дай бог пойдет в этом направлении она. ИМХО.
I saw her live 30 years ago. Don't ever consider taking magic mushrooms at her gigs...! I did... Not a very good idea...
love it.
I feeling in one movie horror i like It🫥😨☠️