Diamanda Galàs “Broken Gargoyles” (Intravenal Sound Operations, 2022)

Have to admit it, being a music lover sometimes makes your wishes coming true nightmares. I have promised myself to dig into chinese free jazz first, in order to complete the series of articles I started at the beginning of this month. Then I grabbed some interesting other material, like a couple of old Pharoah Sanders records – who passed away recently – and a copy of Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth full of material unreleased in 1961.

So the amount of records I wanted to listen carefully, both material I want to write about and other stuff I want to listen in order to make up better my own mind, is increasing. Then finally I put my hands on a copy of the record we’re talking in this review, and I could not be more satisfied than that. But my record collection is increasing dangerously for my own mind. Anyway, Broken Gargoyles is a record to talk about after a closer look, since Diamanda Galàs is coming to her avant garde releases after years and years of piano-and-voice records.

I met Diamanda Galàs first in 2002, when a radio I was listening in that period here in my country transmissed Holokaftoma, a gothic rendition of an old poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini decontextualized and recontextualized during the Armenian genocide. I was simply hooked. Finally I had the opportunity to listen to that album, Defixiones: Will and Testament, and all the other stuff by Mrs Galàs, in their entirety. So, I definitely know what I’m talking about when talking about her art.

When you first approach Galàs art, the thing to take in your own mind is the fact that this form of art is made to divide. You can have, from the very beginning, two different reactions: you can be horrified and annoyed, or you can be positively inspired. In order to be positively inspired, you have to take her vocal effects as a door into a inner world of suffering – the suffering many of us have felt through their terrestrial, which is the only, path, the only at least as far as we can prove – without fear of a derange.

In the rich booklet of this album, it is explained very well: Diamanda Galàs uses her voice as ancient Gorgons or Medusa were using it in order to call to the battle. Her use of voice is an act of warfare. War against religion used as a tool against homosexuals during the AIDS pandemic in the case of Black Mass. War against the governements that planned genocides in the past as in Defixiones. War against governements that left people illed with yellow fever to die alone, or that left soldiers disfigured apart from the rest of society, in the case of Broken Gargoyle.

The texts recited in German by Galàs in this album are from poems by Georg Heim written in 1911. They describe the people suffering from yellow fever and condemned to a slow and inexorable death far from the rest of society in order not to infect it, plus the suffering of people at war. This lyrics, surrounded by the sound design created by Daniel Neumann were intended to be originally performed in the Hannover’s Kappellen Leprosarium (i.e. the Sanctuary of the Lepers of the German city) as an installation, and the Red Mask on the cover of the album this time is a reference to the iron mask the mutilated from WWI had to put on their face to prevent fear in their neighbours or in the public opinion in general.

This way, the album talks about war and pestilence, and is a direct reference to the times we’re living. The Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine. Which side are we on, not simply in the conflict but as an act of affirmation of our own humanity? Are we on the side of knowledge and not on the side of obedience or disobedience as mechanical acts? Are we on the side of peace for the people without supporting this or that governement? These and other questions arise while we listen.

The album is not the best output by Galàs creatively, I suspect because the personalities and the modus operandi of both Galàs and Neumann have to melt better and I hope they will do in the future, but this is for sure the best output by Galàs as far as sound. It is undeniable you’ll be pushed into another dimension, with so much space and time in order to be in touch with the emotions the voice, the words and the sounds will evoke through you.

There are two long compositions on the album, Mutilatus (‘Wounded’ in Latin) and Abiectus (‘Thrown Away’). Both are comprised with lyrics and sound effects (violins, trombones, electronic sounds,, metal sheets, modular synthesizers) in order to create a sound ambient in which experience something massive coming from your inner self.

I experienced such installations many times (I remember once being in a simulation of many rooms by John Duncan in London about ten years ago, and again in a room in Piombino, in my country, few times before, always by Duncan with a total loss of references as far as sound and space) so it is not something completely new but it is something that for sure will not let you insensitive.

After all, it is a matter of love. Love for humanity, love for truth, love for life. Diamanda Galàs is like a modern Antigone that refuses to be blocked inside her tomb by power and accepts the duty of pointing the finger at the light at the end of the dark for everyone who wants to suit this road. Political art if there is one, Diamanda Galàs’ is contemporary as not that many because it refuses to be catalogued, aspiring everytime to be alive despite of the wounds it carries along its road.