Death, like life, has its own music and in the convulsive work of Diamanda Galas, all that is holy and unholy, pure and defiled, beatific and profane is woven together on the loom of daemonic celestial hymnody and incandescent hate. Galas' unearthy instrument - her own spectral multioctave voice - is fueled by febrile seething hatred and brutal compassion. In her work she gives voice to an army of tortured souls, the ones who can no longer sing for themselves: the infirm, the insane, the dead who will not rest in peace.

In the late 1970's, Galas began to create her glossolalic grammar, performing in mental institutions. "I developed an extreme technique to ride the outer limits...", she has said, "... the outer limits of the soul".

By the beginning of the 80's, Diamanda Galas was performing her heretical pieces, "Wild Women With Steak Knives", and, "Song From The Blood Of Those Murdered", at the Theatre Gerad Philippe Saint-Denis in Paris. The themes of her work - claustrophobia, schizophrenia, stigma, extremity, cathartic obsession, psychic violence - were already in place on her first recording "The Litanies Of Satan" in 1982.

In 1984, Galas began work on 'Masque Of The Red Death', an ongoing work dedicated "to people who are HIV-positive, PWArcs and PWAs, who fight to stay alive in a hostile environment that offers disgusting pity and pacifying lies to persuade the diseased man to desist from fighting, and partecipate instead in his own burial..."

Authentically liturgical and truly blasphemous, her work is a convocation of souls and an invocation of energy. AIDS is the whimpering apocalypse, the real horror is when we turn away; there is a war within the very cell-walls of our human family, and each citizen is either a member of the resistance or a collaborator. Like the cross at Golgotha, Diamanda Galas is a conduit between heaven and hell, a place of no middle ground.

Her voice is the sound of that place.

©Tim Holmes 1990