Diamanda Galas - Broken Gargoyles - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

G. Bizet - Pearl Fishers (Highlights) [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/30/2008

Diamanda Galás In Concert is not simply a live album. With nothing but a piano and the full expressive range of her extraordinary voice, Diamanda Galás strips away the comforting patina of time, tradition and stylistic convention to expose and express the raw human emotion that is the living heart of a song. It explores an eclectic range of material; rembetika, soul, ranchera, country and free jazz, and her passionate eviscerations reveal their hidden kinship. Four of the songs-O Prósfigas, La Llorona, Let My People Go, and Ánoixe Pétra are for and by the forsaken, outcast and debased; the other three are hardboiled love songs. 'In Concert' features select recordings taken from performances at Thalia Hall in Chicago, and Neptune Theatre in Seattle from 2017. The songs are drawn from disparate sources. Diamanda is of Maniati Greek and Middle-Eastern Greek/Egyptian origin, but she was born near the border of San Diego and Mexico, hearing the corridos, ranchera, and ballades daily, so the album draws deeply from both sources. Crucial to her performance are song types with ancient roots, primarily the amané, a vocal improvisation of Anatolian Greek origin. Amanés can be defined as a last prayer to the mother by a dying soldier, with the word amané itself possibly deriving from the Greek word mana, mother. Echoes of amanés can be heard in the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, but in origin it is a primal lament, expressing grief and loss. The origins of the amané are archaic; it's spirit is urgent and timeless. CD is packaged with an 18x24 inch poster and eight page booklet with lyrics and translations.

Saint of the Pit, Diamanda Galás' fifth studio album and the second in her trilogy, The Masque of the Red Death, is an urgent record. It's theme is essentially passion, in the sense of suffering, although here, and unlike the passion of Christianity, there is little to offer solace. Re-released on Galás' own Intravenal Sound Operations (ISO) after it's initial on Mute in November 1986, Saint of the Pit is a masterpiece of witnessing, forged from grief and fury during the HIV-AIDS epidemic. While it's precursor, The Divine Punishment (originally via Mute, now ISO), released only five months before in June 1986, invoked Old Testament laws around the clean and the unclean, as a way of raging against the inhumanity of systemic neglect of people with HIV-AIDS, this album is focussed on a more interior response. Saint of the Pit was an urgent record and now, nearly 40 years on, it remains an urgent record because, ultimately, it's major theme is not limited to HIV-AIDs, but profound suffering. It is this music's capacity to bear witness, to wrap a humanity around another's pain, to hear that anguish, that gives Saint of the Pit it's continuing relevance. Remastered by Heba Kadry in 2024. The vinyl was pressed at RTI, packaged in a printed euro inner sleeve with lyrics/translations and 18 x 24 inch poster. The CD includes an 8 page booklet with lyrics and translations and 14x19 inch poster.