Diamanda Galás

AP

Over the years, your work has been associated with many different genres. People don't quite know where to place you. Why?

DG

I find the music industry’s categorization of music to be absolutely inane. For people to put me in one category as opposed to another category, is absurd. And to be listed under alternative music is just insulting. When I think of alternative music, I think of people who just picked up instruments and decided to play together. I would say the best thing to do is to use my name. Don't ask me what sexuality, what genre, what gender. Use my name and you got the answer. Okay?

I'm not interested in categories. If anything, I've related to different animals during my performances. The closest truth, so to speak, of what I would want to be is the performance persona. It's a distillation, or a series of rituals that has repetitive elements. It's a condensation of elements.

Let's use your video The Way Out [2005] as an analogy. You first make a video of a miniature room, then film it again, over and over again, adding to each space successively. The end result creates what looks like a room within a room repeated infinitely. So, instead of seeing something as two-dimensional, you see it as an endless tunnel. That is what performance should be. It should be that the person comes on stage and you see the person in the space. But then in the performance, they are able to catalyze so much power that they exponentiate that original image and themselves. But, of course, they have to prepare to do that. They have to make it happen with the momentum, the propulsion, and the projection of the sound.

In the performance that I do, your feet are like claws going into the ground and your hands are going into what people may call the heavens. So you're very balanced in a space, and you're projecting to the end of the hallway, not the front of the hallway, but the end. That is what I see you doing in this particular kind of work because you seem to be challenged by a finite room. You see this room, and your mind travels, and you keep focusing. One idea works upon another idea and feeds another idea, and finally you have this exponential room. That is what I think performance should be. It’s only then that a person can have a cleansing of the soul, catharsis.

But the  only way to have that experience is to have technical ability. If you don't have the technical ability to perform, you could imagine it as a vision, but it could never happen. You might not even be able to imagine it. How could you? Performance often involves finding new information in the process of creating. And so what you need to do on stage, in a sense, is an exorcism. You have to have a lot of technique in order to sing what you hear. If you don't have the technique, you will stand there, naked and impotent, in front of the world. And that is death on stage. D-O-S.

AP

I feel like the word exorcism gets thrown around a lot in press release talk.

DG

Oh, I know. It's tiresome. I'm sick of it.

AP

And the word channeling: exorcism as an expulsion and channeling as a bringing in.

DG

Exactly. People need to go to the Greek, to know that the word exo means “out,” as in: out of your purview, out of your territory, out of the soul. I don't know why people use words that are sacred words and throw them around in press releases.

AP

You've already sort of answered the question I was going to ask you, but would you even call yourself a “singer”?

DG

Of course. Unless a person is a master of their craft, a person cannot actually do profound or interesting work. You're standing on everything you know about singing and creating music. If you don't have anything to stand on, you're going to fall. You can have a lot of wild ideas about yourself, but all you'll be able to do is play in front of an audience who's falling asleep.

AP

I saw your video Double-Barrel Prayer (1988) when I was in high school. Then, when I was in college in the mid-1990s, someone took me to PS 122 to see you perform Schrei X. I felt like I got punched in the stomach, and I think it had something to do with, as you say, the propulsion of the sound…

DG

Yes, it was a quadraphonic sound. You were sitting in a cage of voices coming from four directions, so you were essentially being attacked by the sounds. And what that is, it's like Schrei  means "shriek."

Schrei 27 was commissioned by the New American Radio, who asked me to compose a work about bedlam. I chose to research the Willowbrook State School, the infamous asylum in Staten Island which housed children sent from home because of severe physical deformity, mental retardation, and parental dislike of progeny. Those patients were used for experiments with Hepatitis, in which patients were fed or received inoculation of samples from diseased fecal material. They were monitored for disease progression and denied treatment. After many reports of this experimentation, among other maltreatments of the children, Willowbrook was closed.

Of course, this is a timeless paradigm. In Greece there was a place called the Leros Asylum where the “mentally infirm” and political prisoners were sent and the same activities transpired. It's happening in Turkey right now to those immigrants placed far from the city center in asylum.

AP

What comes to mind when I think of you, particularly because you are Greek, is the idea of tragedy.

DG

Yes. And if you think of Greek tragedy, the sound is not amplified. The construction of the theaters gave resonance to the voice. Just as in the theaters of Bayreuth, where Wagner's works were performed, the singers are performing in a space that was constructed for that type of performance.

AP

It's mind-blowing.  Those kinds of theaters are also where the first experiments in what we now call Renaissance perspective were conducted.

DG

I didn't know that at all. Tell me about that.

AP

In my understanding there were a couple of families in Italy who were stage designers. They had the idea to create an illusion of depth—or as you say, a hallway—to mimic the colonnades of ancient Rome. Of course, it's flawed, because the effect is only best from a vantage point at the center of the theater. The most expensive seats were the ones where you would get the full effect of  the receding space. Either way, the idea of this supposed innovative translation of three dimensions into two dimensions, or vice versa, is happening at the same time that it's projecting sound outward. It is said that Piranesi, the etcher who was famous for doing these big etchings of prisons, studied under one of those families.

DG

Oh, that's very interesting. There's something extremely fortuitous about this conversation.

AP

There’s a great Belgian-born French writer named Marguerite Yourcenar who wrote an essay called “The Dark Brain of Piranesi.” When he was active, Rome was in ruin. He would camp out in the ruins and draw over and over again trying to catch the effects of light, and because he was etching, it was very technical, but he was also trying to recapture this thing, something that happens through repetition.

DG

I really like what you're saying, Go on, go on.

AP

Well, my first understanding of being an artist was doing little performances. I was really inspired by the idea of artists putting their bodies on the line for the work, of learning what’s the least amount you can do to affect the biggest change in the room. That's been the central question of my whole art-making life. But it's also something that excites me when I see it in other people. It seems to somehow have fled the culture. It as if everything now needs to be understood or accessible to the widest possible audience. When I first saw your Double-Barrel Prayer video from 1988, I didn't know what it was. It was scary. It was challenging. It was a provocation.

DG

I have to give Sleazy [Peter Martin Christopherson] from Coil and Throbbing Gristle credit. He directed the video.

AP

I didn't know that. That's amazing.

DG

I loved Peter. Before we made the video he said, “I feel terrible doing this video with you. I mean, you're such a great concert artist.” And I said, “Oh, come on, let's just do it. Come on”  He took me out to the subway station in London and said to me, “All right then.” And I said, “What do you mean ‘All right then’?” He says, “Well, start singing. You know, start screaming or whatever it is you do.” We were laughing the whole time because, of course, you can do that in the subway station and nobody stops walking.

AP

I wondered if you could talk about your work in terms of improvisation.

DG

In many cases I start out with the feeling of the thing I'm trying to incarnate. The beginning of that is improvisation. I may start out just solo voice in a very small room. The best rooms to do improvisations are rooms with toilets. Toilets are powerful chambers with very tight reverberation. You can get the brightness of the sound, and it gets slapped back. It's like Elvis Presley's slapback that was used in his songs. There's a certain sound to it that's powerful. The tiny sanctuaries that you would find in Italy are chambers designed for ancient performance. There's a certain power when you're there.

So, you start there and you build. You may stop and think this is not working. So, you start again. Build. Take a break. And then you're onto something. And you may be onto something that you don't want to forget, and so you record it, or you notate it, or whatever. Or you just say, “The more I do this, that which needs to be remembered will be remembered, while that which should be forgotten will be forgotten.”

AP

Do you think there's a connection between the process of improvisation and tragedy? I started wondering if improvisation itself was maybe born out of a feeling of loss or desperation?

DG

Hell, yes, to the second question. [Laughs.] People say, “Why is she doing these covers?” And I say, “I never do covers.” No, I take something and then I work on it. And of course, it has within it the melody of the song as it was composed. But then you take that as far as you can into what you hear. I mean, you don't take it far because you want to be adventurous. You take it as far as you can hear it. Ornette Coleman used to be asked, "How do you become an avant-garde artist?" He would say, something like, “What are you even talking about? You evolve to a point. Your music evolves. What you hear evolves and eventually you are on the frontlines,” which is the meaning of the avant-garde, namely: to be a soldier on the frontlines. Essentially that means that what you sing nobody can really hear or understand,, but you do it because you hear it yourself.

And then you go forward. And at some point, you're all alone in the frontline. And that's the way it is. It's not pleasant. For example, with my last record [Diamanda Galás In Concert]—few people have been interested in it. Very few people have written about it. I knew that would happen because there's two Greek songs in it, and Greek culture is something people look at as an ancient form. They don't understand the idea that Greek people are still alive in Greece, they're creating new work every day. We Greeks, you know, we listen to that and just laugh. I’ve been described as an “exotic” singer. It means foreign, strange, unfamiliar. And I'm like, “You know what? I was born in America just like you, so don't be handing me that shit, alright?”

AP

I am curious about the Amanes. I once heard an interview in which you described them as improvisations on the word Aman. Can you speak a little bit on the history of this form? My understanding is that it is a Greek folk tradition, do I have that right?

I also had to share an anecdote. Years ago, while teaching a class on the “Unspeakable” I played one of your songs in which you repeat the word Aman. One of my students became very emotional when she heard what she thought was the Korean word Omma which is what children call out to their mothers…

DG

She's so right. Because mana means mother in Greek and I believe the Amanes are the last cry of the soldier on the battlefield.

AP

Have you ever read Anne Carson's translation of Electra?

DG

No.

AP

It's incredible. You have to read it. She wrote an introduction about the process of translating ancient Greek. She categorizes 14 different kinds of mourning wails. She talks about the fact that when trying to sing a string of vowels, your mouth contorts so that the word is not only creating a sound, but also a gesture. Hopefully this isn't a spoiler alert, but when the revenge gets enacted in the Elektra, Carson translates that Ares entered the house like "a horizontal scream.”

DG

Those words are extraordinary to hear. Also, these are the kinds of conversations that benefit artists.

One thing I would say about translation is I have to retranslate the poems that I use for the purposes of being able to truly understand each word that I’m singing. I find that even the best translators will miss something that you need to know because the word that they use is the closest to what they know about life and to their understanding of what the original word is. But, when you do your own translation you may use a completely different word. Each word has extreme, discrete power, and that is why it is mandatory to translate poems yourself if you're going to use them. That way, you can say, “Okay, that's a noun, but I'm going to turn it into a verb.” And that way you can actually propel the poem in a way that couldn't be done just reading it. It has to be different from the poet's rendition. It has to be different, because the recording of the poet reading the poem is already perfect, unless he's an extremely bad reader. If you’ve read Paul Celan, for example, you can almost hear him speak it, it's so perfect. So, if you want to transform it into what one calls music, diligence is required. Diligence or beware. The Gods will find you.

I always feel lucky when I discover a new poet, because it's as if this poet is reaching from the grave to take my hand and say, “Sister, all will be right on that day.” And then I can breathe, I can be more relaxed, because I'm sharing my life with this person, and this person is sharing their life with me. This is how it's possible to exist in moments of great consternation. I mean, the artist creates because they must, right?

AP

That's so beautiful. I have a good friend who used to translate Russian poetry into English. She would talk about this as if it were a love affair—your mind merging with someone else's mind.

The last thing I wanted to ask, or say, was that I think as an artist I sometimes get paralyzed by just how bad things are. Do you ever feel paralyzed?

DG

Often. And it's a terrible, terrible feeling. But then something happens that I become involved in, and I feel like I can breathe again. But there's something about that paralysis that is almost as if you can't breathe anymore, you feel like you could drop dead, and it's an extremely terrifying experience.

AP

Yes, especially artists who think a little bit too much...

DG

Oh, no kidding.

AP

Well, here at the end, I want to return to your image of reaching out a hand to one of these poets. That's exactly how I have felt throughout this conversation; like I got to shake your hand or something in this really beautiful way.