DIAMANDA GALÁS
SINGER, COMPOSER, PIANIST AND ACTIVIST SHARES DETAILS OF THE REMASTERED EDITION OF HER FIFTH STUDIO ALBUM, THE SECOND IN THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH TRILOGY
SAINT OF THE PIT, OUT 13 SEPTEMBER 2024
VIA INTRAVENAL SOUND OPERATIONS
LISTEN TO ‘CRIS D’AVEUGLE (1873) (BLIND MAN’S CRY)’
“Harry Houdini once commented, ‘No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a
good set of teeth.’ Galás has iron dentures; her music is a death-defying stunt, practiced and then ritualized.” - Winston Cook-Wilson (2016), The Politics of the Operatic Voice
“Galas’ ability to embody and demonstrate power and affect in voice, music and sound makes her one of the most important artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, jolting political consciousness through an affective sonic materiality and text.”
D Ferrett (2020), Dark Sound - Bloomsbury Press
“I’ve never heard anybody scream like this. It’s as if every fury and demon in her psyche have materialised all at once.” – Richard North (6 Dec 1986) (NME)
“Galas’ bitterest metaphoric identification with the dead “denied by mercy” lies in her setting of Tristan Corbière’s “Cris D’Aveugle” (1873) (Blind Man’s Cry), which concludes Saint of the Pit. Here the singer summons her densest array of vocal effects, ranging from a morbid ostinato to an extremely high-pitched keening within which one hears screeching birds and wailing sirens gradually take aural form. The poem recounts a dying man’s harrowing, lonely, and excruciatingly slow expiration, a death both Christ-like and as endless as Prometheus’. - Richard Gehr, 'Mourning in America.' ART FORUM
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. Its theme is essentially passion, in the sense of suffering, although here, and unlike the passion of Christianity, there is little to offer solace.
Remastered by Heba Kadry and re-released on Galás’ own Intravenal Sound Operations (ISO) on 13 September 2024 (after its initial release 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 its precursor, The Divine Punishment (originally 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.
Listen to ‘Cris D'Aveugle (1873) (Blind Man's Cry)’ HERE
and an excerpt of the track HERE
“I remember a conversation with [Mute’s owner] Daniel Miller in 1986,” says Galás. “He thought that releasing Saint of the Pit was too soon after The Divine Punishment. I replied, ‘I have to do it. I have to put it out right now.’ It was a kind of a spiritual mandate for me.”
Galás describes 1986 simply: it was, she says “a terrible year”. Galás had been addressing HIV-AIDs in her work since 1984, but she had not conceived of a trilogy of albums. “They came one by one,” she says, “each one of them different.” In the middle of 1986, her brother, the poet and playwright, Philip-Dimitri Galás, already sick, handed her book of French poems by the 19th-century authors often grouped under the epithet, les poetès maudits – the accursed poets. He was interested in how she worked with texts. “‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look through these’ Well, I did. I’d worked with Baudelaire before [in The Litanies of Satan, 1982], but I cannot tell you what a shock it was to look through his book. Within days I had found the three poems that are on this record. Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and Tristan Corbière. Their impact on me was immediate. However, it was Corbière’s ‘Blind Man’s Cry’ that terrified me. That poem describes the torture of slow death, with no hope of solace, and this was something that I could see happening to so many around me.”
Philip-Dimitri died in August 1986, aged 32. Galás returned to Berlin to begin rehearsing and recording the songs from the three poems in the volume that he had given her. Saint of the Pit is dedicated to Philip-Dimitri’s memory. The ferocious speed with which this album was written and recorded was very much borne out of this mandate to memorialise and mourn her brother. Galás praises producer Gareth Jones for guiding and comforting her during this work. “He understood the difficulty and the katharsis of the work for me. He was and is an empath of the highest order, aside from being a creative producer.”
As always with Galás’ singular approach to the interpretation of a text, there is a weight of history, large or individual, but always human-shaped. The genocides perpetrated by Turks in Asia Minor as the Ottoman Empire collapsed linger in the background, just as the slaughter of other horrors flicker uncertainly. It’s this approach to language, a deep mining of meaning, that makes Galás interpretations so vital. “With these dead poets, I feel that someone has reached up and taken my hand – and gives me more time to live. I make a human attempt to incarnate the poem, and it buys me more time on this planet – a survival momentum until the thirteenth hour, so to speak.”
Galás adds: “So many lines of musical phrasing are now audible. Heba Kadry is an excellent mastering engineer. Her work exposed lines of sound that I could not clearly hear before. It was a nice surprise for a composer.”
Saint of the Pit was an urgent record in November 1986, the date of its first release, and now, nearly 40 years on, it remains urgent because, ultimately, its major theme is not limited to HIV-AIDs, but to the profound suffering of the sick who are stigmatized by their disease. 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 its continuing relevance.
Diamanda Galás In Concert was released in June this year, and features select recordings taken from 2017 performances at Thalia Hall in Chicago, and Neptune Theatre in Seattle. Listen to what Uncut describes as “a mesmerising path through the many passions of the singer, composer, and pianist; her remarkable vocal range, ability to sing in multiple languages, facility with the piano, lifelong interests in the outcasts of society, and syncretic choice of material” HERE
Saint of the Pit is released on 13 September 2024 via the artist’s own imprint, Intravenal Sound Operations - Pre-order HERE
Saint of the Pit tracklisting
La Trezième Revient (The Thirteenth Returns)
Λύτρωσέ με (Deliver Me)
L’Héautontimorouménos (Self-Tormentor)
Artémis
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