DIAMANDA GALÁS - SAINT OF THE PIT
SINGER, COMPOSER, PIANIST AND ACTIVIST’S REMASTERED EDITION OF HER FIFTH STUDIO ALBUM, THE SECOND IN THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH TRILOGY - OUT 13 SEP 2024
LISTEN TO THE NEWLY REMASTERED TRACK, L'HÉAUTONTIMOROUMÉNOS
“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 the newly remastered version of ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ (Self-Tormentor) 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-AID, 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
Lyric translations available HERE
Listen to Diamanda Galás and Zakia Sewell in conversation for the NTS series, Don’t Assume HERE
Saint of the Pit tracklisting
La Trezième Revient (The Thirteenth Returns)
Λύτρωσέ με (Deliver Me)
Artémis
Saint of the Pit Track by track
‘La Trezième Revient’ (The Thirteenth Returns)
The introduction to the album and a keyboard instrumental of cascading, vertiginous horror, as Galás’ chromatics seem to offer the listener a ladder upwards, even as a dark undertow, like sonic ten-ton weights, pulls them ever-downwards. The struggle to retain a balance is real. Galás first improvised the track in producer Paul Kendall’s Worldwide Studio in London – “He introduced me to some very interesting synthesizers in his studio, and he deserves s great deal of credit for encouraging me in that direction,” she says – before recording overdubs at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin. The title comes from the opening phrase of Gérard de Nerval’s 1854 sonnet, “Artémis”, which she sets to music later the album. “De Nerval was considered a madman,” Galás says. “He would promenade around Paris’ Palais-Royal with a lobster on a blue ribbon.” The lobster, which the poet had saved from the cooking pot, was not so much an image of whimsy, as that of precarity and death. “In his writing, he always had this image of death in front of him and he recognised its imminence,” she continues. “His writing seems to conjure up a ladder between the underworld and the world of the living, almost as if he is courting that which he knows is only a matter of time away.” The thirteenth, incidentally, is death prefigured.
‘Λύτρωσέ με’ (Deliver Me)
Sung in Greek, the text of ‘Deliver Me’ comes from King James Psalm 59: “Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend me from them that rise up against me.” The psalmist’s appeal to divine might has a special resonance in the context of this album’s thematics, while the use of a Biblical text is, for Galás, a cry for historic justice. “While I’m an atheist, I still am part of Greek Orthodoxy… being part of Greek Orthodoxy confirms my spiritual homeland.”
The singing on Saint of the Pit employs Asia Minor Greek’s use of the amanés/amanéthes. “It’s the singing from Asia Minor that the Greeks did, that Assyrian-speakers did, that Turkish and Arab-speakers did,” Galás says. “Many of our ethnic groups at that time were singing together and playing together before the state” – this is a reference to Mustafa Kemal and The Young Turks inciting of The Holokaftoma – the Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greek genocides that it prosecuted with extreme savagery between 1914-23. In Galás’ hands, ‘Deliver Me’ is, save for an electronic throbbing that continues throughout, a stark work that showcases the wide octave range characteristic of the soprano sfogato. Recorded at Hansa and using a sound design created by analogue and digital synthesizers with barely any multitracking, Galás’ voice – whether singing or whispering – is sinuous and incantational, rising like a coiled snake in the darkness. The percussive element we hear in the background is Einstürzende Neubauten’s FM Einheit thrashing, dragging chains, and drumming. “FM Einheit is a supreme musician who performs and composes with an untold amount of found and traditional instruments,” she says.
‘L’Héautontimorouménos’ (Self-Tormentor)
Charles Baudelaire’s poem from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, is centrepiece of Galás’ album of the same title (The Litanies of Satan, 1982), and it’s to Les Fleurs du Mal that she returns for ‘L’Héautontimorouménos’. While the poem is more earthbound than the other texts that Galás uses on this album, its sadomasochistic evocation of the outsider as a carnal creature is very much true to the preoccupation of les poètes maudits – the accursed poets – of whose number Baudelaire counted. “Once again, the poem has that incantational quality that I am drawn to,” Galás says. “It’s sung, in the Asia Minor style and its dirge-like qualities are evident.” With a breathy, brooding electronic undertow in its scoring, this is a piece that sees Galás at her operatic best: the voice unchained as its sings a wordless melisma, while the poem itself is simultaneously whispered, scratched and spit out as if in a shadow reflection of itself.
‘Artémis’
Gérard de Nerval’s ‘Artémis’ supplies two pieces to this album: its title and this song, one that is central to her repertoire. “I have performed this piece a great deal,” she says. “It's astonishing that so many people like it – because it is in French, you know. It's a funeral song of a person who's looking at his own death, and he’s both terrified of it and courting it at the same time because he wants it not to be a terrible death although it is inevitable. The man about to be executed gives as much as he can afford to the man of the guillotine – that he deliver a precise cut.”
Galás gives ‘Artémis’ a straight delivery: piano and voice, an art song turned black, as her vocals slide between arching phrases and snarls. She sees ‘Artémis’ very much as a pair with the last track, ‘Cris D’Aveugle’ (Blind Man’s Cry), in which both protagonists are facing their death. “Thinking about death is part of a Greek tradition. I think that we consider it superstitious if we do not mention death and do not pay our respects to death every day, because it will visit us sooner rather than later… It's a big part of our culture. It's definitely a death culture.”
‘Cris D'Aveugle (1873) (Blind Man's Cry)’
“‘The Blind Man’s Cry’ is very much the cornerstone of this album,” Galás asserts. She’s right of course, but it’s more than that: it’s also an example of the artist at her most magisterial, marshalling her power in righteous and white-hot fury. The 1873 poem by Tristan Corbière (his name, incidentally, is a homophone for “triste en corps-bière” – “sorrow in a body-coffin”) gets a near-symphonic treatment from Galás, who starts with a high, wordless shrilling before an anchoring piano line and metronomic drums – FM Einheit again – begin to mark the time, literally and metaphorically. Her voice soars, ricocheting and resounding. Although it was recorded in Berlin’s Tritonus Studio, it sounds as if it’s sung in a cathedral. Of all the poems contained in the book given to her by her brother, this is the one that horrified her. The lyric describes the agony of someone (not Christ) being crucified, but without hope of redemption. “Corbière is saying, ‘I wish I were capable of inventing a god through my despair, but I cannot.’ His spine is breaking, one vertebra at a time, and he begs someone to kill him. “Kill me, please, kill me.’ He’s calling the crows, ‘the undertaker birds, the ‘Doves of Death’ to end his suffering.” Corbière who was deaf, was no stranger to suffering. Rheumatic conditions bent his body and he died at 29 of tuberculosis. Galás draws a direct line between the sufferer and exclusion. Here, the ‘misshapen’ outsider Corbière stands in for people with HIV-AIDS, denounced as unclean and thus without access to sanctuary. Galás mentions the ancient Greek tradition of lament-singing, the moirolói, a female-only tradition that the musicologist Gail Holst-Warhaft describes in her book Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Tradition (1995) as “the art of women”, and which, because it focuses on loss rather than praise, has a dangerous potential. Because of their proximity to death, these lament singers also occupy an outsider status, Galás explains, but they’re necessary. “Their singing ensures that there is never silence, which would represent a difficulty for a soul travelling to the underworld.” On ‘Blind Man’s Cry’, Galás highlights the importance of such intercessional rituals. It is a way to underline that we, the listeners, must mark the passing of the dead. It follows that, if we value life in this way, so must we share a moral imperative to speak out against violence, against murder, injustice, and genocide.
Louise Gray
The Wire
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