Diamanda Galas Announces the release of 1988's 'You Must Be Certain of the Devil' (remastered) + 'De-formation: Second Piano Variation'

DIAMANDA GALÁS  ANNOUNCES TWO NEW RELEASES                                                     YOU MUST BE CERTAIN OF THE DEVIL (REMASTER) + DE-FORMATION: SECOND PIANO VARIATIONS  OUT NOVEMBER 1, 2025 (DAY OF THE DEAD) REVEALS “SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT” FROM YOU MUST BE CERTAIN OF THE DEVIL LISTEN HERE EXCERPT OF DE-FORMATION: SECOND PIANO VARIATIONS ALSO AVAILABLE LISTEN HERE

On November 1, Diamanda Galás will mark Día de Los Muertos with the release of two commanding works: a newly remastered reissue of her 1988 album You Must Be Certain of the Devil, and De-formation: Second Piano Variations, a live recording of her meticulously reworked score, captured during an intimate, candlelit performance at the Pinault Gallery in spring 2025.   Together, the two albums underline her position as one of the most uncompromising and visionary artists of our time. You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988 / 2025 reissue) * To be played at maximum volume * Photo by Chrysantha Schultz  Riding in on an eviscerating vocal alarm call and originally released in 1988 as the final installment of her Masque of the Red Death trilogy,  Diamanda Galás' You Must Be Certain of the Devil is as unflinching now as it was on release in 1988.  It remains a swaggering, furious fuck-you to those who might cast aside the sick and dying in the name of faith and scripture. Often misunderstood as simply “dark” for its subject matter, You Must Be Certain of the Devil in fact shines a light of such total exposure it leaves nowhere to hide, forensically unmasking the fury and pain of real grief and the vast spectrum of emotions rendered by the AIDS epidemic. It is an album that looks you square in the eye, pins you against a wall and makes you look at and feel the horror the virus visited upon a person, the knowledge of certain death in a hostile environment, and the hypocrisy of those who claim to be Samaritans or protectors.  The album twists gospel spirituals into blistering indictments of hypocrisy, using sacred forms to expose the cruelty of churches that damned AIDS sufferers as cursed by God. From the siren-call of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” through “Double-Barrel Prayer,” “Birds of Death,” and the title track, she intones as apostate, reaper, and bar-room brawler, detourning spirituals into prayers to a god invented by despair. Begun in 1984 and haunted by her brother’s death in 1986, the trilogy moved from anguish to political knowledge, shaped by America’s mounting AIDS epidemic - by 1988 over 46,000 dead, antivirals still years away. Dismissed as “the AIDS lady” and joining Act Up protests, Galás made the trilogy a work “begun in 1984 and not completed until the end of the epidemic,” refusing closure: for her there is no escape or reprieve. You Must Be Certain of the Devil spears you in the eternal present of trauma, by an artist who calls herself a “Greek orthodox atheist”: a person certain of the devil with no hope in God. The reissue features remastered audio by Heba Kadry, vinyl lacquers cut by Paul Gold at Salt Mastering, and photography by Emily Andersen.  Today Galás has made the album’s “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” available. The song opens You Must Be Certain of the Devil and on it she comes in high and clear like a siren, as warning and death herald; as call to action and attack cry.  LISTEN/SHARE “SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT” HERE Please see the full biography for You Must Be Certain of the Devil here.  Pre-order You Must Be Certain of the Devil here.  De-formation: Second Piano Variations (Live, Paris 2025) * To be played played at maximum volume * Diamanda Galás live in Paris photo by Raphaël Massart  "In a striking visual performance, Diamanda Galás plays De-formation: Piano Variations. There is a strong sense of dialogue with the deceased and Galás viscerally negotiates the thresholds of embodiment-testing the limits of perception, presence, and recall." — Xenia Benivolski The Wire June 2025 In the Paris springtime of 2025, Diamanda Galás performed the Second Piano Variations of her De-formation, a recomposition of her solo piano work from ”Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital),” a musical setting of Georg Heym’s early 20th Century expressionist poem about patients isolated and stigmatised by yellow fever. In performance, the intimate concert room in the basement of the Pinault Collection became hushed and reverent, soft lighting arranged like church candles casting gothic shadows across the stage for Galás' first live performance since 2018.  The first iteration of the piece, De-formation: Piano Variations was released digitally and on CD in 2020. This new version rewrites the forceful original, prompted by an invitation to perform at a two-day Hommage à Maryanne Amacher at the Pinault Collection. Galás had met Amacher on multiple occasions from the mid 1980s onwards (she once arrived to find Amacher had gathered all the press cuttings of her work and stuck them on the wall, and was the “Black Witch” to Amacher’s “White Witch”), and although they never talked about their shared compositional commitments to sonic intensities and high volumes, they forged a personal connection. To reach the point of performance Galás enacted an archaeology on her 2020 original, taking her prompts and basic notation and "blasting through the original structure I had created, then recreating it for this performance, block by block." From her documentation, Diamanda Galás and pianist Thomas Feng (a specialist in notating difficult piano music) prepared a full score of the 2020 version, from which she began to relearn the piece, recomposing phrasing, silences, strict dynamic changes, and chord progressions, finding moments for pause and power, bringing new grace to the music and sculpting the muscle of the source material. In order to exact the dynamic changes she now heard, Galás worked for months on combining food pedals (the score is notated with pedal markings and will be available in 2026 for pianists). The intentional aggression and sheer force of Galás' playing draws out its power into a cumulus of fury that falls away into near-silence. An 8-legged arachnid drops precipitously on the belly of the instrument, delicately falling towards melody, before this pale grace is stripped of its gentle resonances to be remade in the brutalism of the De-formation, where notes crack as hammer hits metal.  De-formation: Second Piano Variations gifts breath and space into the fetid air of the fever hospitals that are its subject, retaining the intensity of its execution and finding Galás playing hard and true. As above, so below: the 2025 live version takes on the qualities of a studio recording. Through the process of formal scoring, the piece underwent a meticulous revision, which is why this new document is being released today. With the recording quality afforded by the Pinault, it stands as a definitive work, while the 2020 original remains a primarily improvised performance, captured live in the project’s earliest stages. LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT OF DE-FORMATION: SECOND PIANO VARIATIONS (LIVE, PARIS 2025) Please see the full biography for De-formation: Second Piano Variations here. Pre-save De-formation: Second Piano Variations here.  About Diamanda Galás San Diego-born Galás came up playing both classical and jazz music. She not only accompanied her Anatolian Greek father’s gospel choir and joined his New Orleans-style band, but also performed as a piano soloist with the San Diego Symphony at the age of 14. She went on to play with various groups that included heavies of the new-jazz thing, such as a circa-’74 combo in Pomona, California, that included cornetist Bobby Bradford, sax man David Murray bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Stanley Crouch. She made her first public performance in 1979, collaborating on an opera with Vinko Globokar and Amnesty International about the arrest torture, and assasination of a Turkish woman for treason. In 1982 she released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which showcased her early forays into unorthodox vocal expression and multiphonics, and which included an 18-minute performance piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” She has created work dealing with AIDS (including the recently re-mastered The Divine Punishment), genocide and mental disease, as well as compositions for voice and piano set to the works of exiled poets. She also collaborated with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones on the 1994 album The Sporting Life. Her 2022 album Broken Gargoyles employs a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques to deftly probe the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased, leading Pitchfork to declare her “a world apart from other musicians.” Find Diamanda Galás here: www.diamandagalás.com www.diamandagalás.com.mx Facebook ** Instagram ** Twitter/X