A fiercely confrontational avant-garde performer noted for her wailing, four-octave vocal range,
Diamanda Galás was born and raised in San Diego, CA.
Galás was the daughter of Greek Orthodox parents and her singing was roundly discouraged, although her prowess as a classical pianist was nurtured; ultimately, her strict upbringing resulted in a reckless, drug-fueled youth prior to her entrance into the University of California's music and visual arts program.
Galás made her performing debut in 1979 at France's Festival d'Avignon, which led to an invitation to assume the lead role in composer
Vinko Globokar's politically charged opera Un Jour Comme un Autre. In subsequent solo performance art pieces like Wild Women with Steak Knives and Tragouthia Apo to Aima Exon Fonos,
Galás further honed her unique, shattering vocal style, inspired by the Schrei ("shriek") opera of German expressionism (a form employing a system of four microphones and a series of echoes and delays).
Galás made her recorded debut in 1982 with
The Litanies of Satan, a provocative work comprised of a vocal adaptation of a poem by
Charles Baudelaire. After the prison-themed performance piece Panoptikon (documented on a self-titled 1984 release), she began developing a trilogy of albums known collectively as
The Masque of the Red Death; released independently between 1986 and 1988 as
The Divine Punishment,
Saint of the Pit, and
You Must Be Certain of the Devil, the three records catalogued
Galás' litany against the AIDS epidemic, which claimed her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, in 1986. With 1990's
The Singer, she made her first subtle advances into the realm of pop music; reprising some of the same gospel material that snaked through
The Masque of the Red Death, the record also featured her covers of
Willie Dixon's "Insane Asylum" and
Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You." The 1993 a cappella effort
Vena Cava preceded 1994's
The Sporting Life, a collaboration with former
Led Zeppelin bassist
John Paul Jones. A record of
Galás' 1994 radio work
Schrei X followed in 1996, in tandem with her first book collection, The Shit of God. She returned two years later with
Malediction & Prayer. The solo live recordings
Serpenta Canta and
Defixiones: Will and Testament, Orders from the Dead were released in November 2003, followed by another live music set,
Guilty Guilty Guilty, in 2008.
–
Jason Ankeny, Rovi