On November 11, 2003, Diamanda Galás released two albums, ending a five-year recording hiatus with a bang. Both are solo live recordings and present two very different sides of her. La Serpenta Canta showcased her song-based material (mostly blues). Defixiones: Will and Testament, Orders From the Dead is more typical of her operatic works of the 1990s.
Composed in 2020 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first incarnation of the work was played as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Leper's Sanctuary) in Hanover, Germany. This sanctuary was built around 1250 and served as a quarantine for those who suffered from the plague and leprosy in the Middle Ages.
The young violinist Diamanda La Berge Dramm ventures to bridge music of the baroque with modern. In her GENUIN debut album, the Dutch artist interweaves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and John Cage. In her collaboration with singers Michelle O'Rourke and Katinka Fogh Vindelev, the boundaries between singing and instrumental playing dissolve, and the production of sound itself becomes a highly exciting parameter. From the layers of depth in Bach's great Chaconne to the cobweb-thin tapestry of John Cage's genre-bending compositions, the violinist takes us on an exciting sonic journey that reveals her to be an artist who is as mature as she is inquisitive.
Three and a half decades after Diamanda Galás’ first recordings as a solo vocalist, she still talks about her singing as an act of violence. Musing to Rolling Stone about her performance of the folk standard “O Death”—versions of which are included on both of her new records, All the Way and At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem—she describes it as a cycle of destruction. “You keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it and desiccating it and putting it back together until it becomes a new life form,” she says. “And then you rip it apart again.” It’s an accurate description of that solo piano piece—which traffics in the California-born composer’s longheld affinities for bebop, blues, and stately morbidity—but it’s also a handy summation of the harrowing work Galás has made for her whole career.