Customer Reviews

Litanies of Satan

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If you are not familiar with Diamanda Galas' extraordinary vocal capabiities, this is the disc to introduce you to them. These 2 recordings, LITANIES OF SATAN and WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES, were recorded in the early 80s in London. The background story behind the production of WWWSK is particularly interesting. Seek out a copy of Forced Exposure magazine from 1989. Diamanda's interview will give you so much insight into her creative processes. She talks about literally being awake for more than 24 hours, fueled by caffeine among other things, and laboring through the recording process for WWWSK with producer Dave Hunt in a freezing London basement. Sound boards crashing, microphones blowing out, and numerous re-takes are all in a normal day's "work" for Miss Galas. Best of all her sense of humor really comes through in her interviews.

WWWSK is an aural "exploration" for lack of a better word, of a woman in the throes of schizophrenia. Mixing glossolalia, reverb, spatial delay, signal processing, and multi-tracking, Galas brings out the many complex layers of this woman's psyche. There is much terror and humor in her "words", sometimes the two emotions colliding in the same sound-space. You will understand what I mean only upon hearing it numerous times. Each listening brings a new experience to the listener.

What is so amazing to me is that I have been playing this for more than 11 years, and it still sounds and is BEYOND the avant-garde in music. To call her art "music" is in many ways a disservice. What Galas does is so much more. Her compositions take the listener into places of the human experience most of us will never know. It is her unique ability to communicate psychological, emotional and psychical states of consciousness with such force and clarity that keeps her from being merely 'categorized' for the comfort of art and music critics alike.

She will continue to drag the art, music and social critics kicking and screaming into the future that is her particular style of Expressionism.

"O, Satan, prends pitie de ma longue misere..."

This early work by Galas features two pieces, the magisterial "Litanies of Satan" that uses a text by Baudelaire for lyrics, and the hysterical (in both senses of the word) "Wild Women with Steak-Knives", aptly subtitled "The Homicidal Love-Song for Solo Scream". The two pieces taken together are an excellent example of Galas' vocal and compositional ability, though they do not showcase the piano-voice or rock-oriented compositions of some of her other work. "Litanies" is literally a tour of the Inferno, with all of the grandeur of Dante's national epic; "Wild Women" is nothing but bare, amplified voice in an empty room, howling -- disjointed, fragmented, schizophrenic and an incredibly impressive display of what Galas can do with her voice.

Well, this is the weirdest record I own! Diamanda Galas has a voice that cannot be described. On this album there are two pieces, Wild Women With Steak-Knives and The Litanies of Satan. WWWSk features Galas screaming over and over like a madman. Her voices carries higher then I have ever heard! The Litanies Of Satan is a version of a poem by a French autor. This is a really creepy album, but if you like challenging art/music, this is the album for you!

i love diamanda, have seen her perform live three times, & have met her in person. i can never get enough. a uniquely disturbing record, (in the best way, of course), it sends shivers down my spine.

Being able to say that I "love" this album is the result of nearly two decades of processing. The "Litanies of Satan" was my first exposure to Diamanda Galas, when a friend of mine played the album in an "Experimental Music" class he designed, at the university music school we both attended. As an avant-garde and experimental composer myself, as well as a performer of everything from jazz to punk to performance art, I had had a pretty broad experience of the weird, and thought myself pretty jaded at the time.

None of it prepared me for Diamanda Galas.

This was the first album I had heard -- possibly ever -- that made me actually uncomfortable to just sit and listen to it. It is one of a very few that still send chills down my spine to this day.

Ms. Galas is a musician, yes, but what happens on this album is far more than mere music. Performance art, prehaps, but couched as an aural assault of raw emotion of a kind that sane, well-adjusted people rarely if ever give vent to, and certainly never in public. Galas' vocal talents and understanding of the technicalities of amplification and recording are formidable. A classically trained and disciplined vocalist, she has also mastered a huge range of contemporary vocal techniques, from reinforced-harmonics and vocal "multiphonics" to yodeling and rap-style patter. At times it is difficult to believe that all the sounds you are hearing are being made by a single person, it real time, using only her voice (there is some taped backing on one of the two cuts, but it's kept pretty basic). Yet she has performed both of these pieces in front of live audiences.

All of which means that she has a supurb instrument to work with, through which to express the -extreme- emotional content of her pieces. She conveys with stark intensity a variety and range of feelings that most people, even those of us who may have touched on some of them, prefer to keep tightly bottled up inside. How she can open herself up in performance to this extent without slipping over that fine line into actual insanity is a mystery to me. Maybe she does slip over in concert, although in interviews she seems stable and normal enough...

On first hearing the second cut on the original vinyl recording, "Wild Women With Steak Knives", I remember thinking 'Holy $#|+! If her -recorded- work is this disturbing, her live performances must be overwhelming!

They are.

You may not like what you hear on this album, but I seriously doubt anyone can listen to it all the way through and remain unmoved by it: some of the passages would make a zombie shiver. But even if you ultimately end up using this disk for target practice, you owe it to yourself to experience at least one time this extraordinarily skillful, soulful, and creative artist.

And if you -do- get hooked, as I was hooked, you will be fascinated to discover, on her other albums, that Diamanda Galas can also sing the blues . . . which, once again, she does in a manner not /quite/ like anyone else. ;-)

I am a weirdo and I just love this CD. I wouldn't exactly recommend this as the best first choice for a new listener of Diamanda Galas (Masque of Red Death is the best for beginners) Like many of her albums, it contains minimal or no actual "singing", just insane chanting, the screaming of a person who is possessed by demons, and spooky sound effects. But I love this CD, it is hilarious. It doesn't scare me, (it would have if I was younger though) but nothing has scared me for a long time, I'm far too jaded, but it scares my parents very nicely, it would surely be nice as the background music to a haunted house, to creep your buddies out at parties, or to keep the Jehovah's Witnesses from coming to your door.

This is possibly one of the most difficult recordings to listen to. I lent my copy to a friend who told me it took him three days just to get through both tracks. "Wild Women With Steak Knives" is a terrifying solo vocal work, exhibiting Diamanda's three and a half octave range. She literally sounds like a woman possessed by some unholy demon. The second track, "The Litanies of Satan", goes even further with echo effects and synthesizer work that makes it sound as if it was recorded in the utter depths of Hell. It is Charles Baudelaire's poem/hymn/prayer to Satan, in the original French, recited as if by a rabid zealot. Think of this as a horror movie for the ears, only you can't blink or turn away.

Few albums transcend their material. You are always consciously aware that you're listening to the past--to some recording of a stale event. This generally deadens the impact of the music compared to a live performance. Litanies of Satan is different in that regard. If you can accept Diamanda's performance style on this album which is almost, but not entirely, cacophony, then close your eyes and take a ride. It's as if she's singing from the base of her spine all the way through the top of her head and the music communicates that experience.

The titular song builds and descends several times as Diamanda interprets Baudelaire's poem as an invocation. Though the poem could be read timidly as a long plea for respite, she unwaveringly shrieks the pain that brings someone to side with her tormentor. Eventually she identifies with her subject and speaks with his voice. At the climax, the relationship resembles schizophrenia until a single voice emerges from the din bringing the event to a (somewhat unsatisfactory) close.

"Wild Women with Steaknives" lacks the power of "Litanies of Satan," but being less ridden with effects her voice and style are free to speak for themselves. In this regard her later work shows growth as the song is interesting more on a technical level than an emotional one. Schrei X is an evolution of the "Wild Women" sound that succeeds emotionally although being more vocally minimalist.

Of all of Diamanda's albums, I have difficulty determining the message behind this one. Rarely (if ever) does she sing without intent, but the two songs on this disc fail to cohere like her later work. The album The Singer has a similar problem. In both cases, it seems more like she's trying out a singing style to see how it fits. Once comfortable, she begins to use the style as a medium as opposed to an exercise. Plague Mass serves as a better introduction to this side of her music, while Malediction & Prayer better covers the more melodic aspect.