Diamanda Galás – “Defixiones, Will and Testament” & “La Serpenta Canta”
Diamanda Galás releases two double albums on 15th December, her first releases since 1998’s Malediction and Prayer. For both of these albums, Galás continues her forensic acts of identifying long buried hurts.
“Defixiones, Will And Testament, investigates the little known Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923, with the singer articulating the anger and sorrow of the dispossessed through the words of exiled poets and writers alongside her own texts.
La Serpenta Canta aka The Serpent Sings, is a song recital recruiting blues, R&B, Motown, southern soul, Country & Western and her own “Baby’s Insane” (from This Sporting Life, her duo album with John Paul Jones) in Gal?s’s ongoing campaign against forgetting. Between the two albums, Galás covers a whole lotta dying ground in a babel of languages and traditions spanning Eastern Orthodox liturgy, American roots and the rembetika songs of Greece and Asia Minor.
Both sets are sung by Galás accompanying herself on piano, tape and a minimum of electronics, though you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are more of her out there coming at you from all sides, as her formidable voice rises to its full power and rattles the walls with its reverberating echoes.”
