Diamanda Galás (born August 29, 1955) is a Greek-American soprano sfogato, composer, pianist, organist, performance artist, and painter. She has received international recognition for creating highly original and thought provoking political performance works. Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror". Her works largely concentrate on the topics of AIDS, mental illness, despair, injustice, condemnation, and loss of dignity. She has worked with many avant-garde composers, including Iannis Xenakis, Vinko Globokar and John Zorn, and also collaborated with jazz musician Bobby Bradford, and John Paul Jones, former bassist of Led Zeppelin.
Galás was born and raised in San Diego, California. Her father was a gospel choir director who introduced her to classical music. He exposed her to New Orleans jazz and also the classics of their own Greek heritage. She began playing the piano at the age of 3 under the tutelage of her father. Galas also learned to play the cello and violin, and studied a wide range of musical forms. At 13, Galás began playing gigs in San Diego with her father's band, performing Greek and Arabic music. At 14, she made her orchestral debut with the San Diego Symphony as the soloist for Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. In the 1970s, Galás studied biochemistry at the University of Southern California, specializing in immunology and hematology studies.
Galás made her professional debut in Europe while doing post-graduate studies there in 1979. Galas made her solo performance debut later in the year, at the Festival d'Avignon, in France. Performing lead In Un Jour comme un autre, by composer Vinko Globokar, Galas's performance was based upon Amnesty International's documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. Her first album was The Litanies of Satan, released in 1982. Her second album, Diamanda Galas, was released in 1984. Her work first garnered widespread attention with The Masque of the Red Death, an operatic trilogy which includes The Divine Punishment, Saint of the Pit and You Must Be Certain of the Devil. In it, she details the suffering of people with AIDS. Shortly after the recording of the trilogy's first volume began, her brother, playwright Philip-Dimitri Galás, became sick with AIDS, which goaded Galás to redouble her efforts in her activism. Philip-Dimitri Galás died in 1986, just before the completion of the trilogy.
Galás appears on the 1989 studio album Moss Side Story by former Magazine and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds instrumentalist Barry Adamson. Moss Side Story is a "soundtrack for a non-existent film noir". Galás also sings in a blues style, interpreting a wide range of blues songs with her unique piano and vocal styles. This aspect of her work is perhaps best represented by her 1992 album, The Singer, on which she covered Willie Dixon, Roy Acuff, and Screamin' Jay Hawkins, as well as "Gloomy Sunday".
In 1993, Galás released Judgement Day, a video of her performances, and Vena Cava, a live album, recorded at The Kitchen in 1992. In 1994, Galás collaborated with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, a longtime admirer of the singer. The resulting record, The Sporting Life, was released the same year. She was also featured on the soundtrack for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.
In 1997, Galás contributed vocals to the album Closed on Account of Rabies, a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe which also included Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry and Marianne Faithfull, lending their voices to the tales of the legendary author. Galás' reading of "The Black Cat" was the longest recording on the compilation. In 1998, Galás released Malediction and Prayer, which was recorded live in 1996 and 1997. In 2000, Galás worked with Recoil, contributing her voice to the album Liquid. She's the lead vocalist on the album's first single, "Strange Hours", for which she also wrote the lyrics, and can be heard on "Jezebel" and "Vertigen" as a backing vocalist. In August 2004, Galás released the album Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders from the Dead, an 80-minute memorial to the Armenian, Greek, Assyrian and Hellenic victims of the Turkish genocide. Defixiones refers to the warnings on Greek gravestones against removing the remains of the dead. Will and Testament refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under unnatural circumstances. December 2004, Galás released, La Serpenta Canta a live album including material recorded between May 1999 & November 2002. Galás' vocals from her song "Orders from the Dead" were used on the album Aealo by Greek black metal band Rotting Christ, released in February 2010. In 2008, Galás released her seventh live album, Guilty Guilty Guilty. In 2011, she collaborated with Soviet dissident artist Vladislav Shabalin on Aquarium, a sound installation inspired by the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The event took place at Leonhardskirche in Basel (Switzerland) from June 12 to 19. Aquarium was installed at the church of San Francesco in Udine (Italy), at the festival "Vicino/Lontano", from May 9 to 12, 2013. In 2016, Galás was remixing and remastering her earlier works as well as recording new material.
