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viewing 1 To 11 of 11 items
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CD
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ISO 008CD
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Includes eight-page booklet with lyrics and translations and 14x19 inch poster."Saint of the Pit, Diamanda Galás' fifth studio album and the second in her trilogy, The Masque of the Red Death, is an urgent record. Its theme is essentially passion, in the sense of suffering, although here, and unlike the passion of Christianity, there is little to offer solace. Re-released on Galás' own Intravenal Sound Operations (ISO) after its initial release on Mute in November 1986, Saint of the Pit is a masterpiece of witnessing, forged from grief and fury during the HIV-AIDS epidemic. While its precursor, The Divine Punishment (originally via Mute, now ISO), released only five months before in June 1986, invoked Old Testament laws around the clean and the unclean, as a way of raging against the inhumanity of systemic neglect of people with HIV-AIDS, this album is focused on a more interior response. Saint of the Pit was an urgent record and now, nearly 40 years on, it remains an urgent record because, ultimately, its major theme is not limited to HIV-AIDs, but profound suffering. It is this music's capacity to bear witness, to wrap a humanity around another's pain, to hear that anguish, that gives Saint of the Pit its continuing relevance. Remastered by Heba Kadry in 2024. Vinyl pressed at RTI, packaged in a printed euro inner sleeve with lyrics and translations and 18 x 24-inch poster."
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LP
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ISO 008LP
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LP version. Includes eight-page booklet with lyrics and translations and 14x19 inch poster."Saint of the Pit, Diamanda Galás' fifth studio album and the second in her trilogy, The Masque of the Red Death, is an urgent record. Its theme is essentially passion, in the sense of suffering, although here, and unlike the passion of Christianity, there is little to offer solace. Re-released on Galás' own Intravenal Sound Operations (ISO) after its initial release on Mute in November 1986, Saint of the Pit is a masterpiece of witnessing, forged from grief and fury during the HIV-AIDS epidemic. While its precursor, The Divine Punishment (originally via Mute, now ISO), released only five months before in June 1986, invoked Old Testament laws around the clean and the unclean, as a way of raging against the inhumanity of systemic neglect of people with HIV-AIDS, this album is focused on a more interior response. Saint of the Pit was an urgent record and now, nearly 40 years on, it remains an urgent record because, ultimately, its major theme is not limited to HIV-AIDs, but profound suffering. It is this music's capacity to bear witness, to wrap a humanity around another's pain, to hear that anguish, that gives Saint of the Pit its continuing relevance. Remastered by Heba Kadry in 2024. Vinyl pressed at RTI, packaged in a printed euro inner sleeve with lyrics and translations and 18 x 24-inch poster."
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CD
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ISO 009CD
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"Diamanda Galás' In Concert is not simply a live album. With nothing but a piano and the full expressive range of her extraordinary voice, Diamanda Galás strips away the comforting patina of time, tradition and stylistic convention to expose and express the raw human emotion that is the living heart of a song. It explores an eclectic range of material; rembetika, soul, ranchera, country and free jazz, and her passionate eviscerations reveal their hidden kinship. Four of the songs -- 'O Prósfigas,' 'La Llorona,' 'Let My People Go,' and 'Ánoixe Pétra' -- are for and by the forsaken, outcast and debased; the other three are hardboiled love songs. In Concert features select recordings taken from performances at Thalia Hall in Chicago, and Neptune Theatre in Seattle from 2017. The songs are drawn from disparate sources. Diamanda is of Maniati Greek and Middle-Eastern Greek/Egyptian origin, but she was born near the border of San Diego and Mexico, hearing the corridos, ranchera, and ballades daily, so the album draws deeply from both sources. Crucial to her performance are song types with ancient roots, primarily the amané, a vocal improvisation of Anatolian Greek origin. Amanés can be defined as a last prayer to the mother by a dying soldier, with the word amané itself possibly deriving from the Greek word mana, mother. Echoes of amanés can be heard in the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, but in origin it is a primal lament, expressing grief and loss. The origins of the amané are archaic; its spirit is urgent and timeless."
"Ms. Galás breach[es] the limits of music, improvising, mixing classical bel canto singing with demonic shrieks, muttering and glossolalic runs. Her vocal range is stunning, though the precise parameter is unknown." --The New York Times
"Galás shows us humankind as both culprit and victim, a self-destructive pawn that each year grows guiltier, sadder, and more overwhelmed by the weight of bottomless trauma." - Pitchfork
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LP
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ISO 009LP
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LP version. "Diamanda Galás' In Concert is not simply a live album. With nothing but a piano and the full expressive range of her extraordinary voice, Diamanda Galás strips away the comforting patina of time, tradition and stylistic convention to expose and express the raw human emotion that is the living heart of a song. It explores an eclectic range of material; rembetika, soul, ranchera, country and free jazz, and her passionate eviscerations reveal their hidden kinship. Four of the songs -- 'O Prósfigas,' 'La Llorona,' 'Let My People Go,' and 'Ánoixe Pétra' -- are for and by the forsaken, outcast and debased; the other three are hardboiled love songs. In Concert features select recordings taken from performances at Thalia Hall in Chicago, and Neptune Theatre in Seattle from 2017. The songs are drawn from disparate sources. Diamanda is of Maniati Greek and Middle-Eastern Greek/Egyptian origin, but she was born near the border of San Diego and Mexico, hearing the corridos, ranchera, and ballades daily, so the album draws deeply from both sources. Crucial to her performance are song types with ancient roots, primarily the amané, a vocal improvisation of Anatolian Greek origin. Amanés can be defined as a last prayer to the mother by a dying soldier, with the word amané itself possibly deriving from the Greek word mana, mother. Echoes of amanés can be heard in the Adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, but in origin it is a primal lament, expressing grief and loss. The origins of the amané are archaic; its spirit is urgent and timeless."
"Ms. Galás breach[es] the limits of music, improvising, mixing classical bel canto singing with demonic shrieks, muttering and glossolalic runs. Her vocal range is stunning, though the precise parameter is unknown." --The New York Times
"Galás shows us humankind as both culprit and victim, a self-destructive pawn that each year grows guiltier, sadder, and more overwhelmed by the weight of bottomless trauma." - Pitchfork
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ISO 001LP
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"Diamanda Galás' debut album The Litanies of Satan, originally released on Y Records in 1982, is reissued on the artist's own Intravenal Sound Operations label. The album has been meticulously remastered from the original Y Records analog tapes by Diamanda and engineer Heba Kadry and features the original classic artwork of that release. Vinyl includes poster."
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CD
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ISO 007CD
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"Employing a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques, Broken Gargoyles is arguably Galas's most intellectually, sonically and viscerally formidable work to date. The album finds the visionary artist deftly probing the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased. Composed in 2020 during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the first presentation of Broken Gargoyles featured verses by German poet Georg Heym, 'Das Fieberspital' and 'Die Dämonen der Stadt.' The work was finalized in 2020 in collaboration with the artist and sound designer Daniel Neumann. In 'Das Fieberspital' Heym describes the horrific state of people suffering from yellow fever who live in paralyzing fear of death and swirling delirium owing to their brutal treatment and isolation in medical wards in early 20th-century Germany. 'Die Dämonen der Stadt' also addresses such grim portents of World War I; in this poem, the god Baal observes (like a gargoyle) a town from a rooftop of a city block at nighttime and lets a street burn down during dawn. The final incarnation of the work was played as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Leper 's Sanctuary) in Hanover, Germany. 'Mutilatus' (side one) recedes in an approaching chilly ill wind, Galás intones over subdued whining electronics, cawing birds, semi-human verbalizations and something somewhere between these things. The often Sisyphean sound throughout Broken Gargoyles plumbs great depths in the album' s second part, 'Abiectio' (humiliation, dejection, despondency), which draws from the Heym poems 'Der Blinde' and 'Der Hunger' and the last verses of 'Das Fieberspital.'"
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CD
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ISO 005CD
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Reissue, originally released in 1984. "Diamanda Galás's second album is sometimes referred to as Panoptikon (the composition on the A-side of the album). The album consists of two pieces: 'Panoptikon', which was inspired by Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast chronicled his experiences in the prison system, and 'ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΑΙΜΑ ΤΩΝ ΔΟΛΟΦΟΝΗΜΕΝΩΝ' ('Song from the Blood of Those Murdered'), a work dedicated to the political prisoners who were tortured and executed during the 1967-74 Greek military junta. The album, originally released on the label Metalanguage (founded by Henry Kaiser and Larry Ochs in 1978), has long been out of print. It is now available for the first time on CD, and reissued on vinyl for the first time. Remastered by Heba Kadry, with updated artwork overseen by Galás, it follows the recent reissue of Galás's 1982 solo debut The Litanies of Satan (2020) and her new solo piano LP De-formation (2021) on Intravenal Sound Operations. From original liner notes by Richard Zvonar (edited by Galás 2021): 'Panoptikon is a cry of rage by a caged prisoner against his jailer who is concealed from his victims by an impenetrable wall of technology. The title of the work derives from a design for a new kind of prison, proposed in 1843 by Jeremy Bentham. This edifice consisted of a central observation tower, ringed by multiple tiers of cells. Each prisoner could be kept under continual observation by his keepers, yet he would see neither them nor his fellow inmates. Such a polarization of power, manifested through architectural constraint and omnipresent surveillance, would leave an indelible mark upon the victim, even after release. In Galás's piece, the architecture of the Panoptikon is a model for the architecture of the performance work. The observation tower is aurally present as a continuous pulse, placed behind the audience and in opposition to the performer/victim through whose ranting can be seen the progressive psychosis of one buried alive. The walls of his prison become increasingly monolithic as layer upon layer of sound is built up around him -- each one a transformation of the sound of her voice.'"
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LP
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ISO 005LP
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LP version. Includes full sized poster and insert. Reissue, originally released in 1984. "Diamanda Galás's second album is sometimes referred to as Panoptikon (the composition on the A-side of the album). The album consists of two pieces: 'Panoptikon', which was inspired by Jack Henry Abbott, whose 1981 autobiographical book In the Belly of the Beast chronicled his experiences in the prison system, and 'ΤΡΑΓΟΥΔΙ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΑΙΜΑ ΤΩΝ ΔΟΛΟΦΟΝΗΜΕΝΩΝ' ('Song from the Blood of Those Murdered'), a work dedicated to the political prisoners who were tortured and executed during the 1967-74 Greek military junta. The album, originally released on the label Metalanguage (founded by Henry Kaiser and Larry Ochs in 1978), has long been out of print. It is now available for the first time on CD, and reissued on vinyl for the first time. Remastered by Heba Kadry, with updated artwork overseen by Galás, it follows the recent reissue of Galás's 1982 solo debut The Litanies of Satan (2020) and her new solo piano LP De-formation (2021) on Intravenal Sound Operations. From original liner notes by Richard Zvonar (edited by Galás 2021): 'Panoptikon is a cry of rage by a caged prisoner against his jailer who is concealed from his victims by an impenetrable wall of technology. The title of the work derives from a design for a new kind of prison, proposed in 1843 by Jeremy Bentham. This edifice consisted of a central observation tower, ringed by multiple tiers of cells. Each prisoner could be kept under continual observation by his keepers, yet he would see neither them nor his fellow inmates. Such a polarization of power, manifested through architectural constraint and omnipresent surveillance, would leave an indelible mark upon the victim, even after release. In Galás's piece, the architecture of the Panoptikon is a model for the architecture of the performance work. The observation tower is aurally present as a continuous pulse, placed behind the audience and in opposition to the performer/victim through whose ranting can be seen the progressive psychosis of one buried alive. The walls of his prison become increasingly monolithic as layer upon layer of sound is built up around him -- each one a transformation of the sound of her voice.'"
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CD
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ISO 006CD
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Reissue, originally released in 1986. Includes poster and lyric insert. "On June 30, 1986, the same day that Diamanda Galás's The Divine Punishment was released, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's so-called sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, criminalizing consensual sex between men. At the time, about 15,000 people were known to have died of AIDS in the U.S. alone, with little government acknowledgement besides suggestions to quarantine homosexuals on island colonies. By the end of 2021, the number of AIDS deaths globally would exceed 36 million. The first album in her Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Divine Punishment is one of the most jarring works of art produced in response to the AIDS epidemic, and a milestone in Diamanda Galás's artistry and activism. Galás uses her famous voice both as an oratory instrument and as well as a physical representation of AIDS and those it afflicts. The album features the panphonic dirge work of Galás, accompanied by analogue synthesizers played by Dave Hunt. The texts are primarily taken from the Old Testament, contrasting the hectoring lawmakers of Leviticus with the desperate appeals of the Lamentations and Book of Psalms (Psalm 22, 59, and 88). In doing so, she indicts those who use religion to instigate the witch hunts that inevitably accompany real and perceived plagues. Today, The Divine Punishment sounds no less audacious than when it was released in 1986, but one hears it with a sense of shared trauma and a renewed call to action. Galás imbues all her work with the crushing weight of history -- the hypnotic cadences of her vocal work are precisely aligned to the liturgical texts employed. Remastered with exceptional clarity by mastering engineer Heba Kadry working from the original mixes by London-based producer/ composer Dave Hunt, it's a work of great empathy, solidarity, and physical power. Coming amid another pandemic marked by ignorance and division, its anger and fervor feels remarkably urgent."
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CD
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ISO 004CD
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"De-formation: Piano Variations, a work for solo piano. Composed and performed by Galás in September 2019, the 21:19 minute piece is based on the expressionist poem 'Das Fieberspital' (The Fever Hospital). Written by German poet Georg Heym in 1912, Das Fieberspital's depiction of warehoused patients of yellow fever presaged the treatment and hiding of infected and damaged soldiers later in WWI. De-formation depicts a march and delivery of maimed and infected soldiers to hospitals and industrial warehouses throughout Germany during and after the First World War. In the hospitals the maimed would receive experimental operations and the infected would be confined to protect the mental vitality, enthusiasm, and health of citizens of the State. The Piano Variations were inspired by Galás' work on the score for 'Das Fieberspital'. In organizing the work, she realized that the piano skeleton had become its own work, and she decided to record that in advance of the vocal work. One-sided vinyl LP, with poster of D. Galas artwork."
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LP
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ISO 004LP
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LP version. "De-formation: Piano Variations, a work for solo piano. Composed and performed by Galás in September 2019, the 21:19 minute piece is based on the expressionist poem 'Das Fieberspital' (The Fever Hospital). Written by German poet Georg Heym in 1912, Das Fieberspital's depiction of warehoused patients of yellow fever presaged the treatment and hiding of infected and damaged soldiers later in WWI. De-formation depicts a march and delivery of maimed and infected soldiers to hospitals and industrial warehouses throughout Germany during and after the First World War. In the hospitals the maimed would receive experimental operations and the infected would be confined to protect the mental vitality, enthusiasm, and health of citizens of the State. The Piano Variations were inspired by Galás' work on the score for 'Das Fieberspital'. In organizing the work, she realized that the piano skeleton had become its own work, and she decided to record that in advance of the vocal work. One-sided vinyl LP, with poster of D. Galas artwork."
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