Diamanda Galás in Italy. Nine things you didn't know about the most extreme voice in contemporary music.

Ten years after her last Italian appearance, the Greek-American artist returns for three concerts

Let's discover Diamanda Galás . A name that will likely mean little to the general public: she's never frequented the high-class circles of rock music. She's chosen a territory where avant-garde, blues, jazz, poetry, Greek tragedy, pain, and death coexist, held together by a voice that seems reductive to call simply "voice." She's one of the most radical and recognizable figures in contemporary music, accompanied by a powerful iconography that has sometimes even preceded her music and obscured her character. But who is Diamanda Galás, really? Ten years after her last Italian appearance, the Greek-American artist returns for three concerts: on September 23rd in Trento, on the 26th in Parma, where she will open the twentieth edition of Il Rumore del Lutto Festival to a sold-out audience, and on the 30th in Senigallia.

Nine interesting facts to understand why, after more than forty years, she still looks like no other. Let's get started!

1. The Cathedral
On December 10, 1989, ACT UP entered St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Galás was there with the others: they lay down in the nave, playing dead, while Cardinal O'Connor celebrated. O'Connor opposed sex education in schools and the distribution of condoms while AIDS was killing, and they had come to accuse him of complicity. They arrested her. Ten months later, she entered another New York cathedral, St. John the Divine, and sang "Plague Mass" inside.

2. Her brother
Philip-Dimitri Galás, a playwright, died in San Diego on August 12, 1986. He was thirty-two, Diamanda's brother, and he had AIDS: the obituary published four days later in the Los Angeles Times mentioned kidney failure and pneumonia. During those months, she was recording the trilogy dedicated to the disease and finished it after she buried him. Plague Mass comes from there, and the album's opening track is titled "There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral."

3. Poggio a Caiano
On July 17, 1990, she took the stage in the gardens of the Medici villa in Poggio a Caiano, in the province of Prato, topless and painted red. Masque of the Red Death was an indictment of American preachers, governments, and the Church for neglecting AIDS patients. The Christian Democrats took the case to the city council, and an MSI MP threatened a parliamentary question. Diamanda had hit the nail on the head: thirty-six years later, that concert is still being talked about.

4. the Voice
Forget screaming for its own sake. Behind her work lies a monstrous technique: registers that shift on the fly, multiphonics—she can produce up to three sounds simultaneously—and obsessive attention to breathing. Then there are the microphones, often more than one, treated differently through delays, distortions, and modulations. A single woman on stage can thus sound like a crowd. Live, it reaches your heart when it becomes sweet, your head when it becomes a sentence, your stomach when it assails you. It's no coincidence that she has defined her voice as "a weapon for my friends and against my enemies."

5. Defixiones
Lead plates engraved with curses against anyone who moved or desecrated the bodies were placed on the tombs of ancient Greece and Asia Minor: the defixiones . This is where Galás takes the title of his work, dedicated to the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations of Anatolia, exterminated and persecuted between 1914 and 1923. The Armenians call it Medz Yeghern , the Great Crime; the Assyrians Sayfo , the Sword. His family also comes from those lands. And in Orders from the Dead , a phrase returns that says practically everything: you cannot erase the dead .

6. Casa
Diamanda doesn't smoke, drinks very little, and spends a lot of time alone, reading, writing, and researching. For years, she put her career on hold to care for her parents, dedicating about five years to her ailing mother. And she has an unexpected sense of humor: when asked if she sang for her loved ones, she replied that they'd probably pay her not to. On the other hand, she says she's invited to sing at funerals, but never at weddings.

7. The Hands
Then there are the hands. Because by talking so much about her voice, we risk forgetting that she is an extraordinary pianist. She has been playing since she was three years old and was already in her father's band at thirteen. In 2020, she released De-formation: Piano Variations : twenty-one minutes of piano, without voice. To describe her through that alone is to tell only half of her story.

8. The songs
She sings her own songs, but also Sinatra, Hank Williams, the Supremes. However, just browse through other titles in her repertoire to find her stylistic integrity: O Death , Gloomy Sunday , See That My Grave Is Kept Clean by Blind Lemon Jefferson. And then a country song by Johnny Paycheck with the wonderful title: Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill . Excuse me, I've got someone to kill. In 1992 she released The Singer , blues and gospel dedicated to people affected by AIDS. On the cover, on her knuckles, the tattoo: We are all HIV+ .

9. The Sound of Mourning
It took a passionate courtship lasting over a year to bring her to the Paganini Auditorium in Parma on Saturday, September 26th. A dream come true. For twenty years, this festival has depicted death for what it is: a part of life. Looking at it without erasing it makes us more aware of the days we have been given. And Diamanda Galás is not simply a guest of the festival. Diamanda Galás is The Sound of Mourning.