Diamanda Galás to perform at Unsound: SOFT POWER in Warsaw Poland

In 2026, Unsound will take place across two Polish cities for the first time in its history: Warsaw (2–6 October) and Kraków (8–11 October), under the theme SOFT POWER. The two chapters of the festival will be connected by a dedicated Unsound train travelling from Warsaw to Kraków. 

More live performances in Europe for 2026 and 2027.

As the recent performances in Portugal attest, these new dates offer an unmissable chance to see one of the most uncompromising and visionary artists of our time performing live.

“Diamanda Galás does not merely interpret songs; the American artist reterritorializes them.

This Saturday at Theatro Circo and Wednesday at Casa da Música, Diamanda Galás returns after a long absence to remind us that a scream is a form of complicity. The avant-garde artist brings us wounds and bandages in the form of music. Unmissable, of course. She is capable of piercing the molecular structure of a room. It is an experience that oscillates between reified agony and an almost unbearable spiritual clarity, in which the Portuguese audience usually given to a passive melancholy—is suddenly injected with a rage that is, at once, both wound and remedy.

Pain is what remains to us; it may be the only authentic thing we have left. 

This was a liturgy of violence and suffering that left us wondering whether the ticket was for a concert—or for a live, real-time autopsy.”

JOURNAL DE NOTICIAS | José Miguel Gaspar | Feb 15 2026 Portugal

“If there is one thing Lisbon loves, it is a cult—and last Wednesday Culturgest became the temple of a congregation that had not gathered there to “listen to music,” but to be pierced by it. With the venue completely sold out, Diamanda Galás’s return to Portugal unfolded as a roughly hour-long liturgy that left everyone in a collective trance, somewhere between prayer and exorcism.”

CH Magazine de Cultura, Lazer e Viagens | Tânia Fernandes | February 12 2026

“The artistic choices in Galás’s 2026 Portugal concerts are best understood through a lineage of late period intensification exemplified by Goya’s Black Paintings, in which a lifetime of technical mastery is brought to bear on material of uncompromising emotional depth. In these performances, Galás drew upon vocal traditions that rely on an exceptionally deep, resonant chest register—most notably the cante jondo of Andalusia, the Mikrasian amané lament traditions of Asia Minor, and the male vocal production characteristic of outlaw country music. These techniques formed the structural and expressive foundation of her new musical compositions based upon the poems of Jorge Luis Borges, Henri Michaux, and René Char, as well as her newly performed interpretations of rarely heard songs by Hank Williams and Johnny Paycheck. These choices reflect a new clarity of purpose, in which the depth and weight of chest voice resonance serve as the primary vehicle for articulating lamentation, defiance, and existential rupture across literary and musical lineages.”

RomainVersa

The dates follow recent releases of two commanding works: a newly remastered reissue of her 1988 album You Must Be Certain of the Devil – #8 in The Quietus’s Reissues of the Year, and De-formation: Second Piano Variations, a live recording of her meticulously reworked score for the solo piano score of 'Das Fieberspital, 'The Fever Hospital’. "Galás' dynamic virtuosity elevates her wounded and broken melodies into something absolutely mesmerizing: chords crash like lightning, notes are violently cut off, melodies convulse or stumble off the beat in a feverish delirium." Tony D'Amico Brainwashed

Since the formation of her own imprint, Intravenal Sound Operations (in 2017), Galás has been at the helm of one of her most productive periods of work. The new label has launched a remastered series of reissues from her vast back catalogue, as well as new releases including De-formations First and Second Variations (2019 and 2025) and Broken Gargoyles (2022). She has hosted three installations of Mutilatus in New York City, Hanover and Braga (2020-2021), has been composing the live show for her Das Fieberspital work, recently performed at the Pinault Gallery in Paris and in Portugal.

Listen to / buy You Must Be Certain of the Devil

Listen to / buy De-formation: Second Piano Variations

About Diamanda Galás

San Diego-born Galás came up playing both classical and jazz music. She not only accompanied her Mikrasian Greek father’s gospel choir and joined his New Orleans-style band, but also performed as a piano soloist with the San Diego Symphony at the age of 14. She went on to play with various groups that included heavies of the new-jazz thing, such as a circa-’74 combo in Pomona, California, that included cornetist Bobby Bradford, sax man David Murray, trumpet-player Butch Morris, bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Stanley Crouch. She made her first public performance in 1979, collaborating on an opera with Vinko Globokar and Amnesty International about the arrest, torture, and assasination of a Turkish woman for treason. In 1982 she released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which showcased her early forays into unorthodox vocal expression and multiphonics, and which included an 18-minute performance piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” She has created work dealing with AIDS (including the recently re-mastered The Divine Punishment and Saint of the Pit), genocide and mental disease, as well as compositions for voice and piano set to the works of exiled poets. She also collaborated with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones on the 1994 album The Sporting Life. Her 2022 album Broken Gargoyles employs a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques to deftly probe the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased, leading Pitchfork to declare her “a world apart from other musicians”.