If ever there was an artist for these strange times, then truly Diamanda Galás – singer, pianist, composer – is the one. That said, Galás has never stopped being relevant. Ever since 1981’s The Litanies of Satan, her highly idiosyncratic setting of Baudelaire’s poem, Galás has established herself as a voice that calls for the restoration of humanity to the oppressed, the marginalized and the plague-ridden.
She has done this by using plague as a metaphor for outsidership. This was most explicit in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis: The Masque of the Red Death remains a cri du coeur that was picked up by a large audience. De-formation, Galás’ first new recorded work for many years, is a formidable solo piano piece that reminds us that she was first a concert pianist. A shade over 21 minutes long, it’s part of a work in progress that jumps off from Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital), a fin-de-siècle poem by Georg Heym, and then continues to an imagined post-1918 landscape that takes in the sufferings of shattered soldiers, so many shut away lest their ‘deformities’ upset the general public.
