Within this piece you will find two very distincy aspects of Diamanda Galas. Two interviews conducted several months apart about two seperate projects. That is the only introduction required really:
Vena Cava is a piece that deals with isolation, The extreme isolation of an individual with AIDS. It deals with the destruction of the mind over a long time in isolation. It shows the hallucinations and loneliness of someone who, lets say is lying in a hospital room or living by himself for a long period of time and/or herself and it shows the dramatic changes of a person in this kind of isolation. So it shows the mind wandering and going through rapid changes in thinking, an attempt to provide distraction from a certain kind of obsessive thinking. So the person goes from obsessively counting numbers to hearing something that someone said to them when they had a visitor, to the hospital, to the conversations of people nearby, to dreams. It is as if there where a microphone in someone's brain that was recording their most intimate thoughts. That is why there is such a strong dynamic level in the recording where it moves from very quiet to very much louder, you know, a declamation of the parts of the soloist.
It is an interesting allegory, the microphone and the brain. It is like the schizophrenic delusion of thought broadcasting and paranoia, where the individual may fear that outside forces are 'listening-in'or `bugging' their very thoughts.
In this case it's as if we have the opportunity of hearing information that is very private that has become obscenely amplified. So you're hearing things that you shouldn't be able to hear. But when we talk about a person with AIDS dementia or a person going through that illness experiencing extreme depression I'm talking about a reality that would confound most people, that is so intense that most people would be driven crazy in this position.
Certainly, one draws from ones own personal experience, but also, as in this case the experience's of people who are close to me and so I've seen a lot of things. I also believe that compassion is not so distant from human beings as it would seem. A lot of people can understand these feelings, can understand extreme depression and so I don't think it is as remote an understanding as people might think.
Yeah, that's right.
The structure of our Health System is truly terrifying, and so we have a situation where, maybe half the Homeless people in the street are infected. These people are also coming out of the Mental Health System and there is no provision for them through that system, there's no beds available, there's no Health Care money available and so people are just being driven crazy. They're acting crazy too. When you're living in New York and you walk in East Village the space of ten blocks you meet a lot of people who are really nuts and there's no provision for them whatsoever.
I don't know. The only thing that I can do as an individual, is try to do my end of it. I try to take care of the business by supporting organisations that are trying to change the situation. Other than that I have no prognosis for the future.
That's true it's like a very curious exchange of information and booing and screaming. I don't know what's going to happen next I don't think that any of us really knows that. I think we just have to keep trying the best we can.
I don't know I've always been interested in specific things and I don't feel that I'm having to force myself to concentrate on, let's say various manifestations of the AIDS epidemic. I was involved in research before I was in the music world and so perhaps that has something to do with it.
Neurochemistry and Haematology/Immunology, strangely enough Immunology twenty years ago. (We talk briefly of CD4 Counts, etc.) I'd always been involved in music but I think that helped put me at a different end of it, or shall we say the fringe.(with reference to our discussion of the Edinburgh fringe festival which was current at the time of the interview)
Oh, I think it has. I think everything that what we experience is part of what the output is, and part of what the material is. I wouldn't separate my life from what I am doing. I couldn't do that. I don't think I am good enough to do it, that's just not my ambition.
Yeah, hmm that makes sense, yeah that's a very good point. I think that's true and the ability to concentrate.
Oh it constantly does. It's a group of people that I work with everywhere, all over the world. It's my organisation and basically it's certainly a performance organisation but it will also involve itself not only in performance and records but also in film as well. It's my organisation, our organisation hasn't been independently funded yet, but it will.
Yeah, I do collaborations with people who work for me. That's my favourite kind of collaboration.
I really don't know but I think that will be something I'll get into in the next couple of years.
To a limited degree. I think it's more interesting if you have overall control over the film, than just being someone who is doing a soundtrack for someone else's film. I've seen a lot of composers spend a lot of time doing that and I think the rewards are quite temporary. I can't imagine subserving myself to somebody else's vision unless I thought he was really great. I wouldn't waste my time, but that's my own sense of complete egotism.
The film maker has, if it is a man, his Divine Vision presumably, and then you are given the chance to fill in his ideas with your music, which is cut at will, edited at will. In that sense it can be terribly unrewarding, and then it is judged by a group of peers and I find that quite dull at the end of the day. So I've had people use work that I've already composed. I haven't composed anything for any one's full length film. Again I would rather just do the film because doing the music is certainly as rigorous, if not more so. Anyone who is a composer already knows about film making and let me be one of the first people to tell composers this.
That's right
Sometimes I can doubt my sincere ability to care about the rest of the world. I think that each of us has a certain kind of level of misanthropy we come to terms with eventually, but that's normal.
No, shit no, but I am working harder than before. There's just a lot more to do.
Absolutely, I just watch movies about serial killers and things like that. I just read a book by Joseph Weinbaum that was really good "The Onion Field". I thought that was great; I like to read books like that. And my favourite film is Johnny's got his gun, that is a really intense, shocking film.
I became interested in that shortly after I'd dealt with an amplified voice in 1978. I started using the incremental change and reverberation and then I started using delay processing and then multi-tracking and stereo manipulation on the voice. All of this is to have a larger vocabulary with an instrument so a person can tell a story or perhaps not as simplistic as that. The way I use the voice is very filmic, it's like painting and so I like to have as much at my fingertips to use as possible and that's why I worked very hard on developing the vocal instrument.
No problem I get better every year.
Oh absolutely and I'm continuing work like that all the time. I enjoy that work. The voice and piano work is separate from the other stuff and I will always continue to do that.
Oh probably a performance of Caligula or something. I think a woman should play Caligula it's about time. I think evil women have been portrayed by men for years and so an evil man should be equally portrayed by a woman and I'm sure there won't be any problem with that interpretation. I think I'll start in Italy where they really don't want me'
No, only briefly but that was very brief and a performance in Italy just got cancelled last week. So, I don't know what's going on with Italy it seems to have created quite a problem for my performances there.
I have no idea, it's a very complicated issue.
Certainly, it does make it a very entertaining act, (laughs) you know what I mean. Some people are not going to want to put their money behind something that is just going to irritate them and their friends. It's at that basic level, it's not just this radical political level, but they would just rather get this good `ol' boy who would just sing this stupid love song about it, and you know, kind of make everyone feel at ease. You know what I'm saying.
It's very true and there's a very strong sense of fighting on a daily basis when you do this kind of work, and in general. But as a woman it's even harder because certainly, patriarchal society does not want to hear a woman's loud voice or even a woman's soft voice make points about people's behaviour during an epidemic and so it's not really encouraged in society that's for sure.
Yes. I'll be doing it at the Wharfield in Bill Grantham presents in the Fall, and in Los Angeles and in Norway of all places this Fall.
Very well, it's very strongly received. Certainly it generates a certain amount of controversy, but my work has always done that so I wouldn't expect Plague Mass to do otherwise.
A lot of people coming to see the performances are part of the AIDS community. Particularly all of my friends who are involved in dealing with the epidemic and a lot of people who come to the performances are involved on some level and so it's part of why I do the work. But these people are also people who work with me on the production itself.
I work with a friend in San Francisco and we've worked together now for four years on a Database called Documentation for AIDS Research and Information. I'm constantly updated on all aspects of the epidemic, so if I have a question, lets say on cryptococcal meningitis or the Blood/Brain barrier for Aids I call him up. Really if I want any new information, which is quite a lot, and as you know endless.
The Dbase also deals with perceived biochemical warfare experiments on the prison population that have gone on. `Insecta' was dealing with that. I just performed that at the Lincoln Centre. And so I have access to a lot of information and I plan on getting my own computer system organised for Intravenal Sound Operations because I think there is a lot of information that can really be damning to my enemies, which I'm terribly interested in getting at all times.
It's lack of communication that has as you know taken seropositive people and killed them, a lot of them because they are not able to get the kind of medication that they need to stay alive. It's pretty scary and this goes for many cities in the United States who don't have information at hand.
With Vena Cava you are keeping the same direction as the trilogy with the study and interpretation of AIDS. (The Masque of the Red Death which comprises The Divine Punishment, Saint of the Pit & You must be certain of the Devil). Are you going to proceed along the lines of this theme as you develop your knowledge and the disease itself develops.
Certainly, I don't see that there will be any end to that work at all, until the end of the epidemic and I don't foresee that happening very soon, so that's a life's work. Aside from the other work I am doing I will continue that work.
We have a mutual friend who I'd worked with before, and one day we were just talking and he said "Fancy doing something with Diamanda?" I thought that that sounded really good because I had been very aware of her work since 1983 and I had seen her perform at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1989 and so seemed like a really good thing to do. He had said that she wanted to do a more rock orientated album so I said yeah, I can do that. So he got us together, we exchanged tapes ,wrote it and recorded it.
Well we have a lot of common tastes in music which we found out at the first meeting, which is very nice. It means we could do a lot without having to explain to each other what we had in mind. I tried to record it so it had as live a feel as possible and a lot of Diamanda's takes are just one vocal line all the way through, I think that they are all single takes or two at the most.
Actually it was written in New York and in England. I was writing here and Diamanda was writing in New York, and we were swapping tapes. We met up, rehearsed and more or less got the material together in two to three weeks, we then got the drummer in and just put it down. With mixing, the whole thing took about two months in all.
We had met just once for an evening, when Diamanda was on her way to Norway last year, and we decided that we had lots in common. She is a delight to work with. It's easy to work with professionals, where everybody knows what they're doing it, why, and what they're on about. But, just because it's professional doesn't mean it's cold and calculated, you just know how to keep all the other unnecessary stuff away, and put all your energies into making music.
No, I haven't performed recently? Not since the two Led Zepplin reunions. I have been producing, I have been composing quite a lot. I do lots of classical composition, but I haven't performed at all.
I really like playing on stage. The touring aspect has been done before, but I was beginning to miss actually playing, it's quite enjoyable that. It's one of the attractions of the project, apart from working with Diamanda. The thought of just being able to take it out on the road, and play on stage is something I really have missed over the years.
Really?, why would he say a thing like that I wonder?
I think so too. I try and make life as interesting as possible for me, and as exciting.
Well I suppose this collaboration is new for me in that I'm performing on it, and hope to take it out on the road so that's going to be quite different for me. I try and make my projects really different and exciting, because I have done everything really. There's no point in me doing the same thing over and over again so I try and do new things every time. Rather than end up as just a producer of Rock bands.
There are certainly plenty of them and a lot of them sound the same. I also like to make records that I like to listen to and at the same time do what's expected. It's nice to keep things moving forward. Rock shouldn't have ended in the seventies, but for a lot of people it seems to have.
Well nothing's finalised yet. But before the tour I'm going to work on an acoustic project with Heart. With some of the old stuff as well , arranging them acoustically and with strings. We will be getting the whole thing together and recording it in a club. So again it's a bit different.
That is very true, but I could tell from the first time that John and I played together that this was going to be a very interesting collaboration. I have retaken that position because I really loved working with him. When we first met we talked about the kind of music that we wanted to do in terms of sound and we agreed immediately and all we had to do was see if we could play together, see if the vibe worked. He comes from such an eclectic range of musical experiences from leading Motown sessions, to arranging other peoples music to composing his own music to working with Zepplin to so many other experiences. I do to so we have a lot of common ground that perhaps, especially non-musicians wouldn't have a clue about, and since the comprises most of the music industry we are never surprised. (Laughs)
Completely! That's utterly true, I did enjoy it tremendously and we are really looking forward to live performances.
When I first talked to John about this album I was really interested in doing an album of homicidal love songs that were driven by the idea of following someone down the street that I couldn't have until I caught them. Like a hunt, that kind of idea. So I think that the songs have a lot to do with that. About refusing to let a person leave who has forsaken you. Lets say there is emotional content to a lot of the songs.
I think Baby's Insane is pretty much (laughs) I don't mean to laugh in a pejorative sense but I mean there is a certain humour to it. I think it is a person who is kind of isolated in a room and people know this person is pretty moody and the person knows so and just wants people to go away, it's kind of eccentric. I think a lot of people have felt that way at certain times so it is that kind of song. Anyway, I think the lyrics say it better than anything I have to explain it.
The Sporting Life is about a female gang. You have to picture John and Pete Thomas as good ol' boys playing a shack along the side of the road and going Damn! Seeing my bitches cut some guy up just `cause we don't like the way he looks. Yeah, it's that kind of vibe. it's sort of Faster Pussycat Kill Kill Kill, but a lot more violent, a lot more nasty.
Ha, thank you, I think there's no doubt about that. The music just goes where it goes. You have taken two people, who have come from similar but quite different places, and so it just happened that way.When you are playing live who are you going to have to actually back you up and support you?
Pete Thomas, he plays with the attractions, Squeeze, Los Lobos. He's a great drummer he's played with everyone, a lot of different people, he's very strong, a really big guy, very funny, very, very perfect for this music.
I've just been burying a lot of friends of mine, playing funerals and getting really pretty depressed about it. A lot of my friends who have been sick for a while are now dying, and it's very unbelievable. Obviously life has many different facets and at the same time as people are dealing with the epidemic, there are things like sick relationships and things. So everyone is very happy about this record, because it gives them a break to think about other things. but HIV is still the constant reality.