diamanda galás - schrei x

.:: Based on Diamanda Galas earlier work Schrei 27, which consisted of several short performances over the space of 27minutes, SCHREI X will alternate extreme high-energy vocal work with absolute silence. The work takes place in darkness.

The performances are chapters of a confessions with might have been induced through a chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain. There is a high density of speech-sound over time which is often machine-like in its velocity. The work employs the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Ms. Galas has been researching since 1979.

SCHREI 27 was a commission of the 1994 New American Radio series and was made possible by a grant from the Meet The Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. It was developed for national broadcast with New Radio and Performing Arts. The development of Schrei 27 would not have been possible without the support of a creative residency at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN.)


The New York Times - 'In Performance' section Monday February 26, 1996
by:NEIL STRAUSS

A Step into the Past Presented in Darkness

Diamanda Galas Knitting Factory

On Wednesday night, the avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galas sang "Schrei X," a half-hour piece that she delivered in complete darkness. For 13 years Ms. Galas has been presenting works that are more performance based than this, most of them a response to AIDS. "Schrei X" was a step back, into a solipsistic blackness. Instead of being overtly political, the piece, based on a radio work she created in 1994, favored the more general themes of anguish and isolation present in her music from the early 1980's.

Ms. Galas stood in front of five microphones, and as she delivered "Schrei X" she moved her head around them, sending her voice swirling through a quadraphonic sound system. She alternated sec- tions of abstract utterances and si- lence with a mix of her own texts and passages from the Book of Job and St. Thomas Aquinas. The narrative sections were about transitions be- tween life and death, salvation and condemnation, sanity and madness, with Ms. Galas powerful voice con- veying the agony of being trapped in an intermediate are (such of being institutionalized or buried alive).

More revealing than the meaning of "Schrei X" was the sound. "Schrei" is German for shriek, but Ms. Galas did more. She growled, cackled, screeched, pleaded, wailed and sang, jumping as much as two octaves between utterances.

With a sparing use of digital ef- fects, she often mad it seem as if multiple speakers wer fulminating at the same time or as if the sounds were electronic and not human. In the darkness, "Schrei X" conjured not Dante's "Inferno" but a claustro- phobic internal hell where the same demons lurk.New York Times - 1996

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