Litanies of Satan

Two songs on a great album which has long been out of print. Fair warning that the titles are reversed. Perfect choice for people looking to scare their neighbors.

I owned this many years ago but lost it in the shuffle of a dozen moves in between. Just as moving\disturbing\awesome as I remember!!

The darkest music ever !Perfect buying experienceHandle with care and make sure you can take it. Sick stuff !

For those moods, just in time for halloween

Diamanda Galas is one of those artists you either love or hate, and both have their share of very good reasons. About 3 years ago, if you told me I'd enjoy her music, I'd have laughed right in your face. The idea of someone just screeching, yelling, howling, babbling nonsense into a mic and calling it music was very nonsensical to me at the time- and to an extent, still is. But now that I'm older and my tastes have sort of opened a bit, I've realized that just like art, music is subjective. Some people even call the birds calling in the morning music. Remember that John Cage piece, 4'33, that consists of a pianist just sitting at his piano doing... nothing, for 4 minutes and 33 seconds? This was made because Cage wanted the audience to observe the music around them- the accidental noises happening in the background in different locations. And so Galas, a Greek-American artist with a classically trained 3 octave vocal range, also trained in piano, invites you to challenge the very notion of "music" with her debut album, The Litanies of Satan.The Litanies of Satan is one of the most unpleasant, frightening, disturbing listens one is bound to have in a while. It's mercifully short at 30 minutes, but every second of it feels long and torturous. Galas screams, howls, shrieks, moans, cackles, and shouts her way through thirty unsettling minutes of pure a Capella terror. She recounts the recording experience as being in a London basement, awake for more than 24 hours, very sick, only being kept awake by caffiene and the temperature was freezing cold. Among the many things that happened- sound boards crashed, microphones and speakers blowing out. Then again though, those kinds of things are "normal parts of every day work" for her (then again that's just her sense of humour shining through). What Litanes really is, is two pieces of music- both of which involve heavy useage of her voice as the main, and only, instrument featured on the whole instrument.The first piece is the title track, which is the 17 most frightening minutes of audio ever recorded. Beginning with a series of hisses that fades in, the piece then moves into a recitation of Les Litanies de Satan by legendary poet Charles Baudelaire, originally published in Fleurs Du Mal. The poem is recited in the original French language, with a host of different effects peppered throughout the track. There's moments where a distorted repeat of her voice "recites" along with her near the beginning, and from there on lots of audio effects provide the "music" of the song, making one extremely intense and difficult track to listen to. Her screams and shrieks and echos get looped throughout, at times providing the "background music". At one point in the track, her voice becomes so distorted, it sounds as if 7 Diamandas are talking at once, to a horrifyingly sinister effect. It is one seriously intense track that is not to be listened to past midnight.The next, "Wild Women with Steak Knives", is shorter and has no effects applied to it, but with a vocal performance this psychotic, who would need them. It runs 12 minutes long and is more of an aural assault. It's also a tad bit lighter in tone than the preceding track, and it a tad comical. The songs subject seems to be a woman with intense schizophrenia, and the "lyrics" are mostly babble and gibberish, but when they're in English, they're mostly nonsense ("I'm not talking about meatballs! I'm talking about... STEAK! STEAKSTEAKSTEAKSTEASKSTKSTSTKSTKSTSTSTSTSTSTSTS!!!."). Seriously, at one point she gets so carried away in the vocal work that you wonder if she's going to explode. It isn't as good as the preceding track, but it's twisted and frightening fun.]Litanies is far from Galas' best work, however it is a great starting point, unlike most debut albums. Is it the most pleasant work out there? Absolutely not. Pleasant, it's anything but. But if you can force yourself to listen to it, it's an absolutely rewarding experienced, and will will challenge the way you define music, as stated above. Diamanda has plenty I've other voice-centric works, the best of which being Vena Cava, but before getting into that, try one of her earlier works, like The Divine Punishment and this album. While not happy music, and certainly not for everyone, Litanies is proof that music doesn't always need melodies- but rather the voices of the damned, tortured, and suffering.

Being able to say that I "love" this album is the result of nearly two decades of processing. The "Litanies of Satan" was my first exposure to Diamanda Galas, when a friend of mine played the album in an "Experimental Music" class he designed, at the university music school we both attended. As an avant-garde and experimental composer myself, as well as a performer of everything from jazz to punk to performance art, I had had a pretty broad experience of the weird, and thought myself pretty jaded at the time.None of it prepared me for Diamanda Galas.This was the first album I had heard -- possibly ever -- that made me actually uncomfortable to just sit and listen to it. It is one of a very few that still send chills down my spine to this day.Ms. Galas is a musician, yes, but what happens on this album is far more than mere music. Performance art, prehaps, but couched as an aural assault of raw emotion of a kind that sane, well-adjusted people rarely if ever give vent to, and certainly never in public. Galas' vocal talents and understanding of the technicalities of amplification and recording are formidable. A classically trained and disciplined vocalist, she has also mastered a huge range of contemporary vocal techniques, from reinforced-harmonics and vocal "multiphonics" to yodeling and rap-style patter. At times it is difficult to believe that all the sounds you are hearing are being made by a single person, it real time, using only her voice (there is some taped backing on one of the two cuts, but it's kept pretty basic). Yet she has performed both of these pieces in front of live audiences.All of which means that she has a supurb instrument to work with, through which to express the -extreme- emotional content of her pieces. She conveys with stark intensity a variety and range of feelings that most people, even those of us who may have touched on some of them, prefer to keep tightly bottled up inside. How she can open herself up in performance to this extent without slipping over that fine line into actual insanity is a mystery to me. Maybe she does slip over in concert, although in interviews she seems stable and normal enough...On first hearing the second cut on the original vinyl recording, "Wild Women With Steak Knives", I remember thinking 'Holy $#|+! If her -recorded- work is this disturbing, her live performances must be overwhelming!They are.You may not like what you hear on this album, but I seriously doubt anyone can listen to it all the way through and remain unmoved by it: some of the passages would make a zombie shiver. But even if you ultimately end up using this disk for target practice, you owe it to yourself to experience at least one time this extraordinarily skillful, soulful, and creative artist.And if you -do- get hooked, as I was hooked, you will be fascinated to discover, on her other albums, that Diamanda Galas can also sing the blues . . . which, once again, she does in a manner not /quite/ like anyone else. ;-)

It is hard to say whether Diamanda Galas's first album is so transcendent of genre that it is hard to decide whether it is actually music or just noise. There is no real structure to the songs, scarcely any musical backing and the things she does with her voice isn't really something that leds itself to singing either. So if you are wanting this CD because you like melodic, accessible music then this certainly isn't for you. Even I have some bizzare musical tastes but I found this quite difficult to listen to all the way through and I'm not sure I'll listen it again any time soon.Having said that, you cannot deny that Litanies of Satan is a great demonstration of what Galas can do with her voice and that is a lot. She screams, howls, cackles, shrieks, wails to operatic levels, gurgles, murmurs and talks all with ease and that in itself has to be admired. Also, I think that it does have a good atmosphere, but it is so intense that it is unbearable to stand even for the short running time of the album as a whole. This record is a work of art and really challenges the listener as well as the boundries of when noise becomes music and certainly it does it well. The record is uncompromising and demands you to listen to it and I am glad I did because it has changed my perspectives on music itself. So if you like to challenge yourself with music and see music really as art rather than something just to dance to, then it might be a good idea to purchase this record, but it is a hard challenge and when I played it to my cousin he got through only a minute before asking me to turn it off.

Alles gut, gerne wieder

Une interprétation brutale, sans concession, folle et à chaque seconde inventive du célèbre poème de Ch. Baudelaire. Cette œuvre de l'Américaine a déjà plus de trente ans mais reste encore en avance sur la galaxie techno qu'elle a précédée, elle échappe à toute patine : qu'elle n'échappe pas à vos platines ! C'est un chef-d’œuvre qui se mérite.