You Won’t Be Frigid With Diamanda Galás

From bed to bed the fever slowly crawls

its way, a swollen yellow polypus.

They gaze at it, unspeaking and appalled.

And their eyes whiten as the gleam is lost.

The resounding creepiness of George Heym’s Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital) isn’t diminished in its English translation. Placed in the hands, and lungs, of iconic avant-garde vocalist-composer Diamanda Galás, the poem transcends into a harrowing, confronting work of cacophonous beauty, completed with solitary ambience and deathly howls. It’s the latest performance project in a career that began under the guidance of Anatolian-Greek parenting—harnessing a lucid worldview into politically fervent art since the late 1970s. It will all be showcased on the final night of this year’s Dark Mofo, Das Fieberspital sees Diamanda summon spectres of despair within the depths of an unforgiving Tasmanian winter.

Noisey: Hi Diamanda, how are you today?

Diamanda Galás: I’m doing just fine. My waking hour is usually four o’clock in the morning, so I’m at my best until 12pm. I laughed when I saw the times that were given to me. They’re normal hours—it’s 8pm now—but my hours are not normal. So I’m doing my very best.

I’m sure we’ll do fine. You’re performing a new work, Das Fieberspital, at Dark Mofo. When were you first exposed to the source material?

I discovered it many years ago in a book of German expressionist painting, drawing and poetry. A lot of the writers were also composers or painters—Kandinsky, Kokoschka. Then I came across Heym. I hadn’t read him before. The writers I usually pick to work with have a certain cadence, a liturgical quality. Once I have the culmination of feeling fraternal with their meaning—by which I mean also their imagery, use of colours, or the lack of them—and the rhythm of their work, it gets very, very close.

I have to feel an absolute proximity, that I must do this before anything happens, before I get dragged away screaming by horses. It becomes a fraternal society, the kind of society I need to know that I’m with before I leave this planet. It’s very comforting. A lot of the writers are dead, some are living, but there is something that gives me great comfort in their writing. Often their writing seems to be about struggle and isolation, sometimes in the peril of death and extreme disease, to somehow survive as long as possible in a certain state of mind. This isolation, this shutting out from society, I identify with for whatever reasons, and I go with that, I go with my instincts.

Are you conscious that you’ll be performing this work on an isolated island at the bottom of the earth in the midst of a freezing winter?

No, not at all as a matter of fact. You’re the first person telling me this. It’s going to be very cold is it?

It definitely won’t be warm. It’s indoors, but the audience will be frigid as they enter the theatre.

Oh they’ll be frigid? They won’t be frigid by the time I’m through with them.

I bet. I’m sure the venue will be heated.

Good. I must say, Georg Heym is remembered in many scholastic journals where his work is correlated with the freezing of the ice as he died trying to save a friend while ice-skating. He died under the ice, there was no way for anyone to hear him, and they didn’t know he was dead for days. So it seems like a perfect environment for this work. Very interesting.

Do you feel that your compositions are typically American in style, notably blues and jazz?

I feel that it covers many areas. A lot of distinctly American genres of music are covered, for example: “O Death”, but also Middle Eastern Mīkrá Asía Greek, which is Greek from Anatolia—now called Turkey. It’s that part of the world you can hear in my singing also. It’s an interesting interface of the blues and this style of improvised singing that occurs through the Middle East. It is a style of singing that is funereal, employing many different scales that are completely different from blues scales.

You approach societal issues in your work. Do you think we’ve progressed as a species since you began performing? Or even since the time Heym composed Das Fieberspital?

I would say so, because of the communication systems that we possess. People can get together, and a large amount of individuals can expose a situation that was not possible to expose before. Students got together in Greece and basically told the world what was going on there. You see this much quicker communication of wrongs than in the past, where people were isolated, completely isolated. I think when you get the truth in front of people’s faces at least they can react. But when there’s no communication, you’re in a pit.

Then again, these communication systems can be corrupted by higher powers.

I don’t doubt it at all. We don’t come up with it for the force of good or evil, it’s just a new communication tool that’s either developed by someone inside the military or someone outside the military, or used within the military for not necessarily good things. So we end up with this tool that can be used for multi-faceted reasons. The one good thing about having more tools rather than less tools is that you can troubleshoot a lot of beliefs that emerge from the different systems and make your own decisions a little bit more than if you had only one or two of them. I’m a big fan of doing a great deal of research on everything, a great deal. I would never believe something I searched on Google. I would consider it, but then I would consider many other sources of information and come up with a beginning idea of possible opinion. Then I would go further and interview specific people, going further and further. There are endless amounts of research that has to be done.

Diamanda Galás will be braving the cold at this year’s Dark Mofo.

Follow Lachlan on Twitter: @LACHLANKANONIUK