Fatal attractions

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS BOLD Galás makes her first Chicago appearances in 15 years this week.

Photo: Austin Young, courtesy of Isabelle Deconinck

Bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley stares down the Reaper on his signature ballad “O, Death,” but if he heard what Diamanda Galas did to it, it’s possible the giant of American roots music might feel he’d lost the contest, and the darkness had swallowed him whole.

The track, featured on the singer’s forthcoming album Guilty, Guilty, Guilty (Mute), is prime—and primal—Galás. She accompanies herself on piano, playing gutsy, rippling notes that hang in the air like a deftly poised dagger in a New Orleans bawdy house. Galás introduces the lyrics as if her lungs were a dark, forgotten cave, the words sepulchral, final. Before too long, she launches into a succession of improvisations—dizzying variations in pitch, piercing wordless leaps up the scale, an extreme aria that loops and plunges back into bluesy vigor.

Given the performance’s daring and honesty, it’s also possible Stanley might recognize a kindred spirit, someone unafraid to face the mystery and terror of the natural world, someone who uses her voice to exorcise its demons even as it seems to embrace them. “I don’t want to do Ralph Stanley the way Ralph Stanley does Ralph Stanley,” Galás says, chatting over an espresso on a sunny afternoon.

“If you’re going to do it in a respectful way, who needs that?” asks the San Diego native, 51, who debuted with the 1981 album Wild Women with Steak Knives, and has since applied her three-and-a-half-octave range to everything from American folk ballads to the challenging modernist Greek composer Iannis Xenakis. “If anything can be learned from Ornette [Coleman], it would be that. He was playing the blues, and people would say to him, ‘It’s obvious you never heard of John Lee Hooker the way you play the blues.’ He would look at them like they were an idiot.”

Galás will explore the album, filled with what she calls “homicidal love songs,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Saturday 27. She’s also planning a separate performance Thursday 25 called Songs of Exile, for which she has adapted poems of exiled artists such as César Vallejo and Paul Celan.

Throw in some Jacques Brel and—yes—Southern soul singer O.V. Wright, and it’s a quick assumption that she lives to upset expectations. Galás loves to complicate her audience’s perception that she is some avenging lizard queen. Of course, she is draped in black when we meet, her fingers adorned in serpentine jewelry, and drops casual asides about spell casting and Spanish horror movies, but let’s just say she is a sophisticated woman of many enthusiasms.

Doris Day, for instance.

“I worship the singers who sang it straight,” says Galás, who began singing professionally at 13 with her jazz-pianist father. “They actually knew the melody. They knew the changes. They could sing over the changes. They weren’t just going up there and doing their thing over the top of it. That’s disgusting. That’s what you hear on American Idol. I can play it as straight as Doris Day. Love her. Best legato in the business. And from there you can take the song to another place.”

That sums up the singer’s process, which often involves unusual and circuitous journeys through her imagination. “I was reading a forensic book about a good ol’ boy in Louisiana who has a body farm,” Galás says, offering a roundabout perspective on her creative choices. “He was a forensic pathologist who had seen so many horrific murders of women and children. So he lays the dead bodies out in different climactic situations, where he could determine how long it takes for the body to rot to the bone. I was in Hollywood with this drag queen buddy of mine. He was reading the book in his Bermuda slacks. He has a coffin laid out in his living room, a whole New Orleans–Kentucky funereal decor.”

When the singer returned to the studio, she came up on the line “flesh and worms will have your soul.” “And there it was,” she continues. “There’s this section where I go into what some people call vocal multiphonics. It was based upon that reading somehow. When you’re singing multiphonics on a scale, you’re using the resonance cavities in your body to make three or four notes at once. When you start talking about resonance cavities, then you’re back to that forensics guy.

“The music is on a scale,” she concludes, making an analogy that any mountain musician or blues guitarist would grasp inherently, “which is like walking along a path, the inescapable path that death is leading you on.”