August 30, 2022

DIAMANDA GALÁS | Portrait

18 minutes

Diamanda Galás has spent a lot of her life representing the underrepresented. While working on music, she also created work dealing with AIDS, genocide, and mental disease, as well as compositions for voice and piano set to the works of exiled poets. On this episode of LaunchLeft, Diamanda and Rain have a great conversation about her work, artist collaborations, and how she uses music and art to tell the stories and experiences of forgotten people.

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LaunchLeft Podcast hosted by Rain Phoenix is an intentional space for Art and Activism where famed creatives launch new artists. LaunchLeft is an alliance of left-of-center artists, a curated ecosystem that includes a podcast, label and NFT gallery.

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IN THIS EPISODE:

[02:30] Groups of people Diamanda has felt drawn to represent through her art.

[06:00] Diamanda’s work in her own terms- representing the underrepresented.

[12:00] Collaborating with artists and the new ideas it can inspire.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Artists can draw inspiration from other artists’ creative processes.

Sharing the hard parts can help others to relate and see the end result of working out these situations.

BIO:

The San Diego-born Galás came up playing both classical and jazz music. She not only accompanied her Anatolian Greek father’s gospel choir and joined his New Orleans-style band, but also performed as a piano soloist with the San Diego Symphony at the age of 14. She went on to play with various groups that included heavies of the new-jazz thing, such as a circa-’74 combo in Pomona, California, that included cornetist Bobby Bradford, sax man David Murray bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Stanley Crouch. She made her first public performance in 1979, collaborating on an opera with Vinko Globokar and Amnesty International about the arrest torture, and assasination of a Turkish woman for treason. In 1982 she released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which showcased her early forays into unorthodox vocal expression and multiphonics, and which included an 18-minute performance piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” She has created work dealing with AIDS (including the recently re-mastered The Divine Punishment), genocide and mental disease, as well as compositions for voice and piano set to the works of exiled poets. She also collaborated with Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones on the 1994 album The Sporting Life.

RESOURCE LINKS

Diamanda Galás Website

Diamanda on IG

Diamanda on Twitter

Diamanda on Facebook

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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