Just Another Gloomy Sunday

Was listening to Billie Holiday’s version of  "Gloomy Sunday" tonight. I immediately thought I wanted to hear Diamanda Galás' version from her covers album The Singer. When I was searching around for that tune I dug out these two bootlegs from the Scream Queen Extraordinaire that I thought I could use to torture all you music lovers.

First, recorded live at Castlefranco Emilia Teatro Dada May 09, 1992. Diamanda's album The Singer had just been released & here she covers the…well…covers.

Diamanda Galás - Live at Castlefranco Teatro Emilia Dada May 9,1992.

Tracklist -

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

Let My People Go

Balm in Gilead/Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Judgement Day

My Love Will Never Die

Cris D’aneugle

Reap What You Sow

See That My Grave is Kept Clean

Insane Asylum

Gloomy Sunday

I Put a Spell on You

At the Dark End of the Street

Let My People Go (again)

Secondly, recorded by David Homes on Sony DAT with Radio Shack PZM mics at Gammage Auditorium, Arizona State Univesity, Tempe, Arizona December 02, 1994 with John Paul Jones. This tour was in support of the album The Sporting Life w/ John Paul Jones. Contains several non-album numbers, including "Communication Breakdown".

 Diamanda Galás & John Paul Jones - Live at Gammage Auditorium December 2,1994.

Tracklist -

Skotoseme

Do You Take This Man?

Dark End of the Street

You Gotta Move

Tony

Devil’s Radio

Let’s not Chat

Last Man Down

Baby’s Insane

Hex

The Sporting Life

You’re Mine

Communication Breakdown

Drag out the earplugs, the show is about to begin,
NØ

 

From the Desk of E.A. Poe (Section 38)

The previous Theatre of Hate post reminded me of avant-garde theater luminary & one-time surrealist Antonin Artaud’s Théâtre de la Cruauté or Theater of Cruelty & his treatise The Theatre and its Double so I was re-reading passages from it as I thought about how to finish off this weekend’s selections. I was in no mood to happily feature some chill-out Dub. In fact, I was feeling kinda the exact opposite. So I dragged out some Diamanda Galás. She's always salt in an open wound & definitely a proponent of the Theater of Cruelty.

In Artuad’s Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto, he posits: 

     “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”

In the section “Theater & the Plague” Artuad explains the role of the Plague Doctor & the birth of the Theater of Cruelty:

     “Over the poisonous, thick, bloody streams (color of agony and opium) which gush out of the corpses, strange personages pass, dressed in wax, with noses long as sausages and eyes of glass, mounted on a kind of Japanese sandal made of double wooden tablets, one horizontal, in the form of a sole, the other vertical, to keep them from the contaminated fluids, chanting absurd litanies that cannot prevent them from sinking into the furnace in their turn. These ignorant doctors betray only their fear and their childishness.”

     “The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit.”

Here, as a requiem for those dead or dying of AIDS, is a Plague Mass in Three Parts.

Diamanda Galás – Masque of the Red Death 2xCD re-issue, Mute 61588-2, 1993.
decryption code in comments

Disc 1 –

The Divine Punishment –

Deliver Me From Mine Enemies :

a -This Is The Law Of The Plague

b -Deliver Me From Mine Enemies

c - We Shall Not Accept Your Quarantine

d - Εξεαόυμε (Deliver Me)

e - Υιατί́́, Ό́́ Θξό́́ς?

f - Psalm 22 (Excerpt)

Free Among The Dead:

a - Psalm 88

b –Lamentations

c - Sono L'Antichristo

Saint of the Pit –

La Treizième Revient

Εξεαόυμε (Deliver Me)

L'Heautontimoroumenos (1857)

Artémis

Cris D'Aveugle (1873)

Disc 2 –

You Must Be Certain of the Devil –

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

Double-Barrel Prayer

Let’s Not Chat about Despair

Birds of Death

You Must be Certain of the Devil

Let My People Go

Malediction

The Lord is My Shepherd

Darkness & Decay & the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

NØ