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Track Listings
| 1. Litanies Of Satan, The |
| 2. Wild Women With Steak-Knives (The Homocidal Love Song For Solo Scream) |
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
In the 80's nuggets abounded.
Searching for them was always worth the effort. This record originally appeared on Y records. A friend of mine introduced me. Returning back to his squat in Essex he carefully placed it on the turntable and cranked it to number 10. The Rega Cerwin speakers then took the biggest pounding they were ever built for. Out of the smoke arose a plethora of high pitch screams, whispers and judderings. Instantly split between wanting it to end and waiting for the next deluge. It is the work of genius, but you have to be in a certain frame to listen. Harrowing, brutal, powerful and demented, it is the flow of inner voices, personalities split asunder, all trying to pour through the same door at the same time. The result is a regal cacophony, the effect akin to being punched in the face by harmonics.
Getting back to the squat, the room unleashed a sonic vibration rattling and smashing into the floorboards and ceiling. Creating an instantaneous effect the heavy metal lovers living beneath rushed upstairs with iron bars, unsure of what lay above, monster, madness or beast.
Careful ingestation helped to calm their shredded nerves, as we all sat back and rowed across to Hades. G Force Diamanda ripped into our rib cages with wave after wave of litanies. It was an exquisite torment as Diamanda takes you to places that you would never admit to existing.
Afterwards, when it finished we each felt like pioneers entering a brave new world. We sat comatose, a shared communal experience, never revealed, until today.
Searching for them was always worth the effort. This record originally appeared on Y records. A friend of mine introduced me. Returning back to his squat in Essex he carefully placed it on the turntable and cranked it to number 10. The Rega Cerwin speakers then took the biggest pounding they were ever built for. Out of the smoke arose a plethora of high pitch screams, whispers and judderings. Instantly split between wanting it to end and waiting for the next deluge. It is the work of genius, but you have to be in a certain frame to listen. Harrowing, brutal, powerful and demented, it is the flow of inner voices, personalities split asunder, all trying to pour through the same door at the same time. The result is a regal cacophony, the effect akin to being punched in the face by harmonics.
Getting back to the squat, the room unleashed a sonic vibration rattling and smashing into the floorboards and ceiling. Creating an instantaneous effect the heavy metal lovers living beneath rushed upstairs with iron bars, unsure of what lay above, monster, madness or beast.
Careful ingestation helped to calm their shredded nerves, as we all sat back and rowed across to Hades. G Force Diamanda ripped into our rib cages with wave after wave of litanies. It was an exquisite torment as Diamanda takes you to places that you would never admit to existing.
Afterwards, when it finished we each felt like pioneers entering a brave new world. We sat comatose, a shared communal experience, never revealed, until today.
9 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Diamanda Galas was brought up in a Greek Orthodox houshold where she learnt to play the piano to an exceptionally high standard (singing was frowned upon). She broke away from her strict up-bringing to become a jazz pianist for a while before recording this piece of exotica. A truely terrifying recital of the Charles Boudilere's poem (he is French and I have probably misspelled his name) of the same name. This recording includes all sorts of unmimicable screeching and wailings characteristic of Diamand. This is not a record for the faint hearted or narrow minded.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
"I am not talking about steak...."
11 April 2001
Format:Audio CD
If you are not familiar with Diamanda Galas' extraordinary vocal capabiities, this is the disc to introduce you to them. These 2 recordings, LITANIES OF SATAN and WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK KNIVES, were recorded in the early 80s in London. The background story behind the production of WWWSK is particularly interesting. Seek out a copy of Forced Exposure magazine from 1989. Diamanda's interview will give you so much insight into her creative processes. She talks about literally being awake for more than 24 hours, fueled by caffeine among other things, and laboring through the recording process for WWWSK with producer Dave Hunt in a freezing London basement. Sound boards crashing, microphones blowing out, and numerous re-takes are all in a normal day's "work" for Miss Galas. Best of all her sense of humor really comes through in her interviews.
WWWSK is an aural "exploration" for lack of a better word, of a woman in the throes of schizophrenia. Mixing glossolalia, reverb, spatial delay, signal processing, and multi-tracking, Galas brings out the many complex layers of this woman's psyche. There is much terror and humor in her "words", sometimes the two emotions colliding in the same sound-space. You will understand what I mean only upon hearing it numerous times. Each listening brings a new experience to the listener.
What is so amazing to me is that I have been playing this for more than 11 years, and it still sounds and is BEYOND the avant-garde in music. To call her art "music" is in many ways a disservice. What Galas does is so much more. Her compositions take the listener into places of the human experience most of us will never know. It is her unique ability to communicate psychological, emotional and psychical states of consciousness with such force and clarity that keeps her from being merely 'categorized' for the comfort of art and music critics alike.
She will continue to drag the art, music and social critics kicking and screaming into the future that is her particular style of Expressionism.
"O, Satan, prends pitie de ma longue misere..."
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Majestic and Grotesque -- A Great Place to Start
26 Aug 2000
Format:Audio CD
This early work by Galas features two pieces, the magisterial "Litanies of Satan" that uses a text by Baudelaire for lyrics, and the hysterical (in both senses of the word) "Wild Women with Steak-Knives", aptly subtitled "The Homicidal Love-Song for Solo Scream". The two pieces taken together are an excellent example of Galas' vocal and compositional ability, though they do not showcase the piano-voice or rock-oriented compositions of some of her other work. "Litanies" is literally a tour of the Inferno, with all of the grandeur of Dante's national epic; "Wild Women" is nothing but bare, amplified voice in an empty room, howling -- disjointed, fragmented, schizophrenic and an incredibly impressive display of what Galas can do with her voice.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
The Litanies Of Satan ~ Diamanda Galas
24 Feb 2002
Format:Audio CD
Well, this is the weirdest record I own! Diamanda Galas has a voice that cannot be described. On this album there are two pieces, Wild Women With Steak-Knives and The Litanies of Satan. WWWSk features Galas screaming over and over like a madman. Her voices carries higher then I have ever heard! The Litanies Of Satan is a version of a poem by a French autor. This is a really creepy album, but if you like challenging art/music, this is the album for you!
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