State Laughter

If you want to scare your kids, play this for them before they go to sleep. Galas has a magnetism....able to leech despair out of the atmosphere and turn it into fearless power. Forget the cosplay of most industrial....this ranks with SPK as sheer warfare. To quote the reissues write up on band camp "When asked about her earliest work, in the early nineties Diamanda spoke of the ‘athletic discipline’ required, and described the physical toll of her performances as ‘like a ripping of the flesh’. Likening the discipline of her attack to warfare, she said that the idea of performing without perfect vocal technique would be like ‘someone going to war who didn’t know how to fight’; she described singing as ‘an attack energy’ – the transformation of the body into a weapon. The Litanies of Satan is divided into two experimental pieces of physical performance with a terrifying intensity, at the limits of madness, which is certainly not for all ears but is in all essence timeless. " It is extremely bodily music. Phantasms in rapture rising out of body to examine their own organs pumping blood and bile thru out their diseased systems. I don't think I can do justice to her recordings with words. There is nothing else like this. Totally human and totally inhuman simultaneously...or rather a state of human unreachable by anyone else.