Jedediah Wheeler, who helped produce “Plague Mass” at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1990, said: “She knows her music; she knows her voice. She developed her own operatic tradition, unique to herself and based on understanding of the repertoire. It was not just that.”
In the beginning, Galás played avant-garde works in Europe with the likes of Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis, and back in San Diego he was part of a raucous band that would “play free jazz by standards to totally free-for-all.”
Recorded in a cellar in England, the title track of “The Litanies of Satan” (1982), her first album, set Baudelaire’s poetry against a creaky backdrop. The message was simultaneously terror and power, harshness and grandeur: “The palace of despair”, she called it in the even more aggressively distorted “Panoptikon”, released on her self-titled second album in 1984.
She wrote “Deliver Me From Mine Enemies,” the first part of “The Divine Punishment,” in San Francisco, at a studio called Decapitation Center, which had an expensive array of synthesizers roaring beneath her raucous howls on the finished album. Her style here may resemble a piece of industrial and death metal music from that period, but then she suddenly deviates into folk wails and cheers. The thunderous incantations of the second part, “Free Among the Dead”, were formed by improvisations with producer Dave Hunt.
By the time the album was released, her brother was seriously ill, but he insisted on listening to it. “I was sitting outside the room,” Galás recalled, “and I was crying. And he was sitting there, you know, when someone is really sick, they keep themselves together. He was sitting on the couch with his boyfriend listening and I thought: that’s really cruel.’
Over the next few years, however, she began to realize that those who were sick did not find her music offensive or cruel. Finally, they would tell her that someone had acknowledged their despair and helplessness.
