Diamanda Galás Announces New Album 'Broken Gargoyles'

On August 26 renowned singer, composer and pianist Diamanda Galás will release her new album, Broken Gargoyles via Intravenal Sound Operations. Employing a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques, Broken Gargoyles is arguably Galás' most intellectually, sonically and viscerally formidable work to date.

The album's title refers to WW1 soldiers who were so facially disfigured that they were called "broken gargoyles." The album finds the visionary artist deftly probing the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased.

Broken Gargoyles was composed in 2020 though the first incarnation of the work was played as a sound installation at the Kapellen Leprosarium (Leper's Sanctuary) in Hanover, Germany (in keeping with the theme, the sanctuary was built around 1250 and served as a quarantine for those who suffered from the plague and leprosy in the Middle Ages). The work was finalized in collaboration with the artist and sound designer Daniel Neumann.

Talking of their work together he says, "It was a wild working method, all remotely, with all these different pre-existing and newly recorded fragments." In May Portugal's Theatro Circo hosted the sound installation and Galás wrote them this: Broken Gargoyles refers to the cynical denomination of the soldiers and their war-disfigured faces. Surgery was performed upon them in order to send them to the backlines of the theatre operation.

Some were released with no support, and hidden, special housing units were designed to house those with no arms and legs, and mutilated faces. Some of these dead alive were used for medical experimentation. Dalton Trumbo wrote of this last occasion in Johnny Got His Gun, in which his SOS tapping was ignored in order to continue medical study

Today Galás shares new excerpts from the album as well as a video originally made for the Theatro Circo installation explaining the LP's genesis and story.

Listen to the new singles here: