I once coated the concrete halls of a Bed-Stuy storage facility with a torrent of my own blood in an accidental feat of acolytic devotion to the widely celebrated composer and “Diva of the Dispossessed” Diamanda Galás.

It was the summer of 2012, and the dubious threat of the apocalypse as dictated by the “ancient Mayan calendar” had begun to coagulate over Nostrand Avenue. I was working as a plucky young (unsustainably) bisexual intern, or more accurately, a hash-addled, extended vocal technique novitiate, directly under Diamanda’s assistant, while she cared for her ailing mother in San Diego. I got a bit careless with an exacto knife one afternoon while repackaging vintage promotional materials. While I narrowly avoided nicking a major artery in my left forearm, blood squirted indiscriminately from my hapless gash and I fainted on the frantic assistant’s shoulder. Sixteen stitches, all for the sake of the archive!

Forgive the gushing goth within me, but this abrupt exsanguination and its subsequent keloid insignia felt in some marginal way apropos given the legacy I’d volunteered to help preserve. This was my rite of indoctrination into the plasmatic cosmogonies conjured by Galás’s staggering oeuvre, one marked by extraordinary feats of compassionate release, public exorcism, and surgical precision. Indeed Galás, when referring to the technique deployed on her groundbreaking recording for solo scream Wild Women With Steak Knives, compares her voice to an “unmerciful brain surgery, a kinesthetic representation of the mind diffracted into an infinity of crystals.” Before investigating the seemingly limitless expanses of her instrument—encompassing Monica Belluci vampire orgies, collaborations in subtractive synthesis with Iannis Xenakis, and revelatory primal scream sessions in anechoic chambers under the influence of LSD—Galás undertook formal academic study in biochemistry and behavioral psychology, eventually persuaded by an encouraging côtérie of outlaw drag queens to pursue a full-time career in singing. Galás’s work later became the denunciative, lacerating voice of radical AIDS activism with her infamous live album Plague Mass, a militant, decibel-shredding condemnation of the Reagan administration’s weaponized silence in the face of the epidemic. To attend a Diamanda Galás performance is to enter an operation theater and witness a craniotomy of the collective unconsciousness, executed without anaesthetic, in which every twitch of exposed sulci and sluice of cephalic leakage is an act of confrontational exposure.

Yet assembling a sonic glossary of corporeal debasement, an unyielding maelstrom of embolism and psychic hemorrhage, has never been Galás’s endgame, despite the glut of journalistic portrayals that lazily render her as a Grand Guignol caricature. While it is true that Galás has long been an established gallows humorist, whose Rabelaisian wit is often eclipsed by the bulk of her conceptual rigor, she is most resonant as a preternaturally gifted moirologist: a funeral wailer whose unhinged prostrations towards ineffable grief are buttressed by her deft recontextualization of preexisting texts. When filtered through the alchemy of her inimitable voice, interpretation and citationilism become tools to reanimate the dead. In other words, the memento mori is the message. Galás uses the innate ephemerality of her body to channel universal mourning in remarkable and unprecedented ways. In moments untethered from legibility, Galás’s virtuosic glossolalia functions in a similar manner to the asemic writings of Henri Michaux; it gravitates beyond the lexicon of embodiment to reconstitute language at both a molecular and spiritual level, traversing multiple liminal borders often within a single inflection or glottal stop.

This elliptical obliteration of Cartesian dualism, this exalted sodomization of a body without organs, arguably reaches its purgatorial climax on Broken Gargoyles (2022), an album forged from the ideological mortar that binds the tombs of unknown soldiers, the ruins of leper colonies, and the sallow halls of overcrowded hospice facilities. Inspired by the historical ostracization of servicemen disfigured during WW1, who upon repatriation were forced to wear iron masks to disguise their maimed faces or disappear from public altogether, Galás harnesses the early expressionist poetry of Georg Heym, most prominently his work Das Fieberspital, which details the anguish and delirium of yellow fever patients forced into isolation in the early 20th century German medical wards in which his father worked, and Die Dämonen der Stadt, depicting the pagan god Baal perched atop a crumbling edifice, portenting the immense carnage and psychic wreckage of The Great War.

Broken Gargoyles is a contrapuntal sonic diptych, a bipartite onslaught of free indirect discourse and interdimensional slippage: vision obscured by congealed gauze, sensation blunted by morphine drip, clustered trajectories of nonlinear violence, rupture, flashback, and phantom pain. It is immediately clear that we are not in the company of the Faustian blues chanteuse of The Singer (1992) or the Lorena Babbitt-turned-harpy of The Sporting Life (1994). This is Galás as innovative neoclassicist, as baroque avant-garde visionary. In The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum describes operatic tone production as an act which “...participates in that larger, historical throat, the Ur-throat, the queen’s throat, the throat-in-the sky, the throat-in-the-mind, the voice box beneath the voice box.” Galás, who stresses the traditional bel canto style of singing as a foundational base for her more strident vocal exhumations, gnashes at the threshold of these signifiers to trouble the complex mythologies attached to them. Each archetypal throat exists in a loaded continuum; it is fitting that the etymology of gargoyle comes from the Old French gargouille, the noise of both air and water mixing in the throat. Here the gargoyle’s throat is ragged, ulcerous, parched, and struggling in vain to phonate.

“Mutilatus” begins the first of its 23 minutes in media res, with a modulated piano rumble that evokes the clanging of tinnitus, the whirring and ringing of the eadrums amidst a vast explosion. A fusillade of keening from another realm gradually emerges. It is the throat of the Valkyrie, polyphonous and prismatic, wordlessly invoking the names of the slain. This initial overture of detonation transforms into an achingly beautiful processional drone. We are concussively lifted out of the trenches into the sacrificial rites of a Nibelung ossuary, before the sound of a frigid wind brings us back to the combat-ravaged landscape, where Galás switches registers from her treble-laden fugue state to a hoarse, eviscerated Sprechstimme. Vultures hover eagerly in the interstices between putrefaction and petrification as the casualties accrue. Chimes appear intermittently between more turbulent passages, as if to denote sparse granules of memory. The relentless multivocality and terminal velocity deployed here is reminiscent of, on the one hand, Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden, a labyrinthine one-sentence screed written in the aftermath of Guyotat’s desertion from the Algerian war, and on the other the unsparing nihilism of Elem Klimov’s celluloid hellscape Come and See. Acoustic guitar, a rarity in Galás’s catalogue, appears stark, unadorned, detuned, as if to signify distant old-world comforts. We then hear the striking of a match, a reminder that night has fallen. A sickening thud echoes from the depths of an asylum basement. The Teutonic litany resumes with renewed vitriol, over a pestilent electronic buzz, a swarm of flies emptying from a dilapidated elevator shaft. A discordant piano figure closes the track with stumbling Brechtian menace.

The second movement is entitled “Abiecti,'' Latin for “those thrown away, abandoned, outcast.” It starts with an aural Sturm und Drang of metallic scraping strings. Here the oppressive din of cauterizing instruments and the rattling of stretchers overwhelms the listener. It sounds as if Galás’s esophageal lining is irrevocably torn over the course of these 17 minutes. She shrieks for fallen men who have relinquished their autonomy and their anatomy to the military state. In the wake of battle the aphasic utterances of the disinherited, of the tongueless, teeter at the edge of meaning. It is the throat of the demon queen Rangda, a fathomless shock corridor, coruscating in febrile disjunction as it swallows entire populations. It was important for Galás to note upon the album’s release that gorgon, not dissimilar from gargoyle, shares a Proto-Indo-European root with the Sanskrit word garjana, signifying guttural sounds or the growling of a beast, and thus possibly began as an onomatopoeia. We envision the laugh of the decapitated Medusa as her head sails through a plume of sulfurous smoke across enemy lines. A Blitzkrieg of indignation foments in the stereo field, blasts of white noise spread like electrical fires in an evacuated military base. These final passages gesture towards the despicable continuity of war, with digital processing that alludes to drone surveillance and biological weaponry. A coda of distorted voice suggests an electrolarynx but also points towards crimes of the future—to profiteers’ and nationalists’ propensity for continued orchestrations of barbarism and exploitation. Through her attention to the abominations of the past, Galás vehemently critiques the systemic failures of modernity, exposing the proletariat still suffering under the collapsed façade of neoliberalism while predicting the consequences of a reinvigorated global wave of fascistic ideology.

If we were to conduct a thorough medical examination of Galás’s body of work, where the rectum is a panopticon and the vena cava courses with santa sangre infectada, it is through the endoscopic dexterity of Broken Gargoyles that we may diagnose the proverbial Queen’s throat as an infinite warzone: shrapnel-embedded, deterritorialized, inexorably marred by atrocity. It is within this psychoacoustic terrain, that of spontaneous tracheal implosions and distended suppurating uvulas, that Galás’s voice can potentially operate as a graft or a transplant, regenerative in its confrontation and disavowal of intergenerational traumas.