It's been said that singer/composer/performance artist Diamanda Galás has vocal chords of titanium. Her incredible skill and three-and-a-half-octave vocal range make her one of the most talented American vocalists working today, but it was her unapologetic persona and coherent analysis of voicelessness that drew me initially to her performances. Her work ranges from a Plague Mass on the subject of AIDS and its victims to fairly straight-ahead rock album with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones called The Sporting Life to more assaultive and difficult pieces like The Litanies of Satan.

Virginia Eubanks: What I'm really fascinated with in your work is the combination of anger and art and politics - especially when it's referenced in explicitly protest musics, like gospel and jazz. A lot has been said about your anger or about the aggressive nature of your music, but the mix of political activism and art often gets left out. How has this combination worked for you, and how do you expect it to affect your audiences?

A 1989 ArtForum article said, "She provides a cathartic focus or condensation of emotions connected with AIDS." And I don't really see a cathartic element to your work. I think that's too passive·

Diamanda Galás: Well said!! That's actually the line I like to use. The reason that I say that is that people will ask me if my performance is a catharsis, and I'll say, whether it is or not is irrelevant. The point is that I'm supposed to say what I have to say as articulately as possible and I'm supposed to do it interestingly on a technical and structural level. Whether it's cathartic for me is then, perhaps, another question that you could ask. But if it's the primary focus, then it's much better to just go visit people in mental hospitals. That's not what an artist is supposed to be doing. An artist is supposed to go and provide a vision of something we don't know about (theoretically).

As far as whether or not my work is cathartic for my audience, it's not my place to assume that. I am supposed to be saying what I know about life with my medium, the medium that I've trained for, the thing I do the best, hopefully, with the tools I have as a craftsperson. Let's say we're talking about the sound and the words as a medium for everything I know about life - and that's necessarily going to mean that if I have a certain attitude towards death, or a certain attitude towards fighting death, whatever that attitude is, whatever that emotion is is going to be the same as what the music is.

I'm not, for example, going to discuss something like someone being incarcerated in an hotel room dying of AIDS, and discuss that in a light, folksy sort of way. I do it in a very strident way.

VE: Joan Biaz you're not!

DG: (laughing) Well, I can't really comment on that because I've never seen her perform, so it's not fair! I just feel that I have to say it the way I say it as a Turkish-Greek-American, which is going to be different than how somebody else is going to say it. I have this background that's going to make it pretty emotional. I was raised this way! Every statement you make is going to have a certain Cocteau vibe to it.

VE: In a best-case scenario, what would you want your audience to go away thinking, or is that even a concern?

DG: I think the most important thing is to speak honestly and as well about a situation as I can, and after that, what the audience does with it really is their own business. Because I'm an AIDS activist, I would like to think that what I'm saying could be of inspiration or could be of comfort to people dealing with the epidemic. That's my first thought.

Some people think the way I say things is too rough, and perhaps too politically incorrect in a certain way, so that it can't be comforting, but that's the paradox of being an artist - you have to say what you see, and that may not be comforting to the very people you'd like to be comforting to. That's a very unfortunate thing, and that's why I don't see my music as particularly therapeutic. If I'm going to do something therapeutic, I'll go into the hospital and sing Christmas carols, or something. I really make a separation, and I have done that.

As an activist, I have to say my primary goal is connecting to people who are dealing with the epidemic. As far as converting ignorant people, I have to say that I care about it on a political level, I don't care about it on an artistic level. As an artist, I don't care. Because there's so many of the converted that could use a chance to hear what they are already thinking, because the media around us are so user unfriendly, that preaching to the converted is a very underestimated job. I just did a concert in Phoenix and we had all these Christians surrounding the auditorium, protesting my performance and handing out booklets about how I'm a Satanist, and that kind of stuff. Now, am I going to convert them? I don't give a damn. I really don't. We all have a certain amount of time to live, it's best to spend it doing more constructive things than talking to ignorant people.

VE: Well, thinking about your connection to gospel music - there's a recurring theme in a lot of your music about "witness," witnessing, which is very much a part of the gospel tradition. That's one of the things I really admire about your work - you get a very large group people to witness for something like the AIDS epidemic. I think it's a very powerful and positive thing·

DG: That's interesting, because in Greek, the word matyrion means "witness," and the word martyr comes from that.

VE: Some of your work has gone to pretty savage lengths when it explores anger. I think this has touched a chord with a lot of the women who come to your shows, because most women are consumed, on a daily, hourly basis, with dealing with anger. How has your art helped you to express and deal with it?

DG: The most important thing, for me, is that being able to do these performances has helped me deal with a certain amount of the anger, but even so, one has to think that there are other things you have to do to help you deal with that that are constructive in certain ways or destructive in certain ways, and those are the things that haunt me quite a bit. I find that as you get older, the anger gets much greater instead of much less. It means that you've been walking down that street and hearing crap in your ear x number of years longer than before. You get to a point where you start to wonder, what is going to be the next step with all of this? I really have to say that that's taken me to a point where I have been considered extremely paranoid and extremely aggressive, on a certain level, and I don't know where that's going. I really don't know where that's going.

VE: How do you feel about some of the other performers out there who are dealing with issues of anger, like, for example, Karen Finley?

DG: There should be many, especially female, performers out there right now that are expressing strength. We need to have as many as possible. I don't understand how anyone can do anything really passive at this point. I suppose if you live in a remote, remote area and have lots of money, you could do it. But even then, I don't know! I don't think that women are hormonally constituted to be passive. I think that's something that is a male indoctrination.