Galas’ Album Speaks to AIDS Audience : Pop music: The avant-garde singer, who performs at the Palace tonight, turns blues and spirituals into a series of psychodramas.

Among the blues and gospel songs that Diamanda Galas turns inside out on her new album is Willie Dixon’s “Insane Asylum.” It’s a setting that Galas knows well: Her first vocal performances, in the mid-’70s, were given in mental institutions, and she later spent a little time inside one herself.

“The work that I’m doing is not separated from my life,” said Galas, who performs at the Palace tonight. “If I’m talking about extreme isolation . . . states of extraordinary depression, it’s because I know this for myself. . . . I’m lucky to have this work. That music has kept me going in the face of a lot of craziness.”

Galas is an established figure in avant-garde music circles, particularly in Europe, but her rule-bending individuality and the passionate nature of her music have earned her attention from experimentally inclined rock fans as well.

She shares a forbidding cell in the rock underground with such intrepid explorers of the dark subconscious as Nick Cave, but in a recent phone interview from a tour stop on Chicago, she sounded pleasant and earnest as she searched carefully for the precise phrases to capture the complex process of her art and life.

Galas describes her vocal approach as “unmatrixed,” and on the new “The Singer” album--which like all her work since 1984 addresses AIDS--she takes American blues and spirituals and puts them through the wringer. She sounds possessed as she bellows, rasps, yelps and gargles, and in the most harrowing passages her voice sounds like a violin string made of barbed wire.

This riveting, cathartic series of psychodramas might puzzle fans of, say, the Winans, but it speaks clearly to her target audience of people struggling with AIDS.

“My reappropriation of this music takes it back into its original roots, which is as a military music,” said Galas. “Gospel music is a fighter’s music. It’s music sung to stay alive in the face of the bloodhounds. . . .

“The way I sing the songs goes back to a much earlier level. The original place in possession and in rituals, rituals to stay alive, that create ecstasy and profound energy. It’s like a warrior’s cries in the face of attack.

“Aside from the disease itself, the attack on the mind is so profound that survival is a very perilous thing. It’s death by isolation. The people are truly cut off. . . .

“A person who has this disease really has to think very aggressively, very much like a fighter, and that’s the same way you have to think when you’ve gone through situations like mental illness,” said Galas, whose own struggle with paranoia and depression has enhanced her empathy for the states of mind related to AIDS. (Her brother, playwright-actor Philip-Dimitri Galas, died of the disease in 1986.)

“You have to think aggressively about how this organism can be kept functioning, because if it shuts down for too long it may not function anymore. That’s how people end up in nuthouses for 10 or 15 years. . . . It scares me that people become lost.”

Galas, who now lives in New York, grew up in San Diego and played in her father’s New Orleans jazz band, but was encouraged to sample all styles of music. She says the main musical impetus in the development of her vocal style was the tradition of “free jazz” horn players such as Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman. She began using several microphones to create a spatial “cage” and foot pedals to change reverb or delay “as a macrocosm of changes of thought.”

In Europe, Galas worked with composers Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xanakis. Her first album, “The Litanies of Satan,” came out in 1982, and two years later she began what she calls simply “the work”--”Plague Mass (Masque of the Red Death),” a trilogy dedicated to people who have AIDS or are HIV-positive.

With that uncompromising background, it’s a little surprising to hear some blues lines on the new album that are almost conventional, and even more surprising to hear Galas addressing the issue of broadening her audience.

“I suppose you could say this record would be, pragmatically speaking, more accessible to people, but it isn’t the reason I did this material,” she said of “The Singer,” which is on Mute Records and is distributed by Elektra.

“Sure. I think the most, ‘obscure’ musician in the world wants to be communicating with as many people as possible. It’s just a human desire. That’s what the performer is, someone who’s sharing experience with the rest of the world. Telling a story, having a chance finally to be heard. . . . So I guess you could say yes, I think about accessibility. But quite obliquely.”