Weekend Reviews : Music : Galas Vents Her Fury in ‘Mass’

On a candle-lit platform onthe stage of Royce Hall, UCLA, composer-performer Diamanda Galas anoints herself with blood as she chants the words Christ spoke on the night of his betrayal and that priests repeat in the Mass:

Hoc est signum corpus meum,

Hoc est signum sangre meum.

However, Christ has no place in Galas’ “Plague Mass.” For her, people with AIDS embody the ultimate betrayal, the ultimate suffering, and it is their bodies, their blood, that she invokes in this simultaneously breathtaking and unbearable 90-minute solo on Friday.

Can the Mass be a curse? This one can, for its unyielding confrontational intensity springs from Galas’ fury at the profiteers, power-brokers, hypocrites and voyeurs of the AIDS crisis: “The killers let us die, one by one . . . ,” she sings, consumed by anger. “Die! And faster please. We’ve got no money for extended visits.”

Beyond expressing the hatred for the straight world gathering force among homosexuals and their allies as AIDS shows societies at their worst, “Plague Mass” also offers a potent statement of the New Paganism. Bare-breasted and defiant, Galas reincarnates one of the oldest religious images in Western art: the Minoan snake-goddess or priestess from Crete, carved 1,600 years before the birth of Christ.

However, instead of snakes, Galas holds microphones in her hands and into them pours a virtuosic collage of classical vocal techniques, pop idioms, Bible texts and her own poetry that could belong to no other era. Indeed, she distills in solo vocalism all the restless sound-sampling, tape-editing and remote-control switching of a society fatally close to input-overload.

Although her music incorporates prerecorded vocals along with percussion tracks, electronic effects and her own piano playing, most of the time what you hear is a single voice violently ricocheting from one style-language-accent octave to another. “Were you a witness?” she growls, piercing the verb with a high, long-held wail of pain. “And on that bloody day, were you a witness?”

“Plague Mass” draws a line between those who consider themselves unaffected by AIDS and those who have lost a brother (as Galas has), friend, lover, colleague or culture-hero to the disease. Approach the event as an outsider and Galas will seem just another Hollywood Boulevard banshee, howling at the moon.

Share her perspective, as most of her audience did, and the performance becomes an outlet for all those primal feelings (outrage, betrayal and blind hate) you’ll never find in any sentimental AIDS movie-of-the week.

Fiercely prowling the stage under apocalyptic smoke and lighting effects, Galas ultimately becomes AIDS itself (“I am the plague, I am the Antichrist”) and she issues a warning in the voice of its victims:

“We who have died shall never rest in peace.

“There is no rest until the fighting’s done.”