San Diego-born Galás came up playing both classical and jazz music. She not only accompanied her Anatolian Greek father’s gospel choir and joined his New Orleans-style band, but also performed as a piano soloist with the San Diego Symphony at the age of 14. She went on to play with various groups that included heavies of the new-jazz thing, such as a circa-’74 combo in Pomona, California, that included cornetist Bobby Bradford, sax man David Murray bassist Mark Dresser, and drummer Stanley Crouch. She made her first public performance in 1979, collaborating on an opera with Vinko Globokar and Amnesty International about the arrest torture, and assasination of a Turkish woman for treason. In 1982 she released her debut album, The Litanies of Satan, which showcased her early forays into unorthodox vocal expression and multiphonics, and which included an 18-minute performance piece titled “Wild Women With Steak Knives.” She has created work dealing with AIDS (including the recently re-mastered The Divine Punishment), genocide and mental disease, as well as compositions for voice and piano set to the works of exiled poets. She also collaborated with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones on the 1994 album The Sporting Life. Her 2022 album Broken Gargoyles employs a vast array of advanced vocal and instrumental techniques to deftly probe the weaving, warping transformation on the nervous systems of her post-traumatic soldiers and dying diseased, leading Pitchfork to declare her “a world apart from other musicians.”
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