Wave Tank’s 8-track album, RawMantiSch (2025, Bandcamp) is a clever manipulation of faders and buttons, employing as best as it can the capabilities of a number of different synths and vocal filters. Without overloading the songs, the compositional approach is based on simplicity, repetition and imagination. In this way, loud, weird and monotonous bass lines, for instance, stay interesting and fresh throughout the songs, allowing beats and rythmic patterns to create the required atmosphere for the story that is communicated. In the end, whether inspired by personal obsessions (track No 3 – Christian Death’s, Dogs, and Dead Kennedys’, At My Job), or referencing personal favourites (track No 7 – Chris & Cosey’s, In Ecstacy), the Neo-Romantics of the 80s, the punk ethos and the goth rock aesthetics introduce a feeling of urgency to take action. But why take action and how is it encouraged?

The title of the album, RawMantiSch, makes immediately a connection with ‘romanticism’. Romantisch is the German word for ‘romantic’. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, the Romantic movement in the arts was associated with heightened emotional expression and nature. It was a product of rural communities, valuing the countryside over the city. For the romantics, the city was unnatural, a monster.

However, although the title does sound like ‘Romantisch’, it uses instead the word ‘raw’. Raw, of course, can mean raw or uncooked food, as it has come straight from nature. Moreover, ‘raw’ can be understood as raw emotions – i.e. feelings which are unfiltered by civilisation and societal norms, and they can often be seen as honest, frank and realistic. Raw feelings sometimes are valued more, as ‘raw’ is also used to mean strong or intense.

Wave Tank’s song Human Memories is exactly about this. It looks back at earlier stages of human life on earth to bring our attention to what valuable things we have lost in the name of extreme urbanisation, digitalisation, human-to-human connection, increased separation from nature, and more:

- ‘Do you remember the colours and the sunset?’, ‘Do you remember the rain?’, ‘Do you remember the trees?’

Similarly, Do You Want Time to Get Slow is a direct attack to city life:

- ‘Do you feel time getting slow when you walk away this modern city?’, ‘All puppets want you to work, to work in high speed.’, ‘Do you want to break the clocks?’

At the same time, the Romantic movement was also a reaction to the Enlightenment, which sought to revive the classical idea of the self-governed people in the ‘free’ city, and more specifically, the ancient cities of Athens and Republican Rome. It therefore attacked both the Enlightenment’s fundamental principles of science, reason and logic, and the means with which it represented itself, which was none other than the classical tradition, with its focus on balance, harmony, symmetry and the logical organisation of an arrangement. The Romantic movement proposed culture instead of science, emotions instead of reason, and imagination instead of logic. [i]

The album cover of RawMantiSch (2025) also disregards logic. Disjointed uneven patches of abstract patterns surrounding what looks like a Weimar photographic portrait for a movie poster or an avant-garde magazine. Using a glitch-art technique, which itself reminds Dada collages and magazine covers for mid-twentieth century publications, the black-and-white photographic portrait, whether AI generated or found, is defaced in a manner that reminds the CoBrA artist Asger Jorn’s artistic vandalisms. [i] The cover of RawMantiSch (2025), then, also plays with our memories of the black-and-white era and hand-made typography.

Asger Jorn, 'Untitled' (Raphael's Angels), c. 1949

Memories, of course, in the sense of history, tradition and ancient religions, were at the heart of the Romantic movement’s political ambitions. After all, Romanticism coincided with the rise of nationalism. With the use of visual prompts, which often included paintings depicting extreme natural phenomena or historical landmarks of local significance, memories aimed at stirring the viewer’s emotions. These emotions could be either positive, such as extreme admiration, intense joy, or rapture – when seeing, for instance, a vast area of green land with spectacular waterfalls and impressively colourful plants – or negative, such as the deep fear felt by seeing strong blasts of wind gusting through a forest, uprooting trees and damaging buildings.

In music, too, the Romantic composer would use extreme dramatization to disturb the traditional sense of balance and harmony, which the Enlightenment valued so much, using dynamic colouring and extreme atonality. For example, the late-Romantic composer Richard Strauss, in his opera Elektra (1909), an adaptation of the ancient Greek play Electra (c.420-414 BC) by Sophocles, the focus is on the psychological world of the protagonist, Elektra, not on the construction of a clear story. The music is deliberately loud, employing more than a hundred musical instruments, and repetitive.

If this sounds like the early-1990s grunge or shoegaze movements, which focused specifically on the atmosphere, it is because grunge and shoegaze artists were also interested precisely in the psychological effects created by music, and in this case, guitar noise. After all, when the electric guitar amplifier is turned to the maximum setting to create the greatest distortion possible, the words are obscured and difficult to decipher.

Romanticism’s capacity to move the masses emotionally was very quickly exploited by the elites, who were able to work on people’s imagination using the appropriate symbols, myths and memories to inspire irrational reactions. For example, in the same way that an image of powerful sea waves hitting with immense force the rocks in the seashore could inspire feelings of fear, grief, anxiety and despair, an image of one’s homeland depicting a local site of national importance could inspire love for the nation. Romantic art helped create in the minds of the masses a typical picture of the nation. By stressing some common physical characteristics and suppressing differences, the nation was made to look homogenous. [i]

More importantly, this national image showed that a nation was distinct from its neighbours, so its plants and trees had to be made to look different from those outside its borders. The elites had discovered now a way to convert the public to the national idea. The Romantic artist helped them make the abstract idea of the nation visible. National forests, lakes, rivers and plants could become instantly recognisable, and the nation’s borders clearly graspable by being recorded with archaeological accuracy. [i]

Wave Tank also address this issue. The song Facing the Rich People is about these elites, those individuals who are above the politicians. In your country, wherever you are, you have an example of this. A media baron, a biopharma mogul, an arms dealer in the legitimate defence industry. You read about them every day, and you know them, but you don’t know they are the local elites governing your country. You think the politician you voted for to represent you takes decisions about you. The role of the elites in what we call ‘democracy’ and their actions are invisible. Or do you see them?

Perhaps, invisible to many of you is also the so-called brain behind Wave Tank, who has been making music since 2007, slightly in the background and in disguise, experimenting with different musical genres and styles within the wider alternative scene and with a DIY approach. Some might have heard the name Mr.XIII in relation to this band, or in relation to projects such as VHSGhost, Background Projection, Galaxia Obscura, Urban Seance, Bröckensbectrwm, and more. Some might also know him as DJ Tumult (real name Petros) and as a frequent clollaborator of Tango Mangalore, as a member of Gematos Arachnes Re File!, The Cyclothymics, Akiraja, Κωμωδία Θανάτου, Εμφιαλωμένοι Εραστές, Abra Macabra, Mani Deum, and other bands, or as the person to whom Eddie Dark’s 2023 album is dedicated.

Lastly, RawMantiSch (2025) doesn’t cost any money. It wasn’t made to be sold.

- Chris Salatelis

Chansard’s drawings also echo this message. The small, white, floating pieces of what looks like ice, on the front-cover artwork and on the inner sleeve, are ice glaciers that have been cut off from the land, as the earth’s temperature rises, and travel in the sea, where they melt away. The ghost-looking and snow-covered mountains in front of the large moon on the front-cover have started to melt, too.

So, are Delacave actually environmentalists? And if they are, do they address the impact of human activity on the environment employing clichéd claims about buying a reusable coffee cup and recycling waste, using pictures of cute birds and animals in danger of extinction, or do they use pictures from The Ugly Animal Preservation Society and their own individual agency, like members of leaderless grassroots environmental movements, away from mainstream politics (or no politics at all), to influence spontaneous action locally and at community level?

Delacave were part of an artistic collective called La Grande Triple Alliance Internationale de l’Est (the Great International Triple Alliance of the East), whose members lived between Metz, Strasbourg, Bruxelles and Rome. Seb Normal and Liliane Chansard would not only perform live together with their fellow Alliance members and collaborate in the studio, but also meet up at house parties, as they shared the same attitude to life – “a life without any form of compromise”, as some of them say. A film about that Alliance captures this in the humorous but sarcastic and ironic language of its members and in the directness and cynicism of their artistic output targeting Western consumer society.

But this humorous artistic expression is serious and not light at all, because it is critical. It is like political cartoons, also known as editorial cartoons. Political cartoons may look harmless and light at first, but their satirical content and biting humour makes people refer to them as weapons, with some newspaper cartoonists even addressing themselves as ‘hired assassins’.

Of course, Liliane Chansard’s illustrations are cartoon-like drawings. And although they may have been produced as political commentary, their use in a cultural context, as part of an artistic work that is independent of organised politics, allows greater flexibility of interpretation. Whereas editorial cartoons, whose entertainment function becomes secondary, are only understood in political terms. This single-lens reading has often made them seem unpleasant, shocking, and even offensive.

In 2017, for example, editorial cartoons were seen as offensive and were banned from an exhibition by a group of liberal politicians, an otherwise open-minded political orientation advocating democratic principles and values, such as freedom of expression, dialogue, and the rights of individuals. They were political cartoons from various Greek newspapers that had been sent to Brussels for the European Parliament exhibition “EU Turns 60: A Cartoon Party” (2017). According to the British Liberal Democrat politician who censored them, the Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Catherine Bearder, who was responsible for cultural and artistic events – before Britain’s departure from the EU, as the exhibition took place in 2017 – these cartoons included “controversial content”.

Some of them had been previously exhibited in Athens, at the 2016 exhibition ‘Sweet Europe’, which included cartoons made during Greece’s 2015 referendum on the country’s exit from the Eurozone and its 2016 UK equivalent, and they had simply been seen as critical of EU’s economic and security policies. Mrs Bearder’s rejection of these cartoons is understandable, because they undermined EU’s effort and ongoing concern to maintain an image for itself that promotes unity among member states and ideas of fairness and democracy.

One of them depicted a rag-wearing child refugee being saved by a medieval-Europe aristocrat, and its caption read, ‘Europe During War Always Takes Care of the Refugees She Generates”. This implied that EU’s promotion of a humanitarian image for itself was at least hypocritical. Dating from 1996, when war refugees came to Europe from Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and many other places, it raised questions about the root causes of war, Europe’s involvement in armed conflict, and Europe’s colonial past, to emphasise the fact that if Europe had prevented these wars, there would be no war refugees.

‘Europe During War Always Takes Care of the Refugees She Generates’ (1996), by Stathis.

At the same time, militaries are not only big carbon emitters, with aircrafts, ships and land vehicles being fossil-fuel intensive, including the arms industry with its huge manufacturing capacity and the transportation of military equipment, but also cause significant environmental damage during armed conflicts, with toxic gases, oil and gas leaks, or fires. Afghans, for instance, still experience air pollution and issues with their contaminated land and poisoned water, as a result of the US military intervention there, especially with the so-called Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), dropped by the US in 2017, triggering skin diseases in people, and degradation of agricultural soils that caused food insecurity, both locally and globally. But as the speakers from the recent COP28 summit’s panel The Climate Toll of War and Peace on Climate Action said, the amount of money flowing into military operations is exactly the money needed to develop fossil-fuel free energy solutions to slow down global warming. Also, the only thing that can enable dialogue between countries, for international cooperation and global agreements that will tackle our environmental challenges, is peace.

So, it is not a coincidence that Liliane Chansard has chosen a form of graphic art for Every Night is A Moon Rising (2023) that is as critical as political cartoons. Editorial cartoons capture in naive-looking images the complex reality of political diplomacy and geostrategic agendas, and at the same time they look very simple. This simplicity is her tactic. It makes her fictional characters more real and the stories of the album believable.

The music also does this. Delacave have written sweet and simple synth melodies to blur imagination and reality and make their message convincing. And although they create bizarre and strange sounds, by drowning their synths in special effects, they use them in moderation, keeping the songs direct and unpolished. So, in the end, after the closing track, An Escape in Headlights (another masterpiece), you think their message, “every atom of our being is nature”, is straightforward and simple, and not at all complicated or difficult to understand.

Of course, our planet is a complicated system, with everything being interconnected. That’s why we keep failing to reverse the destructive trends of human-made climate change. We approach the multidimensional climate and biodiversity problems as single issues, rather than complex and interlinked with other problems. We introduce economic or technological fixes, for example, without considering their undesirable effects, as was the case with energy made from soy, which had a series of unexpected outcomes: the demand for more land to grow soy led to loss of rainforest, which resulted in both loss of wildlife and reduced ability of forests to cool the climate, the high price of soy made farmers switch to soy growing for fuel, decreasing food availability and increasing food prices, which caused food insecurity, and the transport of the biomass around the world by highly-polluting freight ships hadn’t been accounted for, either.

We are therefore told that the man-made problems facing our planet can only be tackled if we look at the world through a big-picture lens and approach it as one big system, to enable a change of values, mindsets, habits, and even systems of governance, for a wholesale transformation of society. Because apart from the so-called environmental crisis, we also go through economic ‘crises’ all the time, the massive health ‘crisis’ that we recently experienced, food and energy ‘crises’, as well as ‘migrant crises’, which is the name given by the media to the movement of displaced populations from one place to another as a result of war, interventionist regime-changes, or long droughts. All these ‘crises’ are interlinked.

So, it is probably obvious by now how Delacave’s stories compare with the environmental concerns we see on mainstream media, which use celebrity climate-activists, like Guardian-readers’ favourite, the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, to greenwash high-status politicians, who pose with them to gain people’s support and continue creating new wars, establish global banks to fund technological or economic fixes that will not work, and even finance spy operations through self-proclaimed environmentalists, who operate under the guise of environmentalism and are presented in Western media as founders of charity organisations concerned with the endangered Asiatic cheetah.

More importantly, using the term ‘crisis’, which is associated with mental stress or natural disasters and other unexpected natural phenomena, our governments and the media that support them create the impression that our current ‘crises’ are also natural phenomena that occur suddenly. This helps shift the attention away from human involvement, preventing us from seeing that, in reality, the environmental, economic, health and other problems we experience are man-made.

With albums like Delacave’s Every Night Is A Moon Rising (2023), it becomes obvious that there are some artists – not Delacave – who are deeply concerned with the environmental damage caused by human activities, and address the problem of using animal fur, for example, or consuming meat products (which is great that they point these things out), but there are also artists, such as Delacave, who do not blame people for these problems, but look at the bigger picture and put the issue in the right context, that of powerful elites controlling governments and turning people into passive consumers. Delacave’s approach is a more original form of creative environmental action, and it may turn out that it will have a more lasting impact and be more effective.

Chris Salatelis

The album A Story of A Global Disease (2022) by Marseille-born and Brussels-based musician Naomie Klaus also relates to fake things that are made to look genuine. It is based on an idea about the Japanese Tower in Brussels and the Japanese Gardens that surround it. The Japanese Tower was constructed during 1901-1904 by orders of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had admired a similar tower, a Japanese pagoda, at an international world fair of commerce, the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and purchased it immediately. The King then asked the French architect Alexander Marcel to modify it and re-build it for him in the gardens of his Royal Palace in Brussels. When it was completed, he promised to transfer it to the nation after his death, so when he died in 1909, it was passed to the Belgian state.

The album was recorded during the recent pandemic for the project ‘On the Go’ by a Brussels arts organisation. The project invited artists to share art with the public, while restrictions were still in place, by making music to accompany walks throughout Brussels. Klaus decided to write music for a walk in the park around the Japanese Tower. Today, the Japanese Tower is administered by a public organisation within the City of Brussels authority which uses it as a museum, the Museum of the Far East. Visitors can admire not just the architecture and the surrounding gardens, but also the building’s decorative elements, including furniture and stained-glass windows, and a collection of art objects relating to the Belgian-Japanese relations throughout the years of cultural and economic exchange between the two countries.

Klaus herself describes the album as a collection of songs about ‘the artificial paradises of globalisation’. Using a range of electronic equipment to filter voice, drum-kits, and trigger synths, she expands on the idea that copies of famous cultural artefacts – like the Japanese Tower – can be enjoyed as exotic spectacles outside of the country they were made, to talk about global communication, free trade, and the problems of a consumer society. Songs such as ‘Can I Be Your Gheisha?’, ‘Crocodile Skin Shoes’, ‘Tourism Workers’, and ‘Can You Tell Me What Is Micronet?’, question the idea that the world is a tightly-woven international community with strong cultural and economic links (through international exhibitions or festivals and inter-governmental trade agreements).

During the pandemic, the word ‘globalisation’ was used by government officials around the world to mean cooperation between nations. The reality, however, was completely different, as the world is actually divided into separate nations with clearly defined borders. Governments of powerful nations competed with each other, prioritising the nation instead of the good of the humankind, and causing disagreements among them with their nationalistic decisions to buy enough vaccine supplies or large quantities of personal protective equipment (PPE) for themselves, rather than sharing them across the world.

The picture of a typical Japanese dish on the album cover also reminds the argument about globalisation by the sociologists Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta, who believe that globalisation does not flatten out cultural diversity but adds more and more layers to it. For Ichijo and Ranta, the promotion of national cuisine as a brand, for example, is a form of nationalism. National cuisine offers nations a form of ‘soft power’ (unlike the military and economic ‘hard’ power) – a term used in gastrodiplomacy to mean a state’s power to enhance its prestige and appeal using its ‘traditional’ cuisine in international relations. Mediterranean cuisine, for instance, is associated with health and wellbeing, because of its nutritional value, as is Japanese cuisine, because of its association with light eating due to its use of seafood and vegetables as main ingredients. Nations are supported in this, as there are many inter-governmental initiatives, such as UNESCO’s global list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, or smaller cross-national schemes such as European Union’s Protected Geographical Status framework, which increasingly link food items to specific geographical areas. By identifying products as originated in a specific region, not allowing other countries to market them under these names, Cornish butter, Scotch whiskey, Brussels sprouts, Jersey Royal potatoes, Greek Feta cheese, Frankfurter or Cumberland sausages, and about another thousand food items, help nations exploit food’s appeal for economic growth and support the tourism industry to strengthen their private sector.

A closer look at the image on the album front cover reveals that the bowl with a Japanese soup and the chopsticks are not real but artificial. This makes it a matching image for an album about ‘the artificial paradises of globalisation’. The Belgian artist and art educator ‘Harrison’ (real name Joël Vermot), who created it and made it look like real food, encourages the listener to consider the spread of globalisation in relation to not only the McDonaldisation of the world, but also the international promotion of national cuisines in general. Taiwan, for example, who is not widely recognised as an independent state, and its territory and sovereignty are in dispute, launched an official food campaign to ensure diplomatic survival. The campaign involved Taiwanese food festivals abroad, the establishing of a Taiwanese ‘culinary think tank’, Taiwanese culinary tours, etc. By marketing Taiwan as an interesting country and enhancing its international image, the country hoped to promote its products as attractive to global consumers.

So, depending on how food is used globally, even highly nutritious recipes and genuinely healthy culinary suggestions can be ‘deleterious’ to the world’s health – to use Friedrich Accum’s term. After all, food can function like any other cultural artefact that helps shape a country’s self-image, international status, and reputation. In fact, Belgium (today the capital of the EU) had seen a number of other commissions by King Leopold II before the Japanese Tower in Brussels, that included monuments, museums, and schools, bringing him much praise, as well as the nickname “the builder king”. This effort has been recently seen as an attempt to erase from the nation’s memory (and globally) his bad reputation, because of the human atrocities committed by Belgium in central Africa during his reign. He wanted to be remembered as a beneficent ruler who gifted beautiful buildings and gardens to the nation.

This album is the 2022 release, which was made only on vinyl and in digital format. It had been made available on tape earlier, in 2021, and with a different album cover too. The tracks  from the tape have now been remastered, by the Dutch producer Rude 66, and a bonus track has been added as well.

Chris Salatelis

With a booklet containing illustrations of paintings, photographs and poems, Broken Gargoyles (2022) is more than a music release. Diamanda Galás has included in the booklet four illustrations of her own paintings (there were sixteen in her installation), pre-WW1 German poetry, both in the original language and the English translation, and eleven images of wounded First World War soldiers with damaged faces, taken from a 1924 illustrated book compiled and published by the German activist and pacifist Ernst Friedrich.

The reason why Galás merges these textual, visual and audio elements is that they had been used separately for years – in isolation from each other. So, with Broken Gargoyles (2022) she re-connects them. This allows her not only to re-establish the links that existed between them, but also to create new links between the historical material and some contemporary elements (her photographic portraits, taken by Robert Knoke and Austin Young, and her music). In the 2020 installation, Galás had also included film.

But the linking of all these artefacts is more of a protest against the forces that un-linked, or separated, them, and the forces that kept them apart throughout the years. In this sense, Galás engages with the separation of the arts, or the tendency to place strict barriers between different art forms. This is a widespread phenomenon in our time. We have, for example, music magazines, art magazines, poetry magazine, and so on, in which music, art, poetry, or any other art form, is discussed separately, in isolation from the other arts.

Separating the arts, and cutting off the links that exist between them, can be problematic. The arts are different forms of expression, so if we work using a single art form, we cannot provide the whole picture of a given subject. In other words, we do not tell the whole story to our audiences.

This is because information is transmitted to the brain through sensations coming from various sources. And it is our sense organs that are responsible for passing knowledge to us, when a number of different material properties are absorbed by them, as the modern Greek philosopher Helle Lambridis (1896-1970) shows in her book on the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. But each of our senses, she writes, receives only a limited number of information, because different stimuli activate different senses. Our eyes, for instance, cannot perceive sounds, because the information carried by audio particles in the sound is destined only for the ears. Therefore, to acquire full knowledge of something or someone, we need to receive information from many different sources.

The fact that Broken Gargoyles (2022) is primarily about the separation of the arts is not easy to spot. To understand this, we need to think of separation – or isolation – as the act of making something invisible. When we separate, for instance, two identical twins, and present only one of them, the other twin becomes ‘invisible’. We can also say that we ‘hide’ the second twin.

The first clue that leads to this conclusion exists in the music. The fact that Galás decided to recite early twentieth-century expressionist poetry in the original expressionist style, which is a form of singing that sounds almost like reading, makes Broken Gargoyles (2022) automatically an album about invisibility. Expressionism is associated with ‘social isolation’, because of the alienation from society that was experienced by expressionist artists, musicians, architects, photographers and choreographers in Germany, after the government ended up prohibiting by law the expressionist style in the early 1930s, a policy that condemned expressionist artists to invisibility until the end of the Second World War.

Diamanda Galás, 'Mr. Firecracker' (2011)

Then, Broken Gargoyles (2022) is based on poetry about isolation and alienation. Galás uses poems by the German expressionist poet Georg Heym. One of them, Das Fieberspital (1912), offers a rich imagery of isolation and horror in a German hospital ward with yellow-fever patients. And another, Der Dämon der Stadt (1910), contains a frightful experience of alienation in heavily industrialised and densely populated German cities. This poem describes people’s separation from nature and their locking up in apartments full of toxic air from factory fumes that cause nightmares and other physical and mental suffering.

Galás sees parallels between the isolation in Heym’s time, as experienced by the yellow-fever patients or the suffocating city dwellers, and the isolation experienced by the elderly residents in nursing homes, who were also shut out of the community during the recent pandemic, by being cut off completely from their friends and relatives. But the recent forced separation of the uninfected from the infected attracted Galás for its twisted turn. In New York nursing homes were forced to house post-ventilation and still contagious COVID-19 patients, and this fact was hidden from national media, as well as from the families and relatives of the vulnerable over 70-year-olds who lived there. So, Heym’s poetry provides the perfect metaphor to introduce the listener to the idea of hiding something to make it invisible to others.

Similarly, hidden from public view were also Friedrich’s photographs of wounded soldiers with damaged faces. The “war-damaged face was incompatible with the image of heroic self-sacrifice” and it had to be kept hidden during the war; disfigured soldiers were concealed, through ‘the institutional and social isolation of “facial” patients’, to make them invisible in the wartime press and propaganda. As a pacifist and a conscientious objector, Friedrich used these pictures in his book War Against War! (1924) to counter misinformation in the media that hid the horrors of the battlefield to suppress the negative impact of war. In other words, they helped him uncover the colonial, imperial, and indeed capitalist motives behind every war.

Lastly, the album booklet includes four of Galás’s paintings. Are these paintings hidden in the booklet? The answer, of course, is ‘No’. They have been placed prominently next to Friedrich’s photographs, which themselves are central to the album’s concept, as well as the album’s title: ‘Broken gargoyles’, Galás says, was an expression used during the First World War to “describe soldiers who were facially mutilated by skin-melting gases and machine guns, both of which were introduced during this war.” In fact, to make more apparent the link between her paintings and the photographs of wounded soldiers, Galás inserts between them her own photographic portraits. In the 2020 installation, the paintings had been juxtaposed with moving images from San Diego (where Galás now lives) that she had filmed herself during the pandemic and between lockdowns. Because those moving images had been made in a time of forced inactivity for those working in the cultural sector, they evoked the ‘wounded soldier’ who becomes inactive after injury, returns home, recovers, and then goes back to the battle (as was the case with injured soldiers, who often had to undergo surgeries and treatments in order to be sent back to the battlefield). The paintings, therefore, encourage parallels between Friedrich’s wounded soldiers and today’s artists.

At the same time, photographs of injured soldiers had to be used in medical records because wounded servicemen needed them in applications for disability payments. Soldiers were dependent on such photographic records, as they were the most valuable proof to collect a pension.

Galás’s paintings also relate to her own situation at the time of their production. In this sense, the specific dates they were made can be important as well, apart from their subjects or materials. Having begun painting in 2003 during her residence at the Civitella Ranieri in Italy, the production of paintings became more systematic in the late-2000s, a period of many changes in the music business. In the early 2010s, Galás felt dissatisfied with her then record label, Mute, rejecting a new record contract with them. Also, her back catalogue had been sold to major record companies, which equally did not seem the right record labels for her to work with, and refused to sign a deal with them, too. But while this halted her recording plans (temporarily, as Galás soon started releasing her music through her own label, Intravenal Sound Operations, and also acquired the rights to all of her work), her ideas found expression in her paintings. As Galás has stated, the ‘subject material’ of her paintings is also part of the working material of her musical projects – they are ‘simply different treatments of similar subjects’. So, while she continued composing and performing musical works as usual, the period of changes in the way she released her music allowed a different medium to become an equally important means of expression for her: painting.

And this is where Galás’s protest against the separation of the arts begins.

Diamanda Galás, 'Teeth of the Sun' (2014)

Unlike Friedrich’s precise close-ups, Galás’s paintings depict schematically drawn figures, whose calculated simplicity leaves facial features unresolved. Her rushed brushstrokes and thickly applied coloured pencils blur and fragment the faces, rather than defining them clearly. In the 2020 installation, Carlton Bright’s animation effects and re-colouring had blurred them even more, transforming them into interesting shapes and colour combinations.

In a 2016 article about ‘women in horror’, some of Galás’s paintings were even understood as quite pleasing, and the characters depicted in them as playful and interesting. Described as ‘tribal’ – and not strictly ‘dark’ or full of ‘horror’ – they were linked to ancient rituals. But ‘tribal’ is also another word for folk and colourful art, as well as another way to describe something humorous and amusing.

Similarly, in a short interview in 2014, Galás’s paintings are seen both as ‘twisted, horrifying, brutal and tantalizing’, or ‘designed to freak you […] out’, and as ‘amusing’, and even joyful. As Galás herself reveals in this interview, she believes that her paintings are not necessarily sad or depressing. She says, “sometimes the visual work [that I do] is actually funny, and I enjoy that.” One of the paintings used in the installation Broken Gargoyles (2020), for example, Teeth of the Sun (2014), showed a character in a state of sarcasm, with a sardonic smile revealing a sinister intent, as if it was an actor in a bitter satire.

So, Galás uses some of her paintings to introduce a mood which seems almost the opposite of Friedrich’s unpleasant and shocking photographs. The joyful colours and playful mood of the paintings disturbs the atmosphere of horror and tragedy in Heym’s unsettling poetry. After all, mood, atmosphere and emotional reaction are part of an aesthetic experience, and just like material properties, they also provide some kind of historical evidence.

And there are also elements in the music that contain moments of laughter: Galás’s vocals in the track ‘Mutilatus’, for example, culminate in a deep and convulsing chuckle (at 15:43). Heym did not indicate how his poem would be read, nor what kind of music it had to inspire, if any at all. It was Galás’s choice to do all this and to burst in a laughter at that moment.

It is possible, then, to say that this album was designed specifically to oppose the separation of the arts, as every element of it demonstrates the immense power of blending audio, textual and visual sources, and with completely different attributes and behaviours, which range from grinning grimaces and ironic facial expressions to sarcastic sounds and horrifying stories.

Unavoidably, the separation of the arts has a negative impact on artists. Artists are separated form each other when they are put into categories and often treated separately: fine artists, musicians, dancers, filmmakers, and so on. Galás, for instance, is treated by the press – and some scholars – as a composer and performer, despite the fact that she has been painting for the last twenty years, and that the staging of her performances is often designed by her.

But today, many artists are treated by the press as single-medium artists. Ruth Ewan and Jeremy Deller, for example, two visual artists who use very often music in their works, are very rarely included in the music press, as they are not considered ‘musicians’. There are also historical precedents of cultural practitioners, such as Henri Michaux, Oscar Kokoschka, Hermann Nitsch and others, who kept switching between art, theatre, literature, music and other arts, but who have not been recognised as multi-media artists.

This is also the reason why Empedocles is treated simply as a philosopher and not as a poet, too. Empedocles wrote his philosophical works in verse, to be read like poetry. And for this reason, his works were able to pass to their audiences many different information at once, because his texts’ rhythmic patterns, as well as their sounds (from reading them aloud), produced additional material properties that created mental images, heightened emotions, and so on. But we never remember Empedocles as a poet, do we?

- Chris Salatelis

Diamanda Galás, Untitled (2010)

All paintings © diamandagalas.com

8 years after the first album, two 7″ from Kernkrach and a CDr self-released in 2016 with singles and tracks previously featured on compilations, Moonlandings is the latest long awaited album from Gertrud Stein, a solo act from London who’s striking again with a self-released 4 tracks EP.

It kicks off with 2m2, a killer track rhythmed by synthetized percussions evoking whiplash sounds over a gritty bassline and a pulse that could drive people berserk on the dance floors. Monotonie carries on with the drive of tight analogue drums and a raw bass that is typical of her sound. On the B side, Sad Song is a throbbing slow track with more robotic rhythms and melancholic lyrics with spacey effects reminiscent of laments from beyond. Then Wires and Lights ends in beauty with another generous dose of lovely synth tunes and dissonant percussions. In its whole, the minimal groove and trippy synths that were assembled here should satisfy the cravings of any minimal electronics junkie.

The dark energy emerging from Moonlandings definitely seems to come from outer space. I was glad to find back the trademark sound of Gertrud Stein, but more importantly, I was very excited to find the same drive and madness that was pushed even further.

EP / Digital Album

Tadash is a Parisian duo that was born in late 2012 from members involved in OIZAK (Dark Ambient), Province (Psychedelic Rock), Red Space Cyrod (Indie Rock) and Cyrod Iceberg (Indie Folk).

Shadow of Dreams is the full length following to their debut self-titled EP that just came out one month before.

Using guitars and bass guitars with synthesizers, archaic percussion instruments, harmonica and field recording, their style cannot be described with a simple label but their music quickly brings up to mind references like The Legendary Pink Dots, Brian Eno and The Fall.

This album managed to fit together the perfect mix of melancholic guitar riffs and melodies with ethereal vocals and trippy synthesizers to create a dreamy whole for which I could not grow tired of. Very relaxing and easy to listen, this should please a lot of music lovers out there…

Listen and download here.

Makina Girgir, also known as AratkiLo, is a solo project from Toulouse, France. In 2007, the debut EP The Spell was released on Das Drehmoment and other tracks also appeared on various compilations like Dance With Us! and Synthesize Me in 2007, Circuit d’Actes 2 in 2011 and The Future Echo Tapes in 2012.

Faithful to the original spirit, every song is mixing cold and spacey sounds with warm and haunting melodies. Often urging you to dance, robotic rhythms and piercing synth riffs are contrasting in sweet and seducing harmonies. Mechanical sequences are arranged with deep and spacious soundscapes in a way that won’t leave anyone indifferent.

Female spoken words, processed through icy effects, are also making this record even more slick and sexy.

Definitely getting off the beaten paths, Torment has a modern edge that I found original and refreshing. Every listening got me totally absorbed with the head in the clouds, ironically taking me away from life’s torments…

Makina Girgir – Torment

To speak of Ame de Boue, this is the debut album and only 250 copies were released on Treue Um Treue, in February.

Soundwise, I was pleased to find back some elements from Dolina but the obscure madness was pushed a bit further. I got stunned by the diversity and the beauty of the sounds that seems to be mixed and arranged with real magic. As others often reuse the same type of classic analog sounds, there is much more originality to be found here.

Musically, most of the album has some sort of bizarre carnivalesque ambiance, making me dreaming of clowns dancing on barrel organ music. The spooky theme, from the beginning to the end, really stirred me deep inside.

Out of 15 songs, my favorite title is definitely L’Inconfort Néccésaire (live and very different version). The beat stays on a slow tempo but near the end, It’s Fun to be Dead also kicks in with a danceable song using a distorted rhythm over a killer bassline.

The intro and the first 2 songs are written in French, 5 are in English and the rest is instrumental. The vocals are sang or spoken in some kind of simple and modest way that really makes them shine. At other times, wicked effects are also used over vocals for more experimental passages.

Why only 250 copies were printed? Given the quality of the music, I think it is a big nonsense but to be selfish, I am very glad to own my copy of this limited edition. It seems that Ame de Boue and Dolina aren’t much into self-promotion. Just search online and you won’t find their page on any stupid social network. I found it relieving after wondering what’s the matter with so many artists and so-called marginals, using private mainstream medias without much consciousness.

Certainly, L’Inconfort Nécéssaire will pass the test of time as I have no doubt its intemporal originality will make it a priceless collector item.

Also worth mentioning, you should check out Illustrations Sonores, a new and very promising project from Datz and Froe Char.

L’Inconfort Néccésaire on Discogs

It came out in February as the 5th release from Fabrika Record. Before that, you might have heard Kunst that appeared on Monosynth and they also released a split cassette with La Fête Triste on aufnahme + wiedergabe, in September 2011.

The first song, Die World, starts up with an harmony from Bauhaus’s classic Bela Lugosi’s Dead, to quickly bring us into the mood for the bewitching ambiance that follows up.

In its whole, Lebanon Hanover are using distorted guitars, bass guitars, sporadic synthesizers and a drum machine to create a cold and minimal aesthetic, all structured in a very shiny way. Their haunting vocals highlighted in wide reverberations, which didn’t fail to rock my guts more than once, are adding a nice touch of warmness. Mixing a bunch of efficient elements from the past into their sauce, I think Lebanon Hanover still innovated with a very distinct sound.

Just listen to Totally Tot where things are getting pretty mad with this earth shaking rhythm and deep pounding bass line. I have no doubt it is going to hit the dance floors like a ton of bricks!

The World Is Getting Colder is still available on Fabrika Records store.

Surprisingly, only 3 months after their latest release on Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, Die Lust! came out in December with Saga Elettrica, containing 10 songs on CDR, DIY style, on the Italian label La Statua Sommersa Produzioni. LSSP has been around since 2006, where Bloodygrave also released a demo in 2009 and Bloodygrave & Die Lust! released their first EP in 2010. As some people said, the best things in life are free, just like having sex, going skinny dipping or downloading LSSP records!

Released in December, this is already the 8th release from Die Lust! Each songs are quite different, using a very wide palette of sounds, combining different atmospheres and styles resulting in quite a crazy trip.

Colonna Sonora Per Una Poesia gently opens on a smooth and trippy ambiance, with spoken words in Italian over gorgeous synthesizer arrangements. Later in Wild As The Wind, we can hear the same Italian vocal, but singing in a very suave way on a slow tempo over some more beautiful synths.

On other songs like Trasformazione and Captain Of My Soul, we’ve got plenty of spastic electronics for lots of fun! Think of Devo meeting DAF with a touch of early Suicide. On Captain Of My Soul, one of my favorite tracks, sweet female vocals are also adding spices into the mix.

Then we’ve got instrumental tracks, like Devo and Saga Electtrica I, where the synthesizers are getting even more wicked. Hidden at the end, there is even an 11th track where the machines are totally getting out of control.

But Saga Electtrica doesn’t only contains electronics. On Arno, it gets a bit wilder with distorted guitars and a real bass over a slow rhythm for a darker outro lasting over 9 minutes, also featuring another Italian back vocal.

Saga Elettrica is definitely a wild and tangy record. It will fit perfectly for any crazy parties, as background music for having wild sex or even for going berserk, dancing alone and banging your head into the walls.