By Michael Evans

Hear the voice of Diamanda Galas, even just once in your life, and you'll remember it for the rest of your days. If you look up the word "intense" in any recent edition of your Webster's Dictionary, you'll likely find a picture of the ever-provocative performance artist. Over the course of her nearly two-decade long career, the 46-year-old singer/composer/pianist/AIDS activist has pushed the boundaries of so-called "new music" with her highly original, quasi-operatic pieces. The creator of such brutal and bracing works as "Plague Mass" and "Vena Cava," Galas uses her astonishing 3-1/2-octave range voice to muse malevolently on such lighthearted subject matter as death, disease, and the devil.

Galas' latest work, and the subject of her 12th and most recent album, "Malediction and Prayer," is somewhat of a departure from her previous, more theatrically oriented projects. Subtitled a "Concert For The Damned," the performance features Galas in a solo piano/voice recital. In what is essentially a cabaret show from death row, the avant-vocalist puts her inimitable interpretive stamp on doom-and-gloom material originally sung by such artists as Johnny Cash, Billie Holiday, and Phil Ochs, interspersed with texts by Charles Baudelaire and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In anticipation of her upcoming Portland performance of "Malediction and Prayer," Galas recently spoke to CitySearch by phone from her apartment in New York City. She talked at length about many topics, including her work, diva-hood, and other musings about life during an epidemic.

CitySearch: Everyone seems to be comparing you to opera great Maria Callas these days. Do you feel comfortable with such comparisons?

Diamanda Galas: I am very, very honored when people mention her name and mine as a singer, as a musician, a Greek, a woman. I often don't understand how people make the comparison, because my work is so out there. Anyone who has heard the "Litanies of Satan" isn't likely to confuse that with Maria Callas singing "La Traviata." They would have to be on a very heavy drug I've never discovered.

CS: The term "diva" practically seems to be a buzzword these days. How would you define a diva? Do you consider yourself a diva?

DG: My definition of a diva, at this point, is anyone that sits down to piss. I mean, really. It's such a ridiculously overused word. Every stupid magazine in England has their list of divas. They put poor Maria Callas on the same list with all these horrible singers. Any bitch that stands up there and wants attention is a diva. No matter how wretched she is. I am just happy to be thought of as a competent singer, a singer who sings in tune, which is something that you no longer can take for granted. When anyone listens to Madonna trying to sing Indian music on (the MTV Video Music Awards)...that was one of the most offensive things to Indian culture and one of the most offensive things to me. Please God, tell her to lip synch. She could have learned so much from Milli Vanilli. I think all pop singers should lip synch, because most can't sing in tune.

CS: What singers do you admire?

DG: La Lupe. She was a great singer of salsa music from Cuba. Castro kicked her out of Cuba because he thought she was obscene. She would sing and pull her clothes off and scream at the same time -- an incredible sense of timing, a great improviser. Ghena Dimitrova, a great opera singer from Bulgaria; flamenco singer Camaron de las Islas; Oum Kalthoum is one of my all-time favorites; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Aretha Franklin, Patti LaBelle. There's nothing half-assed about them. And let's not forget Ethel Merman. There's a woman who sang seven shows a week for a thousand years.

CS: When you were younger, did you have any idea that your life would turn out in the way that it has? Did you always want to be a singer and an artist?

DG: I don't think so. I thought I'd be involved in biochemical research. I've often regretted that I didn't go in that direction. But I'm sure I would've regretted not going off in the singing direction either.

CS: What was the inspiration for "Malediction and Prayer?"

DG: One of the inspirations for the show was the death of my friend, Carl Valentino, who referred to himself as my "gay husband." We met at a veteran's hospital, working in an AIDS ward. It was love at first sight. The pieces in the show deal with a person who, for one reason or another, has been in extreme isolation whether because of disease, incarceration, mental disease, depression. "25 Minutes To Go," the Shel Silverstein (via Johnny Cash) song really reminded me a lot of the (AIDS) epidemic, about time running out on someone.

CS: The whole idea of being those last few moments away from death and knowing it?

DG: I have fears about that every day. This is something that is inescapable in my mind. It's a source of trauma. Seriously, people don't realize that for those in the AIDS community, the word trauma applies. There seems to be a curious lack of compassion from large groups of people.

CS: People seem to react differently to someone who they personally know with a major illness such as AIDS versus someone who is a stranger.

DG: Indeed. It has to get too close before there is any recognition. Why does it have to hit a person in that way before they feel anything? That's curious to me. I had "We're All HIV Positive" tattooed on my hand a long time ago. A lot of people understand that and a lot of people don't. To me it's just so obvious: until the epidemic is over we're all in this together. To me, that's not a devastatingly intellectual concept. I have Hepatitis C, so the parallels are quite close with HIV, if somewhat different. It's so huge now. So many people have hepatitis now. You see magazines now describe it as "The AIDS of the Millennia." How stupid.

CS: You appear to revel in your role as a cultural and artistic outsider.

DG: (Laughs) I think I'd better. If I don't I sure would get depressed. Somebody once said to me that I seem to get a lot of inspiration from despair. My feeling has always been you should be able to get something (of value) out of it.

CS: To say the least, your work is intense. Have you ever considered softening your approach at all in order to reach a wider audience?

DG: No. I've always wanted to be as tough as a razor blade. I've never seen any reason. That's one of the advantages of working on my own for a long time. After awhile you establish yourself, discover you can make a living doing what you're doing, and not have to worry about what some (record company) guy thinks.

CS: So you've never thought of waging the revolution of ideas from the inside?

DG: (Cackles) I'll tell you one thing, if you're not waging the revolution from the inside when you have Hepatitis C, where are you waging it?

CS: Your work focuses so much on death, disease, and the devil. But one has to ask, what do you like to do for fun?

DG: I generally hang out with a bunch of really vicious friends, queens, who are really, really funny. We gossip really worthless gossip. I say I do that for fun. I did a reading of Marquis De Sade at St. Martin's Church the other day. That was fun, too.