The Satanic Voices

Diamanda Galás - I Put a Spell On You

Were you a witness?

Were you a witness?

And on that holy day

And on that bloody day

Were you a witness?

Were you a witness?

And on that holy day

And on that bloody day

And on his dying bed he told me:

Tell all my friends I was fighting, too

But to all the cowards and voyeurs:

There are no more tickets to the funeral

There are no more tickets to the funeral

Were you a witness?

Were you a witness?

And on that holy day

And on that bloody day

There are no more tickets to the funeral

There are no more tickets to the funeral

The funeral is crowded!

Were you a witness?

Were you a witness?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you there when they nailed him to the cross?

Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you a witness? Were you a witness?

Were you there when they dragged him to the grave?

Were you there when they dragged him to the grave?

Sometimes it causes me to wonder, wonder, wonder

Were you there when they dragged him to the grave?

And on that holy day

And on that bloody day

Were you a witness?

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?

Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?

Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Were you a witness? Were you a witness?

SWING! SWING!

A band of Angels coming after me

Coming for to carry me home

Swing! Swing!

A band of Devils coming after me

For to drag me to the grave

Swing! Swing!

But I will not go

And I shall not go

I will wake up

And I shall walk from this room into the sun

Where the dirty angel doesn't run

Where the dirty angel cannot go

And brothers in this time of pestilence

Do know that we meet we hear another sick man sigh

Each time that we meet we hear another has died

And I see angels angels angels devils

Angels angels devils

Angels angels devils

Coming for to drag me to the grave

Angels!

Mr. Sandman makes a filthy bed for me

But I will not rest

And I shall not rest

As a man who has been blinded by the storm

And waits for angels by the road

While the devil waits for me at night

With knives and lies and smiles

And sings the "swing low sweet chariot"

Of death knells

One by one

Like a sentence of the damned

And one by one

Of my brothers die

Unloved, unsung, unwanted

Die, and faster please

We've got no money for extended visits

Says the sandman

But we who have gone before

Do not rest in peace

Remember me?

Unburied

I am screaming in the bloody furnaces of Hell

And only ask for you

To raise your weary eyes into the sun

Until the sun has set

For we who have gone before

Do not rest in peace

We who have died

Shall never rest in peace

There is no rest until the fighting's done

And I see Angels Angels

Devils

Angels Angels

Angels Angels Devils

Coming for to drag me to the grave

Angels!

Diamanda Galás

The Litanies of Satan/Judgement Day

1985/1992

01 intro

02 There Are No More Tickets to the Funeral (excerpt)

03 Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

04 Let My People Go

05 Judgement Day

06 spoken word

07 Artémis/Cris D'Aveugle (Blind Man's Cry)

08 Insane Asylum

09 Gloomy Sunday

10 I Put a Spell On You

11 Scream of Love (bonus track)

12 outro

13 The Litanies of Satan 

Total time: 1:04:44

Tracks 02-10: Cabaret Metro, Chicago IL USA 4.11.1992

Track 11: MEAT, New York City NY USA 8.15.1992; mixed by Aldo Hernandez

Track 13: I-Beam, San Francisco CA USA 7.29.1985

Tracks 01 & 12 are short vocal interludes of indeterminate origin, possibly created for this video, or extracts of existing pieces

Diamanda Galás - vocals, piano, percussion & electronics

256/48 (Tracks 01-12) & 224/48 (Track 13) audio from 2 digitized, out-of-print & never reissued or DVD'd VHS tapes

Tracks 01-12: "Judgement Day" (Mute Film, 1993)

Track 13: "The Litanies of Satan" (Target Video, 1986)

extracted, converted to 16/44 CD Audio, tracked, slightly denoised and minimally remastered by EN, August 2022
368 MB FLAC/direct link

Born this day in 1955, and The Shriek of the Week ever since, I'm closing out August with the undisputed and righteous queen of Hades, ladies.

That's right, Diamanda Galás -- all-around visionary and noted anti-AIDS crusader way before it was fashionable -- is 67 today, and there are a few tickets left to the birthday party, thanks to some outta print and never DVD'd VHS tapes I spent the week extractifying/fucking with. Scream on into September, I say!--J.

Sweetback Sunday: Melvin Van Peebles 90

Heliocentrics/Melvin Van Peebles/Archie Shepp - The Cavern

The little tool I had that converted the FLACs to mp4s broke, so we're back to pix at the top, with a scratch audio player underneath for the sample du jour.

This has to be brief, as I'm now supremely irritated at Nonsense Tech.

I don't usually do filmmakers, but this one dabbled in music so we'll make an exception.

He passed last year and he'd have been 90 today, so celebrate we shall.

The acknowledged father of Blaxploitation, and really a primary avatar of African-American cinema of the last 50 years, movies in general would look a lot different had he never existed.

He first burst onto the scene at the dawn of the 1970s, with a film that still turns people's minds inside out five full decades later.

Part action adventure, part polemic, and all mayhem, this first big film catapulted him to the forefront of the culture almost fully formed.

Other acclaimed films followed. He had a son -- who became a superstar in front of the camera -- named Mario, with whom most are familiar.

And like I was saying, all the while he dabbled in music.

The soundtrack to his first film doubles as the debut of Earth, Wind & Fire, in addition to containing his own sounds.

All of his subsequent movies have songs of his, and he even has a couple of records that have no film tie-in and are just standalone examples of him doing music.

He also intermittently collaborated with other musicians, and today I've plucked the audio from a European satellite TV broadcast to illustrate this.

Here we have quite the combination, with our hero and new nonagenarian getting busy with noted maestros The Heliocentrics, and if that wasn't enough you get tenor titan Archie Shepp commentating on the whole 75 minutes.

The Heliocentrics

Melvin Van Peebles

Archie Shepp 

Jazz à La Villette 2015

Espace Charlie Parker

Grande Halle de la Villette

Paris, France

9.8.2015

01 Prologue

02 Big Bang Reincarnation

03 Searching for Signs of Love

04 Blue Mist

05 The Cavern

06 Transformation, Part I

07 Transformation, Part II

08 Telepathic Routine

09 The Dance

10 Trust the Cosmos (Believe In the Universe)

11 Infinite List (Toss the Dice)

12 Epilogue

Total time: 1:15:27

Adrian Owusu - guitar

Shabaka Hutchings - bass clarinet

Ollie Parfitt - keyboards

Jessica Lauren - keyboards

Jake Ferguson - bass

Malcolm Catto - drums

Jack Yglesias - percussion

Tom Hodges - electronics

Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone

Melvin Van Peebles - narrator

192/48k audio extracted from a 2016 HD "Mezzo" satellite TV broadcast

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, volume boosted and tracked by EN, August 2022
385 MB FLAC/direct link

I might do one or two more for August if all goes according to plan.... which it almost never does.

But today is the day when we say thank you and HBD to Melvin Van Peebles, born this day in 1932 and forever, eternally singing that badass song.--J.

8.21.1932 - 9.21.2021

So Jah Say: Unconditional Dub

It's #700 at last, and a worthy subject it is, accompanied by the sort of stellar rarity I try to supply.

We're also inaugurating the integration of my YouTube channel into here, with a track from whatever I'm sharing leading off the top of each post so you can get a taste before you paste.

Today's 64th birthday guy is someone I've wanted to cover since 9 years ago when I started this page.

Part of the original circle of British Punk, he transcended the limitations of 1977 and became one of the godfathers of Modern Dub.

The legend has it that he got his stage name from another, somewhat more primitive bassist: Sid Vicious, who was apparently too drunk to say "John Wardle".

Anyway he was the original bass player of Public Image Limited until 1980, when he voyaged out to a solo career that's featured all sorts of milestones and interesting turns.

His first adventure on his own, in 1981, was a band called The Human Condition.

That's THC for short.

They didn't make a studio record, as within a year they had morphed into this dude's signature group, Invaders of the Heart.

A group which he still leads to this day, by the way.

The Human Condition didn't make it into the studio, but they toured for a good part of 1981 and into 1982.

Lucky for us, they released two cassette-only live tapes, the first of which was the very first Instant Official Bootleg, which made it into the shops 48 hours after the performance.

These cassettes were gone from print almost as soon as they appeared, and to my knowledge have only since ever circulated from 128K mp3s that were at the wrong speed and sourced from chewed up tapes.

I've spent the last 10 days working on changing that.

Jah Wobble's The Human Condition
Live In Europe 1981

01 Apocalypse pts. 1 & 2

02 City of Gold

03 Neon

04 Sleazy

05 Reality

06 Tension

07 Oil Pump

08 Frantic

09 The Human Condition

10 Red Indian

11 City of Gold II

12 Waves

13 The End

14 The Human Condition II

15 Soundcheck

16 Condemned

Total time: 1:16:42

Tracks 01-11: Collegiate Theatre, London UK 9.13.1981 

Tracks 12-15: venue unknown, The Netherlands November 1981 

Track 16: unknown European date & venue, Nov. 1981 (audience recording included for completeness)

Jah Wobble - bass

Dave "Animal" Maltby - guitar

Jim Walker - drums

Annie Whitehead - saxophones

sounds like 1st or 2nd gen copies of the original, way out-of-print and allegedly never-to-be-reissued cassettes

Tracks 01-11 may have been remastered previously

declipped, pitch corrected and retracked -- with Tracks 12-16 remastered -- by EN, August 2022
547 MB FLAC/direct link

The London segment of this mis-circulates as "The Venue 1982," but it isn't, it's this. The Holland segment was only ever around from the mp3s, which ran so fast they sounded like a 170BPM remix... I'm completely woeful at pitch issues but I did my best.

So yeah, Jah Wobble -- born this day in 1958 and still a vital creative force -- makes 700 posts for this blog. I can think of no one more worthy, period.

We'll start the road to 800 next week, but this monster 76 minutes of bottom-driven madness oughta keep you funked for a good while.--J.