Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is not a singer, nor a performer. There is no single musical genre that encompasses what she does. She immerses herself in subjects with which she feels a deep emotional connection: poetry, torture, loss, the Holokaftoma (Asia Minor Greek genocide), as well as the Greek, Assyrian, Armenian, Yazidi, and Azeri genocides, social stigma and war.
She spends hours reading poems in their original language, translating them with the aid of a dictionary, researching the multiple meanings of words, taking notes, and investigating every detail. For the Holokaftoma alone, she spent countless hours writing essays and doing research.
“I extrovert pain and these things that would destroy me.”
Her highly original and politically charged performance works have earned her worldwide recognition. The depth of her research results in works that are holistic and demanding of the listener.
Her singing, while adjacent to contemporaneous practitioners of extended vocal techniques and sound poetry, remains rooted in traditional musics, bridging past and present, the sacred and the profane.
“Sometimes I will fall across a poem and, if it resonates with me for a long enough time, or if it hits me and I can’t move on from it, I will interpret it.”
One of the Greek traditions from which she draws is the singing of mirologia. Dirge singers place a hand on the head or chest of the deceased and begin the lament. Just before finishing, one singer takes hold of another mirologistra, who continues the song, and then another joins in turn. In this way, there is no silence, and the uninterrupted continuation of the lament allows the dead to pass to the next station unimpeded. It is a deeply sacred belief system.
“I like to start working on a piece without any idea of where it’s going. I want no ideas at all; it has to have a propulsion and an incantational structure.”
More recently, her performance work has focused on the musical setting of texts by exiled poets and writers from around the world. Her work-in-progress, Espergesia (with words by Cesar Vallejo, from The Black Heralds), was performed solo a cappella in the Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo, without electronics or amplification, within the space’s natural 25-second reverberation, in complete darkness.
“You have to be a person who is eaten alive by a poem. You have to sacrifice yourself.”
She also presented a performance of Schrei 27 in Spain. It was not performed live, but rather presented in a quadraphonic installation within a small, completely dark room. The presenter locked the doors, so that the audience couldn’t leave.
Broken Gargoyles (2022), was inspired in part by the German poet Georg Heym.
Nina Hagen
There has never been anything remotely normal about Nina Hagen, and thank God for that. Hair, makeup, voice, behavior. Everything about her felt like it had escaped from a parallel universe where restraint simply never developed as a concept.
Crowned the “Godmother of German Punk”. However, her sound doesn’t sit still long enough to be categorized. Punk crashes into opera, then detours through funk, electronica, reggae, jazz - sometimes within the same song, sometimes within the same breath. Trained, yes, but never obedient. That soprano voice, stretching across octaves, slips from spoken word to shrieks to something eerily operatic, as if she’s both performing and haunting her own music at the same time.
Listening to a Nina Hagen record feels like wandering into a haunted house on excellent drugs: disorienting, theatrical, slightly dangerous, and impossible to forget.
And then there’s the image. Along with her vocal abandon, she famously experimented with her on-stage look, rarely shying away from appearing outlandish, eccentric, or even downright creepy. Even when she appears almost “normal,” there’s always a twist. For instance, in a Spanish TV performance of “New York,” she is wearing a “simple,” typical black outfit of hers. That is until you notice a pair of exaggerated silicone breasts, turning the whole thing into pure, subversive humour.
Activist, provocateur, shape-shifter. Completely uninterested in behaving. Entirely committed to herself.
Laurie Spiegel
Laurie Spiegel pioneered new ways of composing music using computers, making it possible to improvise digitally and to create interactive software instruments. Her work helped shape what we now take for granted: the image of the electronic musician working on a laptop, whether onstage or at home.
For the first time, composers could directly create and hear their sounds, instead of writing them down and relying on others to perform them.
“You were making the sounds yourself, as opposed to writing them down on a score and then hoping you could persuade a conductor and an orchestra to turn them into sound. You could immediately hear the realization of your ideas.”
“You could work on music the way an artist did on a painting, seeing (hearing) what you were making while making it. That was not possible before, except for pieces you were writing for a single instrument that you played yourself and that were technically within your own abilities to play.”
Early modular synthesizers were hands-on and intuitive. Computers were more complex, but gave composers full control, often through tools they built themselves. For Laurie Spiegel, an improviser, that direct connection was the draw.
Laurie Spiegel pushed the boundaries of early computer music through her work on GROOVE (Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment), a groundbreaking Bell Labs system that made real-time interaction with electronic sound possible, and its later video-based extension, VAMPIRE (Video and Music Program for Interactive Real Time Exploration and Experimentation).
In 1980, she released the album The Expanding Universe, created using the synthesizers at Bell Laboratories. Around this time, she began developing her own software for personal computers, called Music Mouse. It allowed her to shape sound in a more detailed and immediate way, adding richness and complexity while keeping a sense of lightness and emotion. In 1986, she developed this intelligent, interactive software for Macintosh, Atari, and Amiga computers, allowing users to turn their computers into playable musical instruments.
Also, her computer-based interpretation of Johannes Kepler’s 17th-century work was selected by Carl Sagan to be included on the Voyager 1 and 2 probes to represent Earth's music in space!
Nina Simone
Nina Simone was one of the most extraordinary artists of the twentieth century, an icon of American music. She was the consummate musical storyteller, a griot as she would come to learn, who used her remarkable talent to create a legacy of liberation, empowerment, passion, and love through a magnificent body of works. She earned the moniker “High Priestess of Soul” for she could weave a spell so seductive and hypnotic that the listener lost track of time and space as they became absorbed in the moment.
She was a fearless, classically trained pianist who pivoted to become a defiant voice of the Civil Rights Movement, prioritizing her activism over comfort. She unapologetically infused her music with raw rage and truth, famously releasing “Mississippi Goddam” in response to racial violence, and directly challenged mainstream white expectations with an uncompromising, militant attitude.
Nina Simone has offered her listeners solace through music. The history of America, of blackness, of womanhood, is woven through her voice. We think that her greatest achievement was her radical vulnerability. Her refusal to hide her emotions and experiences. She wields her honesty like a weapon, destroying taboos and social ills.
Nina Simone was a real badass: unafraid of confrontation, allergic to compromise, and utterly unwilling to make herself smaller for anyone.
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros was a composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, innovator, and humanitarian committed to building community through listening and understanding. A central figure in the avant-garde, she was a founding member of the ‘San Francisco Tape Music Center’ and a trailblazer for women in electronic arts.
Her work moved fluidly between performance, recording, writing, and teaching. Over the course of her career, she created scores, books, and a series of sonic practices, while also establishing an arts center.
“Creative work really comes naturally to kids: they are creative and improvising all the time. Then when you start to learn symbolic notation to form traditional music, then you’re discouraged from improvising.”
At the core of her practice was the concept of Deep Listening: a philosophy of heightened awareness that encourages “listening with your whole body,” connecting sound with consciousness and self-awareness.
In the early 1970s, she introduced Sonic Meditations, a series of text-based instructions that shifted attention toward environmental sound and collective, meditative sound-making, rather than traditional composition.
She also developed the Extended Instrument System (EIS), an interactive electronic processing system that allowed her to expand the sonic possibilities of her accordion through delay and real-time transformation.
Working in a field largely dominated by men, she became an important model for generations of experimental composers and educators.
Lydia Lunch
If you’re looking for something soft, soothing, or remotely polite, stay far away from Lydia Lunch. Since the late ’70s, her entire artistic mission has been to agitate: emotionally, sexually, politically. Her unapologetic sexuality and open contempt for passivity never made her a media darling. Good. She was never auditioning for approval.
If you want truth without the flattering lighting, Lydia is your destination. Film, writing, records - whatever she touches comes out sharpened, weaponised, unforgettable.
A central figure of the No Wave scene, she arrived in New York at sixteen and walked straight into its chaos, quickly becoming one of its most confrontational voices. With Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, alongside James Chance and others, she dismantled both rock’s tired rebellion and its even more tired ideas about women. No seduction, no decoration, just confrontation.
Meredith Monk
Meredith Monk is redefining vocal music through "extended vocal techniques," treating the voice as a versatile instrument capable of sounds beyond words, including clicks, hums, and cries. She revolutionized interdisciplinary performance by blending music, movement, film, and theater, pioneering site-specific art in unconventional spaces.
Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words.
Starting in the mid-1960s, Monk broke away from traditional singing to explore the voice's ability to produce primal, emotional sounds. She spans a wide, often wordless range, creating a "landscape" of sounds that function as a high-octane instrument.
When language does appear, it is rarely used in a conventional, narrative sense. Words emerge instead as chants or lists, stripped of theatrical affect and integrated into the overall sonic texture.
Alongside her vocal innovations, she has been a key figure in interdisciplinary performance. She developed a “unified form” that brings together music, movement, film, and theater, creating works that move fluidly across artistic boundaries.
In 1968, she founded The House, a company dedicated to this approach. Around the same time, she began presenting work in unconventional spaces, helping pioneer site-specific performance. In 1969, she created Juice, the first live art event in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum.
