7. Diamanda GalasYou Must Be Certain Of The Devil
Another childhood favourite! This one was scary. You hear this when you’re 11… My father played this to me and did the trick of putting it on at the wrong speed. It comes as a 45 but we put it on at 33 and it was amazing. So dark. She’s already so dark and deep and then he put it on at the wrong speed on top of that. I mean, I would recommend that. Almost any album sounds great when you play it slowly. Some albums also sound great when you speed them up a little bit. While making an album, I find it to be a very interesting technique to listen to things differently, to speed it up or slow it down and it will be a slightly different song. Certain instruments you can do that with before you have the full arrangement. It can be really clarifying, to see which kind of creature it is. Sometimes it can be like sex, especially speeding things down can be like making an extreme close-up or something. This album, even when it’s played on the normal speed, led me to become very interested in everything she’s done. She’s one of the first artists I felt I could become nerdy about because, unlike Annette Peacock, I could actually find some of her albums. When I was in ‘the big city’, I occasionally found something she’d done. But it started with this. The cover is also really great. Red. I don’t know what to say except that it scared the shit out of me. And it will also scare the shit out of anyone who listens to it, or her, for the first time. I would also recommend an incredible interview that she did that’s printed in the book Angry Women. She is fierce.
