2025 Stock. In the shadowy interstices of avant-garde performance and sonic extremity, Faust. Eros. Tod. stands as one of Diamanda Galás’s most elusive and mythic recordings. Circulating as a rare bootleg, this live album—captured in the early 1980s and released unofficially in 1988—offers a raw, unfiltered glimpse into Galás’s early explorations of the voice as a weapon, an invocation, and a lament.

Faust. Eros. Tod. is not a conventional album, but a document of ritualistic performance. Galás’s voice, already legendary for its range and ferocity, is unleashed in a series of extended, wordless exorcisms. The recording is suffused with a sense of danger and transgression: shrieks, glossolalia, and guttural incantations spiral through the air, at times evoking the haunted spaces of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty or the psychic violence of post-war European art music.

The title—Faust. Eros. Tod.—signals a triptych of obsession, desire, and death. Galás channels these themes through her singular vocal technique, drawing on the myth of Faust, the erotic charge of the body, and the omnipresence of mortality. The result is a performance that feels both ancient and shockingly modern, a confrontation with the limits of language and the body.