Diamanda double double release announced

From the Mute web site:

Defixiones, Will and Testament
La Serpenta Canta Two Double Album Releases - Out 24th November 2003
Plus Rare Live Dates in London and Glasgow - October/November

Diamanda Galás releases two double albums on 24th November, her first releases since 1998's Malediction and Prayer. For both of these albums, Galás continues her forensic acts of identifying long buried hurts.
One, Defixiones, Will And Testament, investigates the little known Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923, with the singer articulating the anger and sorrow of the dispossessed through the words of exiled poets and writers alongside her own texts. La Serpenta Canta (aka The Serpent Sings) is a song recital recruiting blues, R&B, Motown, southern soul, Country & Western and her own "Baby's Insane" (from This Sporting Life, her duo album with John Paul Jones) in Galás's ongoing campaign against forgetting. Between the two albums, Galás covers a whole lotta dying ground in a babel of languages (Defixiones alone sets poems by Belgian writer Henri Michaux, Romanian-Jewish Paul Celan, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, French symbolist Gérard Nerval, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, Armenian Siamanto, Syrian Adonis, Assyrian poet-martyr Dr Freidoun Bet-Oraham and more) and traditions spanning Eastern Orthodox liturgy, American roots and the rembetika songs of Greece and Asia Minor.
Both sets are sung by Galás accompanying herself on piano, tape and a minimum of electronics, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that there are more of her out there coming at you from all sides, as her formidable voice rises to its full power and rattles the walls with its reverberating echoes. "My voice," she said in 1988, "was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth." With its much-touted three and a half octave range, Galás's voice is the most powerful weapon in her self-designed musical armoury.
Diamanda Galás will perform Defixiones, Will And Testament on Friday 17th October at the Royal Festival Hall in London as part of their Mind Your Head 2003 - Exploring new meanings in Sacred Music series.
A second date has been announced on Sunday 2nd November at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall as part of the city's Glasgay Festival. Frenzy: Concert For Aileen Wuornos is dedicated to Wuornos, who was executed on death row last year. The performance will include new arrangements of Galás' older recordings, plus songs from the new album La Serpenta Canta as well as brand new songs.
Friday 17th October - Defixiones, Will and Testament
8.00pm at Royal Festival Hall, London. Tickets available from the Box Office: 020 7960 4242 or book online at rfh.org.uk
Sunday 2nd November - Frenzy: Concert for Aileen Wuornos
8.00pm at Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow. For ticket information, check www.glasgay.co.uk - 0141 353 8000