“The Divine Punishment” remaster by Diamanda Galás announced today & will be released on her label. Remastered by me Lacquers cut by Paul Gold @saltmastering Released in 1986 this album is so far ahead of its time. My jaw hit the floor when I was working on it. Diamanda and I work very closely on these reissues and each reissue can take several months to complete...we really want to shed the right light on these recordings while preserving their original intention. Thank you Diamanda for your incredible artistry and genius. I am constantly in awe of you. Excerpt from the release: On June 30, 1986, the same day that Diamanda Galás's The Divine Punishment was released, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Georgia's so-called sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick, criminalizing consensual sex between men. At the time, about 15,000 people were known to have died of AIDS in the U.S. alone, with little government acknowledgement besides suggestions to quarantine homosexuals on island colonies. By the end of 2021, the number of AIDS deaths globally would exceed 36 million. The first album in her Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Divine Punishment is one of the most jarring works of art produced in response to the AIDS epidemic, and a milestone in Diamanda Galás's artistry and activism. Galás uses her famous voice both as an orational instrument and as well as a physical representation of AIDS and those it afflicts. The album features the panphonic* dirge work of Galás, accompanied by analogue synthesizers and piano played by Diamanda Galás with additional synthesizer work by Dave Hunt. The texts are primarily taken from the Old Testament, contrasting the hectoring lawmakers of Leviticus with the desperate appeals of the Lamentations and Book of Psalms (Psalm 22, 59, and 88). In doing so, she indicts those who use religion to instigate the witch hunts that inevitably accompany real and perceived plagues.