Dead Can Dance

Dead Can Dance were one of the fundamental experiences of "atmospheric" rock in the 1980s and 1990s. They were among the first to succeed in the task of assimilating a gothic, exotic, medieval, and classical sound into the structure of the rock song. Their starting point was an austerity that seemed to be the exact antithesis of the spirit of rock and roll: their music is cold, inert, spectral. The songs rely on two evocative factors: the arrangements, which would become the rock equivalent of chamber music, and the female singing, which would become the rock equivalent of the Lied. Both the arrangements and the singing coined a new standard of reference for an entire generation of rock musicians. The arrangement was the most salient aspect. Each album changed setting and set the tone for a new era, moving from the early gothic phase to the religiosity of the second album, from the archaic third to the exotic fourth, from the Renaissance fifth to the Celtic sixth.

Dead Can Dance were formed in Melbourne (Australia) by the English multi-instrumentalist Brendan Perry at the end of the 1970s, and in 1980 he brought in the Australian singer Lisa Gerrard. The couple settled in London and released the album Dead Can Dance (4AD, 1984), which inevitably led to comparisons with the Cocteau Twins dream-pop, although the atmospheres actually derived directly from the gothic punk of Siouxsie and the Joy Division: gloomy harmonies were roughly woven through (mostly electronic) ceremonial cadences, electronic dissonances, oriental-sounding guitar chords, and over this dark and morbid foundation, screams (Fatal Impact) and Perry s otherworldly chants (The Trial, Wild In The Woods) were made to hover; or, over a background of tribalism and noise, Gerrard stretched a Middle Eastern litany (Frontier and Threshold). In Ocean, a pool of chords and wails created the backdrop for a very distant echo of Gerrard, who seems to intone a religious psalm with anguished voice. The rosary closed with Musica Eternal, a celestial slow-motion piece which remains the album s best intuition. Except for East Of Eden and the title track, the musicality of the work was almost nonexistent; the success of the operation relied entirely on the evocative power of the whole.

Better produced, if not better performed, the 1984 EP Garden Of Arcane Delight refined that formula, introducing strong exotic inflections (frenetic polyrhythms and Siouxsee-like chanting) in Flowers Of The Sea and especially Carnival Of Lights.

The progressive expansion of the "orchestra" began with the second album, Spleen And Ideal (1985), which employed brass (two trombones), percussion (two timpani), and strings (cellos, violin). At the same time, the production increasingly highlighted Gerrard s luminous and abstract singing. The album is permeated with the religiosity of Tibetan mantras, from the very first notes of De Profundis, marked by extremely slow drum strikes, very long organ chords, and a choir echoing into infinity. Perry's ballads are set in ever more imaginative musical scenographies (the small fanfare of The Cardinal Sin, the imposing march of Enigma Of The Absolute). Some arrangements are so solemn and intricate that they recall early King Crimson. On the other hand, Gerrard s Mesmerism and Avatar return to the established pattern of paradisiacal or exotic vocalizations (respectively) over a tribal rhythm.

Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun (1987) is orchestrated for a chamber ensemble of eleven musicians. It is an ambitious work that ventures into the music of the distant past, as the manifesto Anywhere Out Of The World declares. In the first half, Perry has the opportunity to demonstrate his abilities as "orchestra conductor" in the instrumental Windfall. However, the highlights are Gerrard s journeys into the subconscious, which occupy the second half, particularly Dawn Of The Iconoclast, Cantara, and Persephone.

The Serpent's Egg (1988) makes use of all previous experiments for a striking incursion into exotic religiosity, and the instrumental Mother Tongue is its new programmatic manifesto. Meanwhile, the schizophrenia that opposes Perry s symphonic ballads (among which stand out the hypnotic In The Kingdom Of The Blind and the medieval Ullyses) to Gerrard s free flights increasingly ends up favoring the latter: only the organ, with its celestial notes, and a string section, with its dark tremors, accompany the convent-psalm of The Host Of Seraphim; between magical and fairytale emerges the stream of consciousness in The Writing Of My Father's Hand, through echoes of her own voice and harpsichord chimes; Chant Of The Paladin indulges in the funereal and ceremonial, a funeral dirge with martial accompaniment of death bells and hare-krishna chimes. Her wordless singing, far from virtuosic but capable of capturing the essential nuances of emotion, is perhaps at its peak. And that senseless babbling acts as an alter ego to Perry s ornate lyrics, just as his lush arrangements complement Gerrard s spectral simplicity. The duo essentially constructed an artificial balance between two completely different artistic worlds.

From the "archaicizing" tendency of the previous album begins Aion (1990), a medieval and Renaissance excursus performed with period instruments and sung in ancient languages. Although steeped in Gregorian religiosity (The Arrival And The Reunion), the real protagonists are gentle madrigals (The Promised Womb), unbridled saltarelli (As The Bell Rings The Maypole Spins), and demonic dervishes (Rhadarc). In them Gerrard displays her mimetic abilities. The work has the value of a cathartic bath of humility. Even Perry's ballads (Fortune Presents Gifts and Black Sun, the only ones sung in English) renounce elaborate orchestral scores and echo the same medieval forms.

Meanwhile, the duo had composed the soundtrack for the film "El Ni o De La Luna" (starring Gerrard), and later would compose the score for Redha s ballet "La Pavane Rouge". Perry also briefly collaborated with Mark Ellis in Elijah's Mantle, producing two albums, Angels Of Perversity (DeNovaDaCapo) and Remedies In Heresies, which refer to Gregorian liturgy, gothic iconography, and decadent literature.

Weak and trivial, Into The Labyrinth (1993) merely repeats the same tricks in light of a rediscovery of the Celtic music of Ireland (their new homeland) and thus highlights the limits of this achieved maturity : between Gerrard s usual vocal virtuosity and predictable medieval references (Towards The Within), increasingly cloying ballads (The Carnival Is Over) emerge in that style of Frank Sinatra or Charles Aznavour-like crooning whose only purpose is to secure a minimum of radio success (and indeed The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove would remain their biggest chart success). The Dead Can Dance records have by now also lost the religious aura that made them, if nothing else, spiritual experiences even before musical ones.
Gerrard s exotic experiments are the real reason to listen to their albums: Yulunga, which begins in a Tibetan monastery and ends in an Arab bazaar, and Saldek, a festival of voices and oriental percussion, are further demonstrations of this "fusion" of widely distant ethnic genres (geographically and temporally), a fusion aiming toward the "super-ethnic" genre foreshadowed in The Spider's Stratagem, one of her most neutral and spectacular recitals.

The live album Towards The Within (4AD, 1994) did not add much to the Dead Can Dance musical program, but in Rakim, Persian Love Song, and Yulunga it revealed the dangers of excessive ethnic mannerism.

To explore those magical recesses, Lisa Gerrard released The Mirror Pool in 1995, ennobled by the percussion of Pieter Bourke. It is a dispersive yet evocative collection, containing superbly orchestrated instrumental pieces. The opening, Violina, is a somber adagio for string section worthy of a Mahler symphony, with a Lied no less somber and no less classical that then rises into a vocal polyphony worthy of Gregorian liturgy. La Bas is a gothic nightmare, a gloomy vision: Gerrard sings in a low register imitating the voice of a monk, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by death bells, a massive orchestra, or a dark organ. The instrumental overture of Nilleshna perhaps paints the most lyrical atmosphere of the album, with violin melodies swirling like in a Baroque aria and that chilling organ solo.
Gerrard s almost obsessive interest in exotic folklore manifests itself in the Tibetan litany of Rite, the Native American round dance of Ajhon, the Persian lament of Glorafin, and the Middle Eastern saltarello of Swans. Gerrard, however, is not Meredith Monk, and her vocal experiments are worth less than the arrangements. The radiant, sorrowful psalmody of Sanvean and the bare, martial chant of Celon, her best vocal performances, are set in the silence of an imaginary convent, and perhaps succeed precisely because they renounce ethnic ambition. Humility benefits Gerrard more than eclecticism.
Over time Gerrard s continual self-flagellation ends up prevailing over the music, often weary and monotonous, patched around fleeting sparks and passing passions for one genre or another. Few of the sixteen pieces seem complete; most seem like experiments yet to be finalized, dress rehearsals for a composition still to be composed. The happiest moments are perhaps the classical ones, those in which the orchestra imposes humility on the prayers of the contrite.
The album documents a bleak and pessimistic phase in the singer s life.

Compared to the trans-global, medieval-inspired, gothic, and so on albums being released in those years, Spiritchaser (4AD, 1996) amounts to very little. Instruments, lyrics, rhythms, and melodies are drawn from Latin American, African, Caribbean, and Native American folk traditions. Gerrard s vocalizations dominate Niereka, which is otherwise empty in content, and especially Devorzhum, which would have fit well on Popol Vuh s Hosianna Mantra.
Song Of The Stars (ten minutes) aims to be the avant-garde piece, and its collage of sonic events (a Steve Roach like didjeridu, Native American chants, animal sounds, a surf guitar theme, the usual multitude of percussion, and Gerrard s usual vocal acrobatics) is certainly elegant; but there is nothing here that hasn t already been heard elsewhere. The duo tries again with Indus (nine minutes), prostrating itself before Indian music in an incense- and marijuana-soaked trance, but manages only to (unintentionally) construct a parody of the Beatles Within You Without You.
All things considered, Perry is right to sing Song Of The Dispossessed with the tone of a Robert Wyatt style proletarian chant: if the Brazilian rhythm is cloying, the duet between the fatalistic clarinet theme and the minimalist piano figure forms the emotional peak of the album and one of Perry s personal masterpieces.
Caught between the legacy of the Third Ear Band and Pearls Before Swine and the innovations of younger groups, not to mention Enya and new-age music, Dead Can Dance struggle to give meaning to their music. Any television commercial displays more daring experiments than these. The album is important in their career because it is by far the most percussive and the least melodic.

The art of Dead Can Dance shows more and more two faces: on one side Perry, incorporating the orchestra into rock music, has arrived at a form of pretentious neo-classical Lieder; on the other, Gerrard, refining her free vocal arabesques (and completely renouncing the use of any specific language, preferring instead to coin a stateless idiom ) has transformed her songs into dark odes inspired in equal measure by Paleo-Slavic hymnody and the Gregorian canon, by Middle Eastern dances and medieval sarabandes, by Tibetan liturgy and Celtic folk. Dead Can Dance have therefore become something like a modern equivalent of the Third Ear Band: popular resurrectors of the sounds of the past for purposes of transcendental tasting (if not meditation).

Gerrard recorded the album Duality (4AD, 1998) at her home, in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Pieter Bourke of the Soma and the Eden. It was conceived as a tribute to medieval Aramaic music but gradually became one of the most ambitious records of her 1990s (Shadow Magnet and Pilgrimage Of Lost Children). Human Game is the first song Gerrard sings in English. Bourke plays practically all the percussion and keyboards and represents a serious (and infinitely more cultured) alternative to Perry.

In December 1998 came the group announced that it was dissolving.

Brendan Perry's solo album that marked the end of Dead Can Dance, Eye Of The Hunter (4AD, 1999), is an intensely personal statement arranged for (synthesized) orchestra and a plethora of acoustic instruments. When one couples the slow, almost dreamy, pace of the eight songs with the brevity of the album (which clocks at 42 minutes), one can draw the conclusion that not much happens, that Perry chose form over content. And it wouldn't be the first time, as Dead Can Dance's career has often been but an elegant gesture in the air.
Perry embraces an art of stately- colloquial- confessional music that has been refined by the likes of Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and that harks back to Leonard Cohen (the spare, tender melody of Medusa would have been a standout track on his first album) and Tim Buckley, to David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name, which Perry echoes several times, and to Van Morrison's Veedon Fleece, which the arrangements quote repeatedly. These are the roots from which the psychedelic, dilated wail of Saturday's Child, on a lullaby-like harpsichord motiv, and even the unabashedly kitschy The Captive Heart, a waltzing rhythm and blues for which he borrows Jim Morrison's ghostly recitative, sprung up. The soft, languid tale and the synthesizers' elegant renaissance dance in Voyage Of Bran represent the last umbelical liaison with Dead Can Dance, while betraying his sympathy for celtic folk, Morricone's soundtracks and new age music.
Perry crowns the album with two master strokes of postmodern adaptation. First he clones Chris Isaak's spectral, bluesy dirge and desolate twang in Death Will Be My Bride, and then merges blues howl and gregorian chant in Archangel. They both slowly fade away into psychedelic stupor.
Perry is not gifted with the cunning introspection of modern songwriters such as Smog or Magnetic Fields, or even Mark Lanegan, but he successfully compensates his old-fashioned style by enveloping the personal into the epic.
His martial tempos and fatalistic baritone would probably sound repetitive over a longer work, but, as it is, the album is a masterly synthesis and revision of 40 years of rock songwriting.

Gerrard, in the meantime, scored the soundtrack for the movie The Insider (Sony, 1999), with help from Peter Bourke, and Gladiator (Sony, 2001), with help from Hans Zimmer.

Percussionist Peter Ulrich has released on his own the album Pathways And Dawns (Projekt, 1999), a work that perhaps beats Gerrard at her own game. A collection of medieval madrigals (Taqaharu's Leaving, Life Amongst The Black Sheep) and baroque exotica (Journey Of Discovery, Nocturne), the album betrays a passion for off melodies (Time And A Word, The Springs Of Hope) that would please Todd Rundgren or the young Brian Eno.

Lisa Gerrard also composed the mostly-instrumental soundtrack for Niki Caro's The Whale Rider (2003).

Immortal Memory (4AD, 2004) the result of Gerrard's collaboration with Ireland's classical composer Patrick Cassidy (i.e., Gerrard's contralto is merely a voice for his melodies and arrangements). The songs indulge in the usual Celtic-inspired cliches (Amergin's Invocation). This is a really bad copy of Enya's music.

Lisa Gerrard and Jeff Rona composed the soundtrack for the film A Thousand Roads (Wide Blue Sky, 2005).

Gerrard's solo album The Silver Tree (Rubber, 2006 - High Wire, 2007), eleven years after The Mirror Pool, is a collection of austere hymns in different musical languages, that together cover an impressive spectrum of styles, from languid trip-hop to stately melodrama to Enya-esque trance.

Dziekuje Bardzo (2009) was a collaboration between Lisa Gerrard and Klaus Schulze.

Brendan Perry released another solo album, Ark (2010), is devoted to symphonic slocore over military drums (Babylon) and over disco locomotive beats (The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) when it doesn't indulge in morbid gothic ballads (The Bogus Man with trip-hop beats) and romantic synth-pop Wintersun (like a sleepy version of Simple Minds' Don't you). Mostly, there is a lot of mellow background muzak. The album includes a nine-minue exotic-sounding version of Crescent, an old (2005) Dead Can Dance song included in live albums.

Michael Stearns, Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci composed the soundtrack to Ron Fricke's documentary Samsara (2011).

The quasi-symphonic Dead Can Dance's Anastasis (2012) is an involuntary exercise in revisiting old stereotypes of commercial music: Children of the Sun evokes Sinatra-era crooned orchestral pop; Amnesia is simply a melodramatic theme for the orchestras of Richard Clayderman or Paul Mauriat; Agape and Kiko are more or less faithful imitations of Middle-eastern love songs; and, above all, the majestic exotic Return of the She-King mixes Ennio Morricone's epic soundtracks with medieval Gregorian chants. The songs drown in too much pomp, not justified by such a low degree of originality.