Dead Can Dance - Australian ethno-gothic

Dead Can Dance is the most important and influential project of that "gothic" and "atmospheric" strand that emerged as an offshoot of darkwave starting in the early Eighties: no other group in this field has managed to achieve results of such far-reaching scope. Dead Can Dance is a cultural project, even before being a musical one, aimed at the (re)discovery of ancient traditions, distant in both time and space.

Their saga has explored a vast range of eras and settings, evolving into a meticulous study of European folk tradition, with a particular fondness for medieval and Renaissance themes (which kick-started the rich vein of ambient, chamber-leaning "gothic" music led by groups such as Black Tape For A Blue Girl), while on one hand rediscovering sacred music and on the other tribal music (laying new foundations for the revival of world music), always maintaining a rigorous stylistic consistency, and at the same time moving ever further away from the canons of rock music.

Dead Can Dance were formed in 1981 in Melbourne, Australia: the group initially consisted of Brendan Perry (vocals, synth and guitar), Simon Monroe (bass), Paul Erikson (keyboards and percussion) plus vocalist Lisa Gerrard. In fact, the band came into being thanks to the meeting, in 1979, between Gerrard (who was studying classical singing) and Perry (who up to that point had been singer and guitarist of punk band The Scavengers, later abandoned to dabble in electronic music experiments). The singer recalls their beginnings like this: "The first piece we improvised was called 'Frontier'. Something magical happened that day. We realised that everything we had done before, on our own, simply wasn't comparable. Something was unlocked that neither of us could have imagined; we had to repeat that experience, so we started writing together".

But it's in England that their music would establish them as an essential point of reference for the entire dark aesthetic. Perry and Gerrard moved there in 1982, becoming to all intents and purposes the sole owners of the Dead Can Dance name and signing to Ivo Watts-Russell's 4AD. In London, a land more suited to their shadowy atmospheres, Dead Can Dance immediately revealed what set them apart from the dark movement of Bauhaus, The Cure, Joy Division, Siouxsie and The Banshees. Their work is characterised by a marked taste for spectral, elegant and atmospheric arrangements, and by the singing - warmer and more baritone in Perry's case, more luminous and ethereal in Gerrard's. Their greatest gift is the ability to build an atmosphere of suspense, taking its cue from a classically and medievally inflected gothic sound, before gradually branching out towards religiosity, the archaic, the exotic and the folk.

In 1984, their debut album Dead Can Dance, quickly followed by the EP Garden Of Arcane Delights, saw them immediately compared to Cocteau Twins for their ethereal, dreamlike digressions. In reality, though, their early music drew above all on the gothic punk of Siouxsie and Joy Division. Yet to the occult-ritual atmospheres of the "queen of the night", Dead Can Dance added a sense of anguished spirituality, developed through religious psalms, litanies and echoes from beyond the grave. One example of this perfect symbiosis is the splendid "In Power We Entrust The Love Advocated" (later covered by the Dutch band The Gathering). But while the refined ballads sung by Perry (standing out among them "Wild in the Woods") still don't stray too far from the canons of dark wave, it's Gerrard's astonishing melismas, her voice possessed of a superhuman range, that define the most original and unforgettable tracks: the restless "Ocean" and the absolute rarefaction of "Musica Eterna".

Starting with their second album, Spleen And Ideal (1985), Perry decided to focus on quasi-symphonic arrangements of horns, percussion and strings, while Lisa Gerrard's vocalisations become ever more dreamlike and evocative. A sense of mysticism dominates throughout, between Tibetan mantras, choirs that seem to echo into infinity, and tribal rhythms.

The two artists' very different approaches are blended to perfection: Perry hits on the first true masterpiece of his art as a philosophical "chamber" singer-songwriter with the wonderful march "Enigma Of The Absolute"; while Gerrard, with tracks like "Mesmerism" and "Avatar", pushes the staggering visionary power of her voice ever higher. The album reaches number two on the UK independent charts. And, alongside their "cousins" Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance become the true symbol of the "4AD sound".

Emphasising the "chamber" leanings of the arrangements, Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun (1986) marks a genuine formal milestone. It's also their "gothic" record par excellence, the most esoteric and mysterious of their career. Eight tracks, split evenly between the two. The first four, Perry's, are extraordinary "studies" in counterpoint, orchestrated for a ten-piece chamber ensemble, laid over "ambient" electronic beds, punctuated by the chimes of keyboards. Each instrument's contribution is calculated down to the millimetre and perfectly set within the whole, in order to achieve music that is solemn and majestic, yet also fluid, natural, flowing and elegant. The instrumental "Windfall" and the long, magical narrative of "Xavier" are the tracks that best symbolise such stylistic splendour.

The second half of the album, centred on Lisa Gerrard's vocal experiments, culminates in the Eastern-flavoured dance of "Cantara".

The album that marked their definitive consecration arrived in 1988, however, with The Serpent's Egg, a work steeped in symbolism from the very start, beginning with the cover image, which shows a photo of a river in the rainforest seen from above. The album opens with "The Host Of Seraphim", a flash of pure angelic light in the sky of the Dantean Empyrean of Paradise. A single organ note hangs in the air before introducing Gerrard's commanding voice. This kind of introduction, with low, sustained notes, is inspired by baroque music, as Perry himself has stated. There are no words in Gerrard's contralto singing, only an intonation of syllables without meaning - glossolalia, which she makes extensive use of throughout her records. One can sense the influence of Balkan singing in the vibrant, dissonant notes of her throat, in particular that presented by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir in 1975 with the album "Le mystère des voix bulgares" (reissued in 1986, fittingly, by 4AD, Dead Can Dance's own label) and later by Trio Bulgarka". Faint Gregorian chants can then be heard in the distance as accompaniment, lending the track a liturgical flavour. The strings step in before the voice soars into a thrilling, unforgettable high note.

The sounds are modelled on another soundtrack written by the same duo, that of "El niño de la Luna", a film by Agustí Villaronga that would be released the following year. It tells the story of young David, an orphan endowed with exceptional powers, and his escape with the help of Georgina, played by Lisa Gerrard herself. One of the actors, David Navarro Sust, was invited to take part in the recording of "Orbis de Ignis", an almost entirely vocal piece, with just a few accompanying bells. Gerrard seems to lead a religious procession in a passage where medieval spirituality and the modern tonalities of the Balkans merge together.

"Severance" sees Perry take over on vocals with his baritone timbre, tackling themes of separation and change through the metaphor of birds in flight and nostalgia for one's own origins. The keyboard's filler sound is simple yet extraordinarily imposing. Even a historic band like Bauhaus would later record a cover of it, struck by the track's stark beauty and rustic quality.

The gorgeous "The Writing On My Father's Hand" puts the microphone back in Gerrard's hands, first delicate and melancholy over faint keyboard chimes emulating a harpsichord, then layered and ethereal. The sounds form a minimal crucible of folk, ambient, darkwave and electronics. The mysterious title leaves everything to the listener's imagination, conveyed only through the nostalgic memory of a beloved figure. The arrangements, with a few exceptions, showcase each individual component in its own uniqueness, rather than layering them as on previous albums.

Perry returns to the microphone on the beautiful "In The Kingdom Of The Blind The One-Eyed Are Kings". Here too the keyboard repeats a melancholic motif, but with greater force, building to an imposing climax, in what is perhaps the record's dramatic peak. "Chant Of The Paladin" is an ostinato litany led by Gerrard, in which more and more elements are layered in to evoke, as before, a liturgical procession, but through the instruments of a village fair: most notable is the hurdy-gurdy, a string instrument played by Perry. The sounds are imposing, yet also obsessive. "Song Of Sophia" is a brief a cappella interlude, drawing partly on Balkan singing and partly on the melancholic music of Ofra Haza, finding a meeting point with Levantine sounds. Gerrard's instrumental solitude, combined with the melancholy of her voice, seems to depict a song of broken love.

"Echolalia" is also short, but here Gerrard and Perry duet, overlapping and intertwining, while faint percussion in the distance sets the tempo. The two seem to call and answer one another, unraveling the chorus in the process. The near-instrumental "Mother Tongue" is the album's most rhythmic and dynamic track: heavily influenced by sub-Saharan tribal music but filtered and transfigured through a post-punk lens, it recalls some of the band's older pieces, like "Frontier" from their debut. Gerrard's voice enters like a terrifying specter in the final coda, where the percussion thins out and a dark-ambient keyboard rises to prominence. At this point, the track acts as a bridge between the band's taste for the exotic and their taste for the otherworldly. Finally, there's the farewell of "Ullyses": an intense ballad, an elegant carousel of strings and keyboards, like a Renaissance dance conducted by a spectacular Perry, who alternates Gerrard-style vocalizations (though with his own acidic timbre) with a deep, sweet, enveloping singing voice.

"We make records because we have a lot of demons to exorcise," they explain, "we take delight in the therapeutic nature of making music, and it's through that enjoyment that we want to express that joy and communicate it to people. It's our greatest source of therapy, and our greatest means of expression." Between the two of them, who were also romantically involved at the time, there's a rapport that transcends mere musical collaboration. Right after the release of this album, however, they would split up, while still maintaining a professional partnership.

Other significant milestones followed, such as the album Aion (1990) — a medieval and Renaissance excursion played on period instruments and sung in ancient languages, the true "conceptual" culmination of their research, featuring one of their most shining gems, the delicate madrigal "The Promised Womb" — and Into The Labyrinth (1993). The latter was the result of a curious "preparation": Brendan Perry lives on an island on a river on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; Lisa Gerrard lives in the Snowy River mountains of Australia. "It's a journey through a year of writing, based on life in the countryside among rural people," Perry explains. "There's a love for the natural, primitive music of the world, a love for things that sound truly natural: a bird's song, a forest."

Afterwards came the live album Towards The Within, in which the band had the chance to show off its particular flair for live performance: "Live," says Lisa Gerrard, "we don't take much from our records. We have a system where we introduce nodal structures that allow for improvisation, following a melodic approach. Through this process you can 'dangerously' reach some beautiful musical moments."

Meanwhile, Lisa Gerrard also pursued a solo career, recording The Mirror Pool (1995), enriched by Pieter Bourke's percussion. Ever enigmatic and far removed from the rock spotlight, the Australian chanteuse never gives up on meditation: "Moments of silence are essential when you're working. You need pauses, you need to hear nothing, to reflect on what you've done. Otherwise your relationship with your own work risks being traumatized."

Musically, Dead Can Dance increasingly veered toward ethnic pathways: their Celtic background became contaminated by Arabic, Persian and Chinese influences, along with the use of new instruments, including the "bouzouki" and other exotic percussion. This direction would be explored further on Spiritchaser, which leaned even more heavily into "transglobal" folk (Indian, Latin American, African, Native American, Caribbean music). But the album, ambitious as it is, shows signs of fatigue here and there.

Gerrard thus continued on her own path, recording Duality (1998), a tribute to medieval Aramaic music, in which the Australian vocalist doesn't give up her anarchic vocal flourishes, blending Gregorian chant, Celtic folk and medieval dances, while also singing in English for the first time. By now the duo's paths had diverged: Perry had increasingly become a neo-classically minded rock conductor, while Gerrard, with her ethnic-religious digressions, had become an experimenter in "free" singing, following in the footsteps of Enya and Meredith Monk. So in 1998 the band broke up. "We had all grown beyond the limits of our shared work," Perry would later say. The best summation of the Melbourne outfit's classic repertoire remains A Passage In Time (1991), the anthology that collected some of their most significant tracks, from "Saltarello" to "The Host Of Seraphim", from "Ullyses" to "Cantara".

But anyone who thought Brendan Perry couldn't match Dead Can Dance's bold achievements on his own was mistaken. His solo album Eye Of The Hunter (1999) is in fact a small gem of end-of-century singer-songwriter craft. In 42 minutes, Perry filters the confessional "songbook" of Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, of Tim Buckley and Nick Cave, through present-day eyes. Yet he manages never to sound overly confessional. If anything, he comes across as stiff and tense, evidence of a difficult personality that has only recently come out into the open: "It's thrilling to be rewarded and to reap what comes purely from my own merits," he has revealed.

Arranged for orchestra with a rich ensemble of acoustic instruments, Eye Of The Hunter takes its cue from the cold, unsettling atmospheres of Dead Can Dance, but updates them within a "classical" context centered on Perry's clear, austere voice. It's an exciting journey through gentle arpeggios and poignant melodies ("Medusa"), psychedelic-tinged lullabies ("Saturday's child"), spectral blues ("Death will be my bride", with echoes of Chris Isaak). But Perry's leanings toward Celtic folk, new age, and the soundscapes of Ennio Morricone are also perceptible. Elegant even in its graphic design, the album proves to be a perfect balance of austere themes and communicative warmth, delicacy and suspense, proving that Perry has everything it takes to inherit the Dead Can Dance legacy and project its "dark" spirit into the new millennium.

Meanwhile, Lisa Gerrard was successfully devoting herself to some major film scores, for movies such as "Insider" and "Gladiator" (directed by Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning).

In 2004 Gerrard released, together with Patrick Cassidy, the fascinating Immortal Memory, which, far from heralding the rumored Dead Can Dance reunion, instead marked the start of an intense solo career, centered not just on albums (The Silver Tree in 2006, and The Black Opal in 2009) but above all on a long series of appearances and collaborations, among which her work with Klaus Schulze would prove especially intense.

By contrast, Brendan Perry, true to his reserved, isolationist character, let a full eleven years pass before resurfacing with an album under his own name. Across the eight lengthy tracks of Ark, Perry seems to want to reconnect with his past with the band, setting aside the more acoustic, singer-songwriter-leaning character of its distant predecessor in favor of a return to shadowy atmospheres, dominated by an ongoing exploration of traditional rhythms and a broader use of electronics, in the form of digitized string and brass arrangements.

Shaped by stern reflections on the condition of post-modern humanity, Ark does nothing to diminish Brendan Perry's class, although his attempt to hybridize a renewal of ancient suggestions with the effort to add something new to well-established expressive modes — modes that are, in fact, hardly susceptible to significant further development — isn't entirely convincing.

Two years later, almost as a surprise, Perry and Gerrard announced an unexpected reunion, crowned by a world tour and a new studio album. Anastasis arrived in August of that same year and marks a comeback in grand style: there's the ethnic flavor of Spiritchaser, the poetics of Into The Labyrinth, but also a mature, and in some ways new, expressive power.

The clue offered by "Amnesia" already hints at the grandiloquence that pervades the album: Perry's voice, intact and even deeper than before, guides us through the discovery of a new sonic universe that's distinctly "Mediterranean", as also suggested by the title's homage to Ancient Greece. Venturing deeper into the album, what emerges right away is an atmosphere of philosophical, "summery" reflection (the majestic symphony of "Children Of The Sun"), dark arabesques where Gerrard's evocative vocals take center stage ("Anabasis"), and traces of that medieval sensibility explored and developed on Aion ("Kiko"). Oriental-sounding traits characterize "Agape" instead, while a harmonious, multifaceted Gerrard makes her appearance in the ethereal liturgical march-duet of "Return Of The She-King". Bringing things to a close are the romantic patchwork of "Opium", embellished with bursts of solemn strings, and, above all, the superb farewell of "All In Good Time", with Perry's voice almost entirely alone, lulling the senses all the way to the formidable instrumental unison of the finale.

The "resurrection" (that's the translation from Greek of the album's title) of Dead Can Dance couldn't be more radiant: Anastasis is a record closely tied to their past but never self-referential, the mature work of a duo whose sound draws its coordinates from timeless styles, just as their music itself seems to be timeless.

Confirming a new season of creativity for both members of Dead Can Dance, two years after Anastasis comes Twilight Kingdom, a new solo chapter for Lisa Gerrard, which essentially sees our artist as the main name, even if different voices can be recognized on the tracks sung in a more straightforward way, namely "Estelita", one of the most successful, "Too Far Gone" and perhaps also "Seven Seas": decidedly well-judged contributions with a light, sweet and slightly melancholy touch, at times recalling the approach of Antony. Despite the scarcity of information on this, at this point one can imagine they belong to the other collaborators credited on the record, namely Daniel Johns, Patrick Cassidy and Astrid Williamson, while the credits also mention the contribution of her trusted Italian-Argentine collaborator Marcello De Francisci (who had already worked with her previously on the score for "Samsara" as well as on the album "Departum"), probably for the musical parts.

Gerrard explicitly harks back to the atmospheres of the Dead Can Dance era, such as "Serpent's Egg" or "Into The Labyrinth" (starting with the particularly fitting and evocative cover art), even if the rich variety the duo had accustomed us to is missing, in favor of a focus on less ethnic and more ethereal territories. Indeed, the singer's voice returns to wordless vocalizing, or rather to a personal, transcendent language, a glossolalia beyond comprehension except that dictated by instinct, which seems to guide us along the path of this twilight kingdom. A kingdom built step by step, thanks to a voice that echoes from formless, at times dark, vastness, like creating waves, moving from a deep and mysterious contralto to a liturgical, priestess-like timbre no less lyrical, shining and outlining the landscapes sketched by the musical backdrop, where the only rhythm appears only occasionally, marked by distant, deep timpani.

Complex structures are indeed avoided, and only two tracks, "Adrift" and "Neptune", are left to carry on the legacy of the almost orchestral composition with its crescendos: the former with a more cinematic imprint, the latter with a slow transformation that, nonetheless, never strays from the refined simplicity that characterizes the album from first to last track in a shadowy circularity.

Looking back at the DCD era for comparison, Brendan Perry's contribution probably knew how to weave greater complexity and variety into the songs, but here sparseness is not synonymous with scarcity, and the overall effect produced by the main instrument – that is, the voice – lives up to our artist's reputation, as she weaves a web of nuanced, fragile feelings that enrich the listener, who lets themselves be carried away on the wings of suggestion, unhurried.

In 2019, Dead Can Dance, who by this point have well surpassed the thirty-year mark in their career, will celebrate their glorious musical history with a tour that from May to June will hit all the main European capitals. An announcement that alone would be enough to fill every theater and venue on this long live run, but the Australian duo likes to do things properly, and so the tour was preceded by the release of a new chapter in their saga, Dionysus. A record tasked with the arduous job of further enriching the already vast and extraordinary songbook of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. Divided into two acts, DCD's ninth album sets to music the age-old traditions of harvest and spring festivals, starting with those tied to the cult of Dionysus. Greece, in fact, is merely the starting point, the springboard for much broader musical and thematic wanderings. The colorful hood found on the cover of Dionysus is in fact a typical mask of the Huichol, a people of the Mexican Sierra Madre, famous for their beadwork on textiles and for ecstatic peyote-fueled celebrations.

Musically, Perry's harvest here is even more exotic; to develop the circular patterns of Dionysus, he employed Corsican flutes, ancestral drums, bagpipes and the like, as well as the gadulka, a Bulgarian string instrument with great evocative potential. Great attention was also paid to the settings of these celebrations, made palpable through a heavy use of field recordings of flocks of birds, waves, and grazing herds. As intriguing as ever is the interplay between the two voices, which this time sees Perry take on the role of the Rhapsode while Gerrard raises sacred vestal chants or tribal, bacchante-like cries.

Compared to Anastasis, which six years ago marked the duo's comeback, Dionysus is far less dark and sees the wave-tinged quirks of Dead Can Dance almost disappear, in favor of a full embrace of world music canons. Thanks to tribal rhythms and the constant repetition of melodic lines, however, the great hypnotic quality of the Australians' music remains unchanged.

Contributions by Alessandro Mattedi ("The Serpent's Egg"), Raffaello Russo ("Ark"), Matteo Meda ("Anastasis"), Federico Gennari ("Twilight Kingdom"), Michele Corrado ("Dionysus")

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