Dead Can Dance

Throughout their multifaceted career, Dead Can Dance — namely Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard — have transcended the boundaries of the genres they explored to forge an expressive style with wonderfully varied influences. Already leading figures of the thriving darkwave scene, of which they represented its most ethereal and exotic fringe, they progressively folded into their formula the many influences of world music, from medieval liturgy to tribal folklore.

The pivot of this evolution is to be found in their album "The Serpent's Egg", released on October 23, 1988, a full thirty-five years ago. A simple yet profound record, a watershed that fluidly ferries the sounds developed on their previous albums toward a new spiritual dimension, steeped in ethnic influences.

As is customary for the Anglo-Australian duo, the album is packed with symbolism, even beyond its apparent intentions. The cover image shows an aerial photo of a river in a rainforest. Perry has described it this way: "In many aerial photographs of the Earth, if you see it from above, like a giant organism, a macrocosm, you can see that the life force of nature, water, flows in a serpentine way". This photo pairs with a title that lends itself to multiple references. First of all, it's a quote from William Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", where in Act II Brutus is given a motive for the assassination he is plotting ("And since the quarrel / Will bear no colour for the thing he is, / Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented, / Would run to these and these extremities; / And therefore think him as a serpent's egg / Which, hatch'd, would as his kind grow mischievous, / And kill him in the shell").

This quote was later taken up by Ingmar Bergman for his 1977 film of the same name, which struck Perry for its portrayal of madness: in the story, a deranged doctor drugs and secretly films the victims of his experiments to test their limits and probe what man is capable of. "It really was a strange film and the title always stuck with me," Perry recalled. "In the image of a river opening into an estuary, you can see the sandbanks underwater, that's the egg to me. But sometimes things are truly subliminal, since there's no real reason why I chose it. I just liked the title and the image. But I love the way you can move from the microscopic details of a jungle to the macroscopic ones, looking from above, watching rivers like the arteries of a body, carrying energy and life force as they flow... it's as if your mind expands to reach the immensity of the universe. It also refers to us opening ourselves up to the world and to traditional music, absorbing different influences from South America and Africa".

The image cited by Perry is, fittingly, the one chosen for the cover. With "The Serpent's Egg", the band tries to evoke these same sensations through a highly detailed music, partly ambient in approach, which borrows influences from various musical traditions to give them a modern interpretation, dominated by an idealized vision of untouched, primordial nature, combined with a sense of the sacred and awe before the otherworldly. This representation, later developed in even greater depth on subsequent albums, would earn the duo some accusations of "exoticism". See in this regard the essay "Medievalism and Exoticism in the Music of Dead Can Dance" by ethnomusicologist Kirsten Yri, published in the academic journal Current Musicology in 2008, which explores the concept of the "other" in Western culture, and how it has been used over the years to simplify, fragment and appropriate elements of different cultures.

In the meantime, though, "The Serpent's Egg" remains a gem of passion and a delightful exercise in style, achieved through minimal arrangements that nonetheless fully capture melodies both stirring and solemn, as well as more delicate ones.

To better understand how they arrived at this record, let's briefly retrace the trajectory followed by the Anglo-Australian duo.

On their self-titled 1984 debut album, and on the following EP "Garden Of The Arcane Delight", Dead Can Dance still belonged to the ranks of Anglo-Saxon gothic rock acts, but with a more refined and atmospheric taste, even open to sonic experiments evoking a sense of the exotic, of distant lands and wilderness (think of tracks like "Frontier" or "Flowers Of The Sea").

Alongside kindred acts who started from similar roots and developed them in parallel fashion, such as Scotland's Cocteau Twins, they were grouped by critics under the so-called "ethereal wave" banner, the wave of bands with airy, otherworldly sounds, often under the aegis of the 4AD label, which would crystallize the sound in the This Mortal Coil project, with contributions from numerous artists on its roster (including Perry and Gerrard themselves). But while Cocteau Twins would go on to develop this approach in a more earthly, dreamlike direction, giving rise to what became known as dream-pop, Dead Can Dance would move toward a more mystical and ancestral sound. The results are already glimpsed on the landmark 1985 album "Spleen And Ideal", an astonishing transitional record that still features the typical elements of gothic rock and the genre's conventional instrumentation of guitar, bass and drums, but which also lets instrumental orchestrations emerge, with brass, strings, extensive use of keyboards and other unconventional instruments, alongside even more refined arrangements geared toward atmospheric layering.

On the imposing 1987 follow-up "Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun", the duo focused entirely on keyboards and orchestration, consolidating their style into a gem of atmosphere, forever balanced between drama and a sense of immensity. Music critics would coin the term neoclassical darkwave to describe this enormous evolution the band had achieved in just two albums.

We thus arrive at "The Serpent's Egg" in 1988, with Dead Can Dance's music building on what came before to launch into something new and unprecedented. Comparisons should be drawn above all with the previous album, in order to identify affinities and divergences, since these are two works that are at once consistent and complementary in both form and content.

Unlike "Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun", which sounded bleak and icy, albeit with sporadic sonic eruptions capable of leaving listeners stunned, "The Serpent's Egg" sounds much warmer and more intimate, without however giving up any emotional intensity. The titles appear to be in opposition: on one hand, the idea of a dying Sun signalling the end of an era, and on the other, the idea of an egg, symbol of the beginning of a new life, of a cycle. Where the dark-toned cover of the first record was dominated by a statue from the family tomb of scientist François-Vincent Raspail at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the bright-toned cover of the second tries to capture the flow of life within a rainforest, one of the Earth's lungs. On one side, then, mourning and death; on the other, life, (re)birth, the flow of energy through every living being and every environment on the planet. For Dead Can Dance, visual accompaniment and graphic aesthetics are essential components of what they intend to convey with their music - everything is part of one overall package. In both cases the theme of spirituality is addressed, though with "The Serpent's Egg" it becomes fused with everything that is material and organic.

The closing track of the 1987 album was "Persephone (The Gathering Of Flowers)", a slow build of psychological tension in which Gerrard's voice rang out mystical and eternal, while strings and keyboards reached a dramatic climax before opening into a long, spectral, almost funereal coda - much like the Greek myth of Persephone, in which winter arrives when she is abducted by Hades and taken to his underworld realm.

The 1988 album, by contrast, opens with "The Host Of Seraphim", a flash of pure angelic light in the sky of the Empyrean of Dante's Paradiso. A single sustained organ note fills the air before Gerrard's imposing voice enters. This kind of introduction, with low, continuous notes, is inspired by Baroque music, as Perry himself has stated. There are no words in Gerrard's contralto singing, only an intoning of syllables devoid of meaning - glossolalia, which she makes extensive use of throughout her records. In her expressive style, what matters is not so much conveying a precise message as evoking moods and suggestions, calling up distant scenes and eras, real or otherworldly, primitive or celestial.

Here one can sense the influence of Balkan singing in the vibrant, dissonant notes of her voice, in particular that showcased by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir in 1975 on the album "Le mystère des voix bulgares" (reissued in 1986 by none other than 4AD, Dead Can Dance's own label) and later by Trio Bulgarka.

Their vocal technique, made up of dissonances, diaphony and counterpoint, at the crossroads of religiosity, folklore, modernity, traditionalism and medievalism, represents an enormously important source of inspiration for Gerrard, as she herself explained in an interview with the New York Times: "If there's anyone who has been profoundly changed by their ways, it's me. [...] When I discovered them I had just moved to London with Brendan Perry, and we had signed to their same label, 4AD. They changed my life at a time when music was entirely oriented toward the post-punk of Joy Division and similar acts. I never really felt in tune with that dark, depressive side of the work that Brendan, on the other hand, felt completely at home with. I was ready to give up, but the Bulgarian singers were my salvation, because I loved their joy and their pure light, which hit me straight in the gut".

Faint Gregorian chants can then be heard in the distance as accompaniment, lending the track a liturgical flavour. The strings enter before the voice soars into a thrilling, unforgettable high note. It's a monumental piece, one that conveys a breathtaking sense of the sublime. Something unique, immense, unreachable. Director Ron Fricke would go on to choose it for the soundtrack of his documentary "Baraka".

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 the odd accompanying bell. Gerrard seems to lead a religious procession through a monastery, with background chants following her notes. The voices recall Gregorian chant but without following any actual Latin text, despite the title. The track is brief, just a minute long, and represents a moment in which medieval spirituality and modern Balkan tonalities merge.

At this point a misunderstanding needs clearing up: Dead Can Dance's music is not "traditional", even though it also draws on traditional music, in the sense that the two artists are not presenting historical musical themes here, but rather drawing on certain sonorities and recasting them in wholly original compositions. The duo wants to create a timeless music, with recognizable references, assembled into an entirely new shape.

"Severance" hands the microphone over to Perry, with his baritone timbre tackling themes of separation and change through the metaphor of birds in flight and a nostalgia for one's own origins. Another difference from "Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun" lies in the balance of vocal parts. On the previous album there was a clean split: the first half entrusted to Perry, direct and cutting, the second to Gerrard, sacred and intangible. On "The Serpent's Egg", by contrast, the two trade off and intermingle, even in the timbres and moods they inhabit, lending the record a more organic aura and turning the songs into a continuous flow. "Severance" shows a seemingly detached Perry, but one who is in fact intense. 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 song's spare 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 melancholy motif, but with greater force, building to an imposing climax in the style of "Spleen And Ideal", in what is perhaps the album's most dramatic peak. The lyrics are once again cryptic: Perry seems to be criticizing the lack of communication between people who hide behind masks out of opportunism and apathy. A cover of this track would later be recorded by Ulver, with less success.

"Chant Of The Paladin" is an insistent litany led by Gerrard, in which more and more elements are added to evoke, as before, a liturgical procession, but through the instruments of a village fair: most notably the hurdy-gurdy, a stringed instrument played by Perry. The sounds are imposing, yet also obsessive. Some of the percussion vaguely recalls Indian music, further proof of the group's versatility. The whole thing comes across as a mix of sweet and bitter, fire and water: a hallucinated and hallucinatory piece that resonates with austere mysticism.

"Song Of Sophia" is once again a brief a cappella interlude, drawing partly on Balkan singing and partly on the melancholy music of Ofra Haza, finding a meeting point with Levantine sounds. Gerrard's instrumental solitude, combined with the melancholy of her voice, seems almost to represent a song of broken love.

"Echolalia" is also brief, but here Gerrard and Perry duet, overlapping and intertwining, while faint percussion in the distance sets the pace. The two seem to call out to and answer one another, unspooling the refrain in the process. Between them, romantically involved at the time, there's a rapport that transcends mere musical collaboration. Yet it was right after this album's release that they would separate, while still maintaining a professional partnership, as well as the idea of composing and playing together as a kind of catharsis: "We make records because we have a lot of demons to exorcise," they said, "we take pleasure 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." The track also shows an early sketch of the Arabic and North African influences within Dead Can Dance.

At this point, one might also raise a small flaw in the album: the brevity of no fewer than three of its ten tracks, on a record that runs just 35 minutes, suggests that the work could have been expanded further, but this partial sense of incompleteness is offset by the compositional originality and emotional flair of the tracks.

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 its taste for otherworldly sounds. Dead Can Dance paint distant, mysterious landscapes, seeking to break away from modernity (even while relying on it to visualize and represent these places) in favor of an encounter with cultures other than the Western one.

Finally, the farewell of "Ullyses": an intense ballad, an elegant carousel of strings and keyboards, like a Renaissance dance led by a spectacular Perry, who alternates vocalizations in Gerrard's style (though with his own acidic timbre) with a deep, sweet and enveloping singing voice.

From this point on, Dead Can Dance would no longer be associated (solely) with darkwave, but also with world music, especially on their subsequent albums, which would expand, in a more diffuse and schematic way, many of the ideas introduced on this record.

On the following "Aion", released in 1990, the Anglo-Australian group would focus on medieval and Renaissance European influences, reinterpreting in particular historic pieces of Romance-language music using period instruments, though giving the impression of gathering ideas and cues without delving much deeper into them. This time, however, such cues would be brought forcefully to the fore, rather than remaining just one component among many. As with the transition from "Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun" to "The Serpent's Egg", the shift from the latter to "Aion" highlights both the similarities and the differences in approach. Either way, the gradual evolution of their sound would lead Dead Can Dance never to sound quite the same as before: each step would be a harbinger of the next and a consequence of the one before it.

In 1991 came the stylistic summa of everything explored up to that point, with "Into The Labyrinth", an amalgam of ethnic influences from Africa to Australia, ambient textures, neoclassical and medieval-leaning orchestral scores, dark sonorities and traditional folk cues, which would bring the group commercial success, but which would also sound more mannered and less innovative than their albums of the 1980s. It's the album that, more than any other, helped establish Dead Can Dance as a band that reinterprets and reshuffles the musical traditions of many cultures, past and present. By comparison, "The Serpent's Egg" sounds, on the surface, far less exotic and tribal, but all the seeds had already been sown beforehand, and the roots of this sonic identity lie chiefly in the work of synthesis the group carried out in 1988.

Finally, with "Spiritchaser" in 1995, the duo drew heavily on new age music, a genre they themselves had helped shape in previous years, producing a more electronic and rhythmic work, though less inspired in terms of songwriting. It would be their last act before splitting up. But the break would last only until 2012, with the release of "Anastasis", followed later by "Dionysus", on which the group would further refine its style, foregrounding Balkan and Byzantine influences alongside African, Middle Eastern and Australian Aboriginal ones.

Over the years, the music of Dead Can Dance would go on to influence many kindred acts, such as In the Nursery, Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Lycia, Unto Ashes, Faith and the Muse, Arcana, Aurora Sutra, Love Spirals Downwards, Autumn's Grey Solace; beyond this strand, the early Gathering, Loreena McKennitt, the mid-career Ulver, and, with due proportion, even electronic acts like Enigma and Lamb have certainly drawn inspiration from the Anglo-Australian duo's music. A music that is eternal, as one of their songs puts it. Transcendental.

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18/11/2023