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I WAS dressed in pyjamas when I first confronted Dead Can Dance - the imagescape of 1993's Baraka was flowing over me with The Host of Seraphim, from Dead Can Dance's 1988 tome, The Serpent's Egg, invading my soul. The theatre was full, but I think I had been standing throughout the whole trial. For the images of Baraka are truly a trial for any mortal. Environmental degredation should make any bastard shirk. "Music is there to pacify, it's there as a moment of repose, of celebration and I think it is logical to the essentiality of man. It's a wonderful medium for storytelling." Lisa Gerrard, one half of the infinitely awe-inspiring Dead Can Dance, belays my belittlement. "I don't think of ourselves as having a nationality, we're just people telling stories through the medium of music and in some ways trying to pacify the other man." Long, long before it was fashionable to acknowledge tribal and native beats, the mutations of which now come under the thoroughly unauspicious banner of 'world music', Dead Can Dance crafted fine, mesmerising orchestrations for the world to behold. Furthermore, and indelibly linked to the gothic sub-culture - brooding, pessimistic, fatalistic - their early, seemingly dark undertones formed the dominion of many of today's industrial merchants, though none seem to strive for the light that Dead Can Dance always celebrated amongst this ball of confusion. Lisa Gerrard, based in Eastern Australia's Great Dividing Range, has an overwhelming aura, well developed past mere Australian nationalism and all its supposedly ocker baggage. Her partner in Dance, Brendan Perry, is permanently based in his resurrected church home in County Cavan, Ireland, a place that Gerrard bases herself for exhaustive periods of composition and writing. I put it to Gerrard that the rolling mountains of the Australian ranges must rejuvinate, replenish, inspire ... "I'd love to spend my time walking around but there's always too much to do. It's been really busy over the past four years - I did a solo record (The Mirror Pool), we had the 'Toward The Within' tour, then the video for that and production. So we've had to really fracture the recording time for Spiritchaser because of interruptions." It is not as if Dead Can Dance composition stops at the three-minutes-thirty mark of popsmithery. More closely allied with classicical grandeur, 1996's Spiritchaser album sees the percussionary, mantric Dead Can Dance arise. "Brendan decided that for this recording we would work with very little musicality and just work with percussive pieces and write vocal mantric music. I think it's the logical progression from the Towards The Within material because we were working with a lot of live percussionists on that tour. We were inspired to do something very live and very active which would work better in the live context. |