Wake, by Dead Can Dance (2003)
Looking into the past with an eye on the future
I hit a personal low in 1993.
I was 21, living back in my parents’ house after tasting a year or two of freedom, with no prospects, no car, and a crappy retail job. I frequently found myself walking alone at night through the undeveloped Arizona desert land adjacent to our neighborhood, smoking and drinking some whisky while listening to whatever was on the radio.
A lot had changed since 1989, but the radio was still a fickle friend. I could get a fix of Pearl Jam or (more likely) Nirvana, amid the wash of fading hair metal bands. But in what would prove to be the second of a “twice in a lifetime” occurrence, one night I heard this while I was out watching the moon:
Overview of the Dead Can Dance catalog (from their label, 4AD)
Interview with Lisa Gerrard on her “universal language”
There are very few artists that could claim to have truly transcended genre. Even fewer that can boast the vast, eclectic appeal of an artist like Dead Can Dance. It’s not an exaggeration to say that their fanbase is its own distinct subculture, counting members from the worlds of goth, metal, punk, electronica, folk, and classical amongst their ranks. I’d be willing to bet however, that for many of these fans Dead Can Dance albums remain an anomaly in their collections. A happy segue into an ethereal sonic offering that proudly sticks out on the shelf next to the Darkthrone and Dead Kennedys’ back catalogues.
“On Dead Can Dance’s message to the within” from Hate Meditations
If you delve into these interviews and overviews, you can see how Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard found their way from the Arabic music they heard as unemployed youths in Australia into other forms of early Asian and Western musicks. Dead Can Dance is a fantastic example of human beings finding something ancient, relating to it, and building new art out of it while stamping it with their modern perspective.
The band’s 2003 compilation “Wake” is an excellent place to find an introduction to their music.
Because the songs of Dead Can Dance are so deeply rooted in early forms of music, it is tempting to think of them as ancient songs, but they are not. What they are, academically speaking, is a “jumping off point” for learning more about older forms and non-Western traditions.
They are also an excellent tool for looking at how music itself is a language, as Lisa Gerrard is known for winding her melodies around lyrics that have no literal meaning. Her partner, Brendan Perry, said of her lyrics that “all are influenced by various languages but have no syntactical meaning in any given language.” John Diliberto, writing in CD Review in 1990, captured a rare early quote from Gerrard herself about her vocalizations: “The thing that is important to me is to break the barrier of language and to communicate something without words that’s for everyone.”
Perry and Gerrard, and the musicians they work with, borrow heavily from early forms of music, but they project themselves into what they create. In the case of Dead Can Dance, they are not trying to recreate the music performed by musicians a thousand years ago. Instead, they take what has survived and has meaning for them, and they weave it into the fabric of modern music, using modern tools, with the intent of bringing the emotions evoked by that ancient music into a new setting.
Once listeners are drawn in, whether they know it or not, they now have a deeper, more ancient musical vocabulary, and if they choose to pursue a study of the more ancient forms of early music available to us, they’ll be able to relate to it in a way that other modern listeners might not - because they have already mapped meanings onto that music.
Because the music of Dead Can Dance isn’t trying to revive actual songs from thousands of years ago, they have the freedom to create something new. But that also means that, academically, you can’t say they are bringing an “accurate” or scholarly revival to early music. Many other less well-known musicians are trying to do that with varying degrees of popular success.
But ironically, the past will have to wait for a future post…