Dead Can Dance Biography:
A short history of Dead Can Dance:
1980 - Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry meet in Melbourne, Australia.
1982 - They move to London and sign with 4AD.
1984 - March, they release their first album, a collection of songs they've written over the previous years, entitled Dead can Dance. One the album cover there is a ritual mask from New Guinea, attempted to provide a visual reinterpretation of the meaning of the name Dead Can Dance. "The mask, though once a living part of a tree is dead; nevertheless it has, through the artistry of its maker, been imbued with a life force of its own. To understand why we chose the name, think of the transformation of inanimacy to animacy. Think of the processes concerning life from death and death into live. So many people missed the inherent symbolism, and assumed that we must be "morbid gothic types," a mistake we deplored and deplore...".
Dead Can Dance contributing two songs, "Dreams Made Flesh" and "Wave Become Wings,” to the first This Mortal Coil album, It'll End In Tears. The band recorded a 12" EP, Garden Of The Arcane Delights. The themes of the EP's central song, "The Arcane," were illustrated by the Brendan Perry drawing, which appeared on the sleeve. "...The naked blindfolded figure, representing primal man deprived of perception, stands, within the confines of a garden (the world) containing a fountain and trees laden with fruit. His right arm stretches out - the grasping for knowledge - towards a fruit-bearing tree, its trunk encircled by a snake. In the garden wall - the wall between freedom and confinement - are two gateways: the dualistic notion of choice. It is a Blakean universe in which mankind can only redeem itself, can only rid itself of blindness, through the correct interpretation of signs and events that permeate the fabric of nature's laws."
1985 - Spleen And Ideal, the second Dead Can Dance album, is released and reaches #2 in the British independent charts. " ...The terms 'spleen' and 'ideal' were taken from nineteenth century symbolist ideas. Spleen - the ill natured and malevolent aspects of human nature such as envy, ill temper, spite and intolerance - was seen as inextricably linked to the notion of the ideal. On one hand it tended to rob the ideal of its potentiality to exist; on the other hand it would shape and influence the ideal's very nature. Correspondingly, our songs were about the truth and illusion; conditioning and freedom; doubt and faith; and beneath all these couplings, the quest for perfection. The attainment of the ideal...".
1986 - The band release the album Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun. " ...We realized we had been limiting our musical visions, adapting role playing fixed around guitar, bass and drums. And a lot of things we were hearing, these instruments weren't adequate to express them. So we were learning classical theory, particularly baroque structures based on counterpoint, and we decided we were going to work within the form of the classical idiom and use classical instruments, with the aid of samplers, computers and a few books on how to score. To play the parts we could hear...".
Dead Can Dance tour extensively and contribute two songs, "Frontier" and "The Protagonist," to the 4AD compilation and video Lonely Is An Eyesore.
1998 - Earlier in '88 they release their fourth album, The Serpent's Egg. “.... A lot of aerial photographs of the earth, if you look upon it as a giant organism - a macro-cosmos- you can see that the nature of the life force, water, travels in a serpentine way. We had a vision of this serpentine embrace around the egg: the earth. Again we were telescoping into an earlier period of European music. The troubadour trouvere music’s going right through to the renaissance. The romantic elements had disappeared. ".
Lisa Gerrard also made her acting debut in the latter part of '88, in Agustin Villarongas film El Nino De La Luna (Moonchild) where Dead Can Dance write the film score.
1990 - Dead Can Dance 5th album, called Aion, was released. It incorporates reproduction instruments from early Renaissance period. " ...The word Aion - alternately spelled Aaon - signifies an age, but also the entire duration of the world or universe. In Platonic philosophy it represents benevolent power existing within eternity..." .
1992 - In October, Dead Can Dance collect their finest compositions (and two new songs "Bird" and "Spirit") as their first American domestic release under the title A Passage In Time. " ...We chose songs to show a journey, where the pieces interlocked. It's evolutionary, traversing something, as opposed to a time, which is fixed and linear. Derived from something and arriving towards something. The music tends to still sparkle and glow, though the events surrounding it are very dim... ".
1993 - Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard - release their new album Into The Labyrinth. Brendan Perry lives on an island in a river on the border between Eire and Northern Ireland; Lisa Gerrard lives in the Snow River Mountains in Australia. As a result, they wrote independently and then, in three months together, prepared and recorded both Into The Labyrinth tracks as well as other material.
Brendan Perry: "It's a journey into a year of writing, very much focused on living in the countryside with rural people. There's folk rooted ness, in one respect: a love for natural, primitive music of the world, and a love of very natural sounding things: bird song, wood."
Dead Can Dance will tour the United States during September, October and November with a full complement of accompanying musicians. ...Live, we don't play much from our records. We have a system where we introduce nodal structures, which allow room for improvisations, according to a melismatic approach. You can achieve some dangerously beautiful musical moments by way of this process... Into The Labyrinth is Dead Can Dance's sixth album...we make records because we still have a lot of demons to exorcise: we enjoy the therapeutic nature of making music and through that enjoyment we want to express that joy and pass it on to people. It is our greatest source of therapy, and our greatest means of expression...
Source: http://www.kabish.com/adrian/dead_can_dance/biography.php
