Date: Sun, 16 Jun 1996 23:46:23 -0700 
     From: Jeff Keibel (redshift@INTERLOG.COM) 
     Subject: Dead Can Dance press release


The following is a press release from 4AD via Dead Can Dance's
Canadian distributer, Mercury/Polydor, who do a super fine job,
by the way!

DEAD CAN DANCE EXPLORING NEW SOUNDS WITH SPIRITCHASER

The mesmeric sound that opens up Dead Can Dance's seventh studio
album is not instantly identifiable.  It could be a percussive
instrument, or a sample, it could be a studio-treated didgeridoo --
anything, in fact, out of the instrumental world.  In truth, it's a
bullroarer, a sculpted piece of wood attached to a rope that you
swing over your head, then sampled and played through a keyboard.
The "original" vs "sampled", there is no distinction anymore, no
boundaries, essentially no difference.  It really doesn't matter.
What matters is the spirit.

Similarly, Dead Can Dance's 15-year pattern of working within an
expansive, quixotic musical diaspora should no longer be broken down
into "when" and "where".  Since 1981, when Australian duo Brendan
Perry and Lisa Gerrard moved to London to begin their musical
vocation, the pair have called on traditions such as neo-classical,
choral, baroque and troubadour, from both liturgical and secular
origins, under a new world planetarium spanning western and eastern
Europe, the Middle East, Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean and
beyond.  Everywhere has either been a colony, or now feels the
residual effects of colonial cultures moving back to the "motherland".

In Dead Can Dance's music, "ethnic"  has become an almost meaningless
musical category.

The time-spanning, genre-and geography-defying spirit is one that has
mesmerised people worldwide, as each of their albums have sold to a
progressively larger audience.  The epic emotional drama of their work
has also come to the attention of the art, film and TV worlds too;
those who have mined the Dead Can Dance catalogue include diverse
motion pictures such as Heat, The Crossing Guard and Baraka.
Numerous musicians have sampled their work; the dance field (Future
Sound Of London and Black Grape, to name two) are especially attuned
to the duo's vivid vistas.

That spirit is continually bound up both in Perry and Gerrard's
extraordinarily affecting voices, and in the continually changing
face of Dead Can Dance's music.  On Spiritchaser, there is another
shift, away from the distinct Gaelic qualities of 1993's Into The
Labyrinth.  But- to these ears at least -- a track like "The Snake
And The Moon" on the new record has definite South American
influences; Gerrard hears African.  "It's gone past the point of
being 'this' and 'that' ," she affirms.  "Music has come to a
new age, where we're exposed to music from all over the world, from
a much larger palate of colours, as opposed to just what was
available in the 50s and 60s.  Our music has taken on an identity of
itself.  A track like "Nierika" sounds like "Frontier",
the very first piece Brendan and I ever wrote together, at the age
of 16 or 17, before we'd heard any African music."

Perry suggests that Dead Can Dance music tends to mirror that the pair
are listening to, or have been researching -- he in his converted
church in Ireland (where Spiritchaser was written and recorded),
and Lisa in the remote Gippsland region of Southern Australia.  Perry
admits he has been listening to South American music, largely from
Chile and Peru, but that the roots to Spiritchaser are based in
rhythm.

delving into areas that we had worked in before, so we made a
conscious decision to move away from that.  We decided to set
ourselves limitations in terms of instrumentation, to work from
the basis of purely rhythmical means, and develop from there.
I've been doing a lot of percussion workshops and doing sessions
with friends, and invariably we'd come back to the studio and have
up to fifteen people playing percussion, just to entertain ourselves,
and some great ideas were generated from that .  We subsequently
put down a week's worth of percussion, from which 'Nierika' and
"Dedicace Outo' come."

The latter, a brief, trance pattern, is based on a Vodun rhythm from
Haiti (Outo is "the spirit of the drums").  "The Song Of The Stars"
begins with words taken from an Algonquin Indian poem, and ends with
words from a Vodun invocation.  Elsewhere, Dead Can Dance traverse
the planet .  The words to "Song Of The Dispossessed" are Perry's,
adopting a traditional Latin melody to address the eternal problem
of people, "whose lives have been changed for the worse".  Sometimes
the nature of a song comes from its incidental inspiration.  "The
Song Of The Nile" is so named because it features the sound of real
crickets from the Nile, while Perry and Gerrard agree that the
track, once completed, suggests a river journey, "with rhythms of
someone pushing a pole through the water, or a marsh."  "Nierika",
which opens the album, is an Inuit term for the paths between the
underworld, middle world and higher world that shamen travel,
inspired by the "running dogs" sound that they felt was Sami-
influenced.  Gerrard's "Devorzhun", which closes the album, is an
invented word of Gerrard's; the track, she says, "is a lullaby
for the sleeping spirit."

For Perry, the unifying force behind the eight tracks that make up
Spiritchaser, "is a search for sounds which would convey a sense of
animism, to try and bring elements of nature  through, like birdsong
and things which suggest woods, snakes, water, atmosphere... to look
for alternatives rather than conventional uses of instrumentation,
to express an animal nature rather than music that was coming from a
technological background."

The rhythms suggested harmonics, which in turn suggested more
diverging possibilities, and so they progressed.  "Making this album
was an evolution of discovery more than anything," Perry reckons.
"We don't discuss that much while we're working; we just know when it
clicks, and become more animated.  It's not an intellectual way of
working, we just try to understand the emotional charge, in order
to go forward."  It's a process, Perry says, that led to the title
of the album.  "We were looking for something that excited us, looking
for the spirit, hunting it down, cornering it...we had the sense of
searching for something which had meaning, something where you hear
the spirits talking."

The result of which is an album that stands well apart from its
predecessors.  Not since the mid-'80s have Perry and Gerrard's
contributions dovetailed together, as opposed to their increasing
tendency to work more in isolation.  It might be because Gerrard
worked on her solo album, The Mirror Pool, which 4AD released in 1995,
or that the pair realized how they had become separated over the
passage of time, after the dissolution of their physical relationship.
Either way, it is a joy to hear the pair of them sing together much
more, as if two rivers have converged to form a stronger, flowing
current.  Their music is grounded in hybrid and fusion so it makes
more sense that they follow the same aesthetic.

as an entity, with a separate life of its own, but this time, I've
been able to sit down and not feel a little tug of war going on
within the picture.  We've got away with doing quite a bit more, which
made the creative process a lot more intense.  It was like a Siamese
twins experience: we microscopically went over everything.  We found
ourselves crossing each other's boundaries, and maybe doing what we
know the other usually does, so it's been an important record for
us."

So boundaries are crossed, and boundaries dissolved.  The boundary
between the studio and the stage will be crossed, too, when Dead Can
Dance begin their world tour in June, their first since 1993, from
where the 1994 live album and video/film Toward The Within was taken.
Besides the usual Western and Eastern European and Northern American
dates, the expanded ensemble are visiting South America for the first
time.  It's not commonly known but, out of all of 4AD's artists, Dead
Can Dance are the biggest internationally -- in San Francisco, for
example, they are playing to 8,000 people ("I'm a bit tentative of
losing the audience from the 40th row backwards," Perry ponders.  "We
might have to throw in some stadium rock numbers...")

Two instrumentals, both instigated in those original percussive
sessions,are to be included in the tour programme.  The beat goes on,
in other words.  Evoking the spirits; and following where they may lead.

(Martin Aston, April 1996)

Dead Can Dance will visit Toronto on Monday, July 15 at the Massey
Hall as their tour crosses the continent...

posted by Jeff Keibel
Toronto,
CANADA