Sunday, November 11, 2018

"The Mountain" by Dead Can Dance

The amazing musical project Dead Can Dance (previously here, here, and here)--Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry formed it in 1980--have just released their first new album in twelve years. Called "Dionysus," it is structured like a classical piece. A suite of seven movements in two acts each portray an aspect of the cult of this ancient Greek god of wine and pleasure.

The album sprang from two different inspirations.

Perry had a transcendent experience twenty years ago in which he and his brother traveled to Spain and found themselves visiting during a festival called Rompida de la Hora in which thousands of drummers play for 16 hours, through the night. And being musicians and students of ethnomusicology, they grabbed some drums and joined in, overcome with a kind of Dionysian frenzy. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Perry said, "You just get into a trance after a few hours of playing and you wander around the streets and you meet other drum groups and realize there’s thousands of them playing throughout these little towns, and they’re covered in blood. Our hands split open. We didn’t feel anything. We were completely oblivious to the pain."

Then about two years ago while researching Greek music, Perry fell down a rabbit hole after reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY: OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC which explores two schools of cultural thinking: Apollonian and Dionysian. In a simplified explanation, the former is about order, control, and logic while the latter is about freedom, chaos, and emotions. But much like our left-brain/right-brain minds, both are needed to create something. Perry responded to this idea and thus "Dionysus" was born.

He wanted to create a piece of music without creating "songs" so the structure assembled itself almost as chapters in an epic myth. And this Dead Can Dance "Dionysus" is indeed epic. Using world instruments such as the zourna from Turkey, the Bulgarian gadulka, the Ancient Greek bowed psaltery, and the gaida (a bagpipe from the Balkans and Southeastern Europe) blended with field recordings of ambient sounds such as Mexican singing birds and goatherds in remote mountain areas of Switzerland, the results are sweeping and cinematic.

Rolling Stone reports on the very special vocals of Perry and Gerrard:
To craft the language of Dionysus, he used a computer plug-in of choral libraries that has an engine called a "Syllabuilder." "It’s basically a directory of sung syllables, which you can then put together into phrases and sentences from a directory," he explains. "You can invent your own words and phrases, and then you can play them polyphonically. You can have a whole group singing the same phrase in different harmonies. So I made a combination of that with Lisa’s and my voices to create the ensemble effect."

"I have no idea what language is on the album," Gerrard says. "I think the album is very much about Brendan unlocking his own language. He’s always been a genius and a remarkable composer, but I think that in this album he is coming to something very innocent and brave."




They will be going on tour in a few months but they are scheduled in the UK, and Western and Eastern Europe only. Perry says they will return to the United States only when the Monster-in-Chief is impeached and is history. Can't blame him.

https://www.deadcandance.com/

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