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Sublime. Hallowed. Soulful. These words accurately describe Lisa Gerrard's spiraling, operatic voice, but somehow fail to capture its essence. One needs to *hear* it to fully grasp its meaning. And despite the spiritual references that her voice evokes, Gerrard is quick to refute anyone who labels her music as such. "To me, to mix my spiritual walk with my music in a sense is to make soup," Gerrard, best known for her work as one-half of the creative force behind the fifteen-year-old group Dead Can Dance, explains from her home in Gipplsand, Australia. "But at the same time, music wakes up a self that I possess that is me, that is not present in my everyday practical life."
Gerrard's latest release, Duality, is not the eagerly awaited follow-up to Dead Can Dance's '96 full-length Spiritchaser, but rather her second recorded collaboration with fellow Australian Pieter Bourke (he joined Gerrard on her 1995 solo debut, The Mirror Pool, and also toured on the "Spiritchaser" tour). Their record, now hovering just outside the Billboard Heatseekers Top 40, is a blend of the classic with the contemporary that will sound familiar to fans of her longtime band. Its sultry Eastern rhythms, haunting layers of strings and grab-bag of percussion recall DCD's innovative instrumentation, but it's Gerrard's voice, as usual, that captures the imagination.
For Gerrard, singing is more about summoning an inner self than structuring a lyrical story. "It exists outside of the practical language that we speak in," she says. "And it's a musical voice that we have possessed since maybe before we were born. I don't feel that the voice that I speak -- and the practical language I speak in -- enables me to surrender and lose myself."
Though Duality was a year in the making, Gerrard says working with Bourke was natural. "We spoke very little during the work process, she says. "We seem to be sort of linked somehow ... and that's why we called it Duality."
Bourke, who claims the only record he has ever bought on its release date was Dead Can Dance's The Serpent's Egg, was also sensitive to Gerrard's creative needs. "I knew that Lisa would like to work spontaneously, and I've been in recording situations where the engineer would say, 'you'll have to wait a half hour while I set up the microphone,'" Bourke says from his home in Melbourne. "You just can't do that when people have ideas, so I just had to make the recording process as invisible as possible so that as soon as ideas came up, we could just record and evaluate them."
Both Gerrard and Bourke agree that working more from feeling than intellect is what creates their music's soulful innocence. "Definitely there's something within the style of this music that reaches a deep place within people," Bourke says. "Maybe it's because when we create the music we reach a deep place within ourselves and somehow that gets reflected out. It's not something I'd want a complete answer for because I think there needs to be some mystery there, both for Lisa and I and for the listeners."
After the duo wraps up summer dates on this year's Lilith Fair tour, they will head to Dead Can Dance collaborator Brendan Perry's home in Ireland with a group of musicians to begin the next DCD project. It's not a trip Gerrard entirely looks forward to making, as she jests, "Brendan never comes to Australia. I want that in bold, capital letters. He's an absolute nightmare. I've begged him. I've said, 'Brendan, please, I've got to bring 7,000 people with me if I come, you only have to bring yourself. Why don't you come here?' Nope, no, no ... can't be moved. 'Mohammed must go to the mountain,' he told me. Bloody stick in the mud I can tell you."
But for Gerrard, it's a trip worth making, as these projects continually let her explore her own space in the musical landscape. "I think we're just trying to create some sort of cultural vocabulary at this stage," Gerrard says. "We don't know. It's not possible to see in the future."
MARLENE GOLDMAN