Just finished listening to a live recording of one of Dead Can Dance's European shows from earlier this year. It's wonderful to see them reformed and producing new and beautiful work.
It's quite amazing to see the reactions of people when they hear DCD's music for the first time. It's often 'love at first listen' and then disbelief that they had never heard of them. Certainly the fact that they were formed in Australia in the early eighties surprises most.
Their music is beautiful and timeless, being a mix of western European traditions from the middle-ages through to the renaissance, with the spice of the East, the echoes of the New World and mythology of the ancients.
If you could somehow travel from the Celtic strongholds of the West, through the dreaming forests of the North and down to the swirling metropolises of the Mediterranean where Empires met, you would encounter the essence of their music.
Lisa Gerrard singing in lost languages while finger cymbals, dulcimers, deep drums and hurdy gurdys provide the musical river for us to travel on. That is Dead Can Dance. That is the melting pot and legacy of the West. That is the music our ancestors dream to. The sounds of foreverness.
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