Dead Can Dance
Within the Realm of a Dying Sun

1981, the Dead Can Dance are born: one of the most innovative and mysterious bands of the decade. Leading it is a duo: Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard.

The first was an English singer who played in an Austro-New Zealand punk band before deciding to pursue a solo career focused on electro-acoustic experimentation.

The other was an Australian contralto raised in a multicultural neighborhood of Melbourne populated mainly by Greeks, who led her to know and appreciate Mediterranean music, which later influenced the band's sounds.

The two artists, so different from each other but so exquisitely “unfashionable,” meet in Lisa's hometown, where a small post-punk scene flourished, which, with its openness to experimentation, could serve as a creative playground, merging opposites and allowing them to strengthen each other. This alchemy was definitively sealed by the legendary record label 4AD Records, a breeding ground for countless "gothic" talents like them.

To create a collective poetics for the Dead Can Dance, there was the idea of a continuous musical journey through many different cultures, almost as if the two were musical anthropologists. This gave a remarkable variety to their albums, simultaneously recognizable and very different from one another, as the more ancient acoustic sounds were able to merge with the electronics typical of those years.

If it all started from post-punk, it was with Within The Realm of a Dying Sun, released in 1987, that the band definitively freed itself from a certain setup common to the bands that made 4AD famous, shifting the sonic center of gravity towards the so-called "neoclassical darkwave," essentially codified by this album.

The album cover can give us important interpretative keys and depicts a statue from the Pére Lachaise cemetery in Paris, built in 1804 and dedicated to the greatest artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The album's atmospheres are perfectly coherent with these premises and evoke imagery torn between the ethereal austerity of neoclassicism and the funereal sentiment of romanticism, in a combination of hints that would later lead to decadence.

If this comparison with romanticism might seem far-fetched, it is important to specify that, even according to Brendan Perry himself, the band was inspired by the music of that artistic movement, which they listened to a lot during the creation of the album.

Their intention was to break away from the gothic rock stereotypes attributed to them in their first two albums, and they succeeded, moving from a "gothic" inherent to the post-punk language to something conceptually more monumental than musical gothic (the genre of related bands like Cure, Siouxsee and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and the like), thanks to an icy orchestral solemnity and the medieval singing of Lisa Gerrard. Another important influence, at least "in abstract," is the "proto-gothic" music of Nico, whose mastery is "shaped" to shift from a center of nihilistic folk to religious music. All these dualisms are also reflected in the structure of the album, divided into two fairly different parts: one where Brendan Perry is the singer, another where Lisa Gerrard is.

Within the Realm of a Dying Sun has something that takes it out of time and space. The combination of classicism and the Middle Ages through the lens of electronics, the almost ethereal vagueness of the lyrics, the rhythms, and keyboards that evoke a continuous sense of mystery (especially in Perry's section), everything seems to suggest an idea of an unshown but foreshadowed eternity, like in a memento mori, tackled not with the ecstatic stoicism of saints but with austere introspection betraying an aura of unease, like in the processions of "The Seventh Seal" by Ingmar Bergman (a director Perry knew).

Brendan's songs are the most “earthly,” both for the atmospheres and the sensible lyrics; hence, they serve an introductory role where the spiritual vein is always present but counterbalanced with more intimate nuances.

The first song: Anywhere Out of the World is a sort of manifesto for the album, focused on sinister keyboards and mysterious rhythms, with choirs that already give us a small taste of what will come in the second section. The title alludes to a poem by Charles Baudelaire, while the lyrics tell of amorous anxieties, set against a religious backdrop.

Windfall is an instrumental that almost takes the listener “out of the World” with its Ambient sound that manages to be simultaneously magical and unsettling, much like in a dark, cemetery fairy tale.

In the Wake of Adversity is a sort of intersection between the first two tracks, thus serving as a bit of a compendium of Brendan Perry's style on this album, and the lyrics seem to continue a bit along the lines of the first track.

Xavier closes the English singer's section with his most emotional vocal performance, combined with the most austere lyrics ever, addressing the theme of guilt and the awareness of human sins, aspiring for spiritual regeneration. Musically, Xavier is the piece where the electronic rock typical of the 80s competes more strongly with the classical aspects, documenting the band's roots very well.

Lisa Gerrard's songs are the ones that, as I mentioned, foreshadow some folk elements that will be pursued more intensely in the future. On this album, the Australian singer is still suspended between a classical and an ethnic approach, between Abrahamic and pagan mysticism, reminiscent, from this perspective, of the thematic developments of less sentimental and more exotic Romanticism. In the lyrics, Lisa assumes the role of the apocalypse priestess, who, through messianic tones, vocalizations, and invented words, makes the songs akin to ascetic litanies, in a disorienting atmosphere that I would dare define as "spiritual syncretism," as it shows both a strictly personal and ineffable relationship with the divine and universal tension, given the absence of linguistic and semantic references that draws the listener's attention to the religious song itself, which can concern all men, regardless of their faith.

Dawn of the Iconoclast introduces us to Lisa's section, with funeral march brass leaving room for a tight pause of the instruments, reduced to a solemn backdrop that seems to demand the listener to pay attention to the singer's words, in an almost a cappella digression that seems like a cryptic prophecy of tragedies.

Cantara is very different from the others because it is a concentration of influences from traditional music; it temporarily dispels the darkness in favor of an oriental and theatrical dance, in a final moment of pre-apocalyptic hedonism.

Summoning the Muse is the highest moment of the album, the point where decadence is at its peak, and bells mark the imminent arrival of the apocalypse, where, judging by the title, the trope of invoking the muse seems to be broadened. The muse is not summoned simply to induce artistic inspiration but as a herald of the end of the world, almost as if the spiritual feeling of transience and artistic enlightenment were the same thing.

Persephone (The Gathering of Flowers) is a very enigmatic finale. If we think that Persephone was the Greek goddess of spring and the underworld, we could interpret this piece as that of human rebirth after death. Here Lisa Gerrard reaches her utmost pathos, like in one final prayer just before achieving the promised immortality, a moment that abruptly ends in the last seconds of the track, played on quiet and rarefied winds that finally seem to give some sensation of peace.

Having analyzed the individual pieces, the "journey" of the album could be roughly summarized as a passage from subjectivity to syncretic universality, given the sentimental subject and candid biblical citations of Perry's side and Lisa's suggestions. Still, in reality, each section of the album presents some aspects that are highlighted in the other, in a relationship reminiscent of Euler-Venn diagrams, where the meeting points between the two sets represent the stylistic and thematic unity of the album. Just look at how Lisa's relationship with divinity is configured, subjective and universal at the same time, or Perry's message, which refers to an archetypal "we" with the instrumental Windfall that with its tacit mystery seems to refer to the typical generality of Gerrard's section.

In conclusion, Within the Realm of a Dying Sun is an album that has been able to give meaning to each influence used: rock to give liveliness and elasticity to the sound, electronics to evoke suggestive images that can be as relevant as possible to the content, classical music to provide a solid formal framework to western spirituality, folk to give a pagan tone that makes the album more universal, almost to show that in the face of losses, we are all equal. It is the depth of ideas and the structural coherence that allows the album to appear strongly iconic of an existential attitude rather than the spirit of a time or genre; it is emblematic of the sentiment of pre-apocalyptic decadence and loss, torn between faith in eternity and the usual fear of oblivion.