Lisa Gerrard & Pieter Bourke
Duality

Splendid in its timelessness, magnificent in its ability to carve significant furrows into the depths of the human soul. It's difficult to classify and spatially or temporally place this 1998 album, which represents one of the highest points in Lisa Gerrard's career as a solo artist (formerly of Dead Can Dance) accompanied by Pieter Bourke, a multi-instrumentalist and true deus ex machina of the sound.

Here, musicality becomes a ritual, sounds become ancestral, as if everything is reaching out in search of the soul of things. Songs become prayers, neo-pagan chants to achieve a spirituality that becomes earthly. Describing the pieces, in this case, is somewhat limiting, like trying to extract a sentence from the Lord's Prayer to capture its ultimate meaning, separating the words from the context. To these chants to divinity (of whatever nature it may be) are associated "earthly" noises and sounds made of animal rustles, ancient drums, Indian-derived (American) choral chants or more properly primitive archaic nature of millennial origin ("Forrest Veil") when at times they even approach medieval Gregorian chants (the choral "The Comforter" or "The Circulations Of Shadows") with vocal blends that eclipse any conceivable convent. Songs of the soul, then, made to stir or at least vibrate the hidden parts within each of us and allow us to glimpse a light of high spirituality (listen to the track "The Unfolding" and tell me how much other music suggests closeness to the "concept of divine" like this).

The tracks flow like a slow ritual procession ("The Human Game") or like ethereal and intangible invocations loaded with immense feeling deeply sensed by Lisa's inspired singing (the splendid "Sacrifice" already used -unfortunately- in advertising). With "Nadir," the singing becomes almost traditional and you can breathe a certain "Southern world," closing an album in my opinion splendid in its timelessness and probably still contemporary in the years to come. One of the albums to always have with you, a great help in the darkest and most desperate moments a person can face: an album that sings of light, allows us to touch the mystical experience of the great spiritual masters and at the same time "illuminates us immensely" by touching vibrational and emotional cords that are hard to remain indifferent to.

P. S. Keep away the "Hit seekers" and those looking for lightness, entertainment, and superficiality in music.