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Into the Labyrinth
Home > Complete List of "d" Artists > Dead Can Dance > Item 15
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Into the Labyrinth
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by Dead Can Dance
Sales Rank: 85721
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List Price: $32.98
$7.99
At Amazon
on 11-21-2008.
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1. Yulunga Spirit Dance
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2. Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove
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3. Wind That Shakes the Barley
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4. Carnival Is Over
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5. Ariadne
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6. Saldek
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7. Towards the Within
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8. Tell Me About the Forest You Once Called Home
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9. Spider's Stratagem
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10. Emmeleia
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11. How Fortunate the Man with None
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Out of print in the U.S.! Import pressing of this classic 1993 album from one of the 4AD label's most popular and influential bands. At the core of Dead Can Dance is guitarist Brendan Perry and vocalist Lisa Gerard, who created a body of work that remains invigorating and uniquely their own. Into The Labyrinth was the first DCD album to gain a major label release in the U.S and features the Alternative radio hit 'The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove'. This was also the first album that Perry and Gerrard completed on their own without the aid of guest musicians. 11 tracks. 4AD.
This CD was recommended to me years ago by Clive Barker during a promotional signing for his (rather blah) Razorline comics. The recording floored me back in `93, but not until the past few months have I become equal to its breadth and design. I'd like to take a moment to try and understand why it took me seven years to "thread" this extraordinary sonic achievement. *Into the Labyrinth* is what synthesizer technology was made for. The "upgrading" of human spirituality and expression, the surgical transposition of tonal multiplicity, the democratic rendering of "world-beat" multiculturalism beyond all notions of ethnocentric culture-mongering. Granted, I normally avoid music that requires racks of digital equipment to get itself off the ground. I'd prefer to hear the squish of sweaty calluses sliding across nickelwound strings, feedback woofing through analog speaker cabinets, a real live acoustic drum set and bass guitarist sweating bullets on a 30-minute prog-rock epic. But the power-duo of Dead Can Dance, along with their arsenal of machines and recording-technology, have ensouled their music in waves of digital sorcery as moving and "organic" as the most bare-bones unplugged meat-and-potatoes blues number. Even the pastoral a cappela "Wind that Shakes the Barley" is rendered with so much digital reverb my speakers buzz and vibrate whenever I spin that track. If nothing else, Brendan Perry's machine-savvy production values stand as an inspiring artistic rebuttal to the lurid vulgarizations of "techno" music with its chooming BASS BASS BASS thundering out of car stereos these days. Of course, certain ethnocentric "purists" will dismiss much of this album as so much poseur kitsch, a crude Anglo-colonialist attempt to coopt the passion and culture of ancient peoples (whether African, Gaelic, Spanish or Asian) in a self-indulgent postmodern stew of Westernized machination, but hey, it's their loss. Recorded at Quivvy Church (some no-doubt hoary monastic backwater), Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard enswathe their listeners with stirring folkways (cleansed of all patina) simmering coolly on the dizzy lip of mania, an aural feed of processed knowledge, a sonic prelude to violent cosmic upheaval and the creation of the moon. This is what multiculturalist music can and should be, NOT an ethnocentric fetishization of one's fraternal gene-pool (or "roots"), but rather the polyphonic cross-fertilization of textures and styles, histories and apparitions, a fossil river traversing the entire span of tonality and desire. Human music, in a word. Brendan Perry comes on rather like an art-school Frank Sinatra in "The Carnival is Over", his lung-heaving vibrato cascading in the speakers, while "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" and "How Fortunate the Man with None" are positively chilling with their baritone legato slides and soulful moans of strangled fatalistic desire. Stunning. Lisa Gerrard (not that she needs my approval) is the greatest of female vocalists. Her silk-throated mastery of diverse styles is godly pure, an Ariadne to be tracked and loved as Nietzsche himself taught us to love. Her voice betokens something good. A nymphic mystery and love whirring out from the groves of Faerie and the grassy swales of African prairieland, negro energies cool in the gloaming. (The only vocal styles she has yet to master are those of swing-jazz and grindcore death-metal.) The gentle love-dream of Lisa Gerrard will haunt me for the rest of my days, like the existence of an oxy-acetylene flame that can burn underwater. How perfectly horrid. The only weakness of this recording is the lyric sheet, enfeebled with trite passages and lazy cliches that simper and crumble under the strength of the music. Forgive me, Mr. Perry, but perhaps in the future you could discover and commission a strong poet to deliver words which are equal to the Dead Can Dance sonic repertoire. Until then we'll have to settle for "And your conscience walks beside you / It's the best friend you will ever know / And the past is now your future / It bears witness to your soul" and the like. Of course, the music is what matters in the end, and roughly half the tracks on *Into the Labyrinth* have no lyrics to begin with (at least, not in English), most notably "Yulunga," "Ariadne," and "The Spider's Strategem." Suffice it to say, these are some of the most rewarding bits on the album. And the haunting final track is deftly canvassed from a Brecht poem. But whatever your race, creed, faith, or faction, *Into the Labyrinth* will surely enrich and sleeken your life, ultramodern mirrors of speculation committed to a synth-rich *othering* of the world, echoing the dusky presence-chamber of the Minotaur and his mad song of violent, thread-snapping carnality.
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Into the Labyrinth
Available from Amazon
Price: $7.99
Updated on 11-21-2008.
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