Dead Can Dance

Lisa Gerrard frequently uses the word “arrogant” in conjunction with Dead Can Dance, the band she formed with longtime musical partner Brendan Perry in 1981. “We had this arrogant belief that what we were doing was important,” she says at one point. “We never believed it couldn’t be something amazing. That was never a consideration.” Later, she puts it even more pithily: “We both had this extraordinary arrogance.”

Arrogant is perhaps overstating it, from an outside perspective at least. But the music Dead Can Dance have made over four decades undeniably has an elevated otherworldliness to it. Their songs are impossible to pin down: the cavernous post-punk of their early years swiftly gave way to a sound that has drawn from multiple places and cultures, from traditional Mediterranean music to medieval.

Their protean approach has influenced some of progressive music’s key figures. Steven Wilson has cited Dead Can Dance as a formative inspiration – he and sometime collaborator Tim Bowness sampled DCD’s on the track from No-Man’s 1994 album , while Wilson has long expressed an