IMMORTAL MEMORY

Lisa Gerrard's musical career has spanned more then twenty years, starting in the early 1980s when she and fellow Australian Brendan Perry formed a band called Dead Can Dance, and erupting into major compositions into the 21^st Century as an assocoate of Hans Zimmer's Media Ventures film composing ensemble, where Lisa contributed to such film soundtracks as GLADIATOR, ALI, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2, BLACK HAWK DOWN, and last year's acclaimed New Zealand drama, WHALE RIDER. She continues to provide richly compelling work.

With Perry, the musical duo released nine Dead Can Dance albums between 1984 and 1985, works refusing categorization and incorporating an eclectic mix of world music influences, medieval chants, folk ballads, baroque stylings, Celtic flavours, electronics, samples and just about anything else that took their fancy.

Gerrard recorded her first solo album in 1995, The Mirror Pool, a notable ambient/orchestral/new age vocal composition in which Lisa's stunning voice was accompanied by the Victoria Philharmonic. A second solo album, Duality, actually a collaboration with with Pieter Bourke, was released in 1998. Last year, along with Irish classical composer Patrick Cassidy, Lisa was originally hired to score Mel Gibson's THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST but the time allotted (three weeks) was not enough to allow her to complete her work as she envisiones it, so veteran film composer John Debney assumed the assignment. It is likely that some of what the two of them started in that project reached fruition in her third album, Immortal Memory, an exoctically ambient and highly textural recording that resonates with mystical power and passion. Tracks like "Abwooll," in which Lisa sings the words to the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, and the Aramaic chant, "Maranatha," are very much in the period and sentiment of Gibson's film. Other tracks have distinctly different sources, such as "The Song of Amergin," the Gaelic ballad brought in by Cassidy that opens the album, "Sailing to Byzantium" is based on a poem by W.B. Yeats, and two tracks based on music Gerrard originally worked on for GLADIATOR.

The music is indeed metaphysically powerful. Even when singing foreign words, Lisa's voice takes on the character of an instrument, so the recording is really more of an instrumental, and the music of all cues is of a similar enough vein that this makes a remarkably consistent listening experience from beginning to end. Aurally and spiritually provocative, this is music to pay attention to and be transformed by.