Within the Realm of a Dying Sun

Official Review

The third album by Australian duo Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry was recorded right after their move to London and their signing with 4AD, the label that hosted Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil during those same years. The record marks the moment Dead Can Dance almost completely abandoned the post-punk element of their early work to construct something closer to an imaginary liturgy: sacred music for a religion that never existed, assembled from fragments of Gregorian chant, medieval European music, and non-Western vocal techniques. The album is split into two sides of contrasting character, almost functioning as two records in one. Perry's side (Anywhere Out of the World, Xavier, Cardinal Sin) works around a deep baritone and dark orchestral arrangements, featuring lyrics that openly cite Rimbaud. Gerrard's side (Summoning of the Muse, Dawn of the Iconoclast, Persephone) almost entirely discards the English language in favor of her celebrated "glossolalia"—an invented vocal technique devoid of semantic meaning, yet crafted to sound like a sacred rite of uncertain origin, Middle Eastern or Balkan only in the ear of the listener. The link to this archive's dossier on Occulture and Chaos Magick is direct in method even before content: Dead Can Dance constructs a ritual apparatus—singing in an invented language, out-of-context religious iconography, arrangements that mimic sacred music from multiple traditions simultaneously—without adhering to any specific faith. It is precisely the operational principle of chaos magick applied to the song form: any belief system, or in this case any religious aesthetic, can be temporarily adopted as a tool to produce a real effect on the listener, regardless of its historical or theological truth. Within the Realm of a Dying Sun remains the album that consolidated Dead Can Dance's mature identity—the one that would lead them in the following decade to be associated as much with the darkwave scene as with a broader audience interested in "world" and neoclassical music, even though the group never truly recognized themselves in either label.