Ani DiFranco New LP

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  Joe Bonamassa Live LP & Tour

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  “My country, right or wrong…”

  Heart Announce Live Tours

  Anais Mitchell HADESTOWN Returns

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  My Favourite Records

  Gaza Nightmare Continues

  Gaza Nightmare Continues

  The Killers New LP & Tour

  Download 2024 First Acts

  Princess Goes COME OF AGE

  Springsteen 2024 Tour

  Philip ‘Seth’ Campbell Live

  This Troubled World

  Dark Side Of The Moon 50th

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  Glen Hansard New LP/Tour

  Great Albums: Fresh New Life

  Hozier’s New Album

  Nicole Atkins Jim Sclavunos Live

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  Magnum - A Year in Ukraine

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  The State We’re In Pt II

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  Moby The Very Best Of Interview

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  Joe Bonamassa Live!

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  Amy Macdonald Rescheduled Gig

  Music & Brexit

  Happy New Year?

  On Barbra Streisand

  The State We’re In…

  Welcome Back! But To What?

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  A RISK TOO FAR

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  Roger Waters on Amused To Death


New Albums

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Lisa Gerrard & Jules Maxwell BURN. Atlantic Curve / Schubert Music Europe Gmbh

Gerrard and Maxwell began working on the album in Australia in 2015 whilst writing songs for The Mystery Of The Bulgarian Voices (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares). After being introduced to Chapman, they asked him to produce the album.

“It is with great pleasure that I share this collaboration with Jules Maxwell,” says Lisa Gerrard. “Jules and I began our creative journey with Dead Can Dance. We realised that we could connect through improvisation and that musical exploration continues to evolve with this present work.”

I can’t believe it’s nearly six years since Lisa and I began work on this album at her studio in Australia,” Maxwell adds. “It’s been an inspirational journey for me. Without Daryl Bamonte’s encouragement and creative drive, this record would never have developed in the way it has and I’m thrilled that it is finally being released on Atlantic Curve.”

Although this record is a new release, its beginnings go all the way back to 2012 during that year’s Dead Can Dance world tour. Originally brought in as a live keyboard player, Jules Maxwell helped create a new song with Lisa Gerrard called ‘Rising Of The Moon’, which was performed as the final encore of each show. By the time the tour finished in Chile in 2013, a strong affinity had begun to develop between the two of them and further opportunities to collaborate with each other resulted over subsequent years.

Review

There are few artists today in the popular music market who take a dramatically different route in their musical expression and communication. Further, there are even fewer with the vocal ability and range of Lisa Gerrard. The new album BURN represents the extraordinary culminating audio experience which Gerrard’s combined style and skill is capable of producing. With Jules Maxwell (Dead Can Dance):

“…over dinner in Sofia after a concert by the Bulgarian women, my publisher suggested to me that I work with James Chapman on completing the BURN songs. James had established a sound with his band MAPS, which also had big horizons at its core, and it seemed an intriguing proposition to me.”

This unique combination of talents together with the major influences of the Bulgarian Women Voices has produced what will come to be seen as one of the musical release events of 2021. Each of the songs here reflect environmental activities and human emotions. Take ‘Orion (The Weary Huntsman)’ and you’ll hear the differing physical and mental conditions of that huntsman so beautifully reflected in the song’s passage. Throughout the record melody and rhythm take centre stage often resulting in songs that are epic in scale, cinematic in scope, with Gerrard’s unique language and voice adding to the intense drama and emotion that results.

‘Heleali (The Sea Will Rise)’ is intensely graphic in its depiction of nature rising first gradually until a final crescendo is reached. ‘Kenson (Until My Strength Returns)’ takes the folk genre larger and further in its glacially slow travel with ocean-deep bass providing the returning strength described in the song’s title. ‘Do So Yol (Gather The Wind)’ is the triumphant and optimistic finale with its assertive rhythmic backdrop, glorious melody and Gerrard’s sky-bound vocal. There is still hope. Superb!

BURN is a beautiful and emotional musical experience created by unique talents and should not be missed.

5/5

https://www.lisagerrard.com/

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Biography

Over a career that takes in almost two decades with Dead Can Dance, award-winning movie soundtracks and a series of acclaimed solo and collaborative albums, Lisa Gerrard has established herself as one of Australia’s most ground-breaking and in-demand artists. Singer and composer, Lisa brings a vision that is both precise and all-embracing to everything she does.

It is a musical journey that began in the early 1980s when she and fellow Australian Brendan Perry formed Dead Can Dance, one of the world’s most original bands whose proud boast is that they never fitted into any neatly manufactured genre or predefined pigeonhole. With Lisa’s otherworldly voice counter-poised by Brendon’s mellifluous tones, from the outset, they thought nothing of setting discordant electric guitars and dark, rolling bass lines against cellos, trombones and timpani.

Over nine albums between 1984 and 1995, the duo’s musical canvas expanded with every release to take in a timeless mix of world music influences, medieval chants, folk ballads, baroque stylings, Celtic flavours, electronics, samples and anything else that took their fancy.

This mosaic of musical influences is perhaps less surprising in the light of Lisa’s childhood in Melbourne, where she recalls Greek, Turkish and Irish melodies “oozing into the streets” of her neighbourhood. Since then she lived in London, Spain and Ireland before returning to the Snowy Mountains of Australia.

In 1995 came her first solo album, The Mirror Pool on which she was accompanied by the Victoria Philharmonic Orchestra. Again, it’s an album that defies categorisation, causing one impressed but perplexed reviewer to describe it as “ambient, orchestral, folk and new age all at the same time.”

Duality, a collaboration with Pieter Bourke followed in 1998 and again transcended musical eras and genres. Next came the stunningly beautiful Immortal Memory, a collaboration with the Irish composer, Patrick Cassidy which further explores the boundaries of Lisa’s musical ambition. Her recent album, The Silver Tree, again shifted into new territory; an album in every way sentient and ethereal.

In recent years Lisa has also become a much sought-after composer of soundtracks. In many ways this has been a logical progression. Much of the work of Dead Can Dance had a cinematic quality that led to the group’s music being used in the cult movie Baraka, TV commercials and even a car chase scene in Miami Vice. Among the many films and documentaries she has scored or contributed to are Gladiator, Insider, Whale Rider, Black Hawk Down, Heat, Ali, King Arthur, Tears Of The Sun, The Mist, Salem’s Lot, A Thousand Roads, Ashes & Snow, Layer Cake, El Nino de la Luna, Balibo, Henry Poole Is Here, Solo, Playing For Charlie & Ichi.

Lisa has received Golden Globe nominations for Insider and Ali and Oscar Nominations for Gladiator and 4 International awards for Whale Rider.

The Voice

Gerrard possesses the vocal range of a contralto but can also reach upward into the dramatic mezzo-soprano range. She has a vocal range from A2 to F♯5 (3 octaves and one note). Her vocal timbre has been described as “rich, deep” which creates a “mournful sound”, and her voice is regarded by critics as “simply not of this world”. More predominantly, Gerrard’s vocal range spans from contralto to dramatic contralto, displayed for examples in ‘Sanvean’, ‘Sacrifice’, ‘Largo’, and ‘Not Yet’; — to the dramatic mezzo-soprano voice in her other songs, such as ‘The Host of Seraphim’, ‘Elegy’, ‘Space Weaver’, and ‘Come this Way’.

Jon Pareles of The New York Times describes that she uses “distinct voices that drew on far-flung traditions: an opalescent tone from Baroque opera, a reedy hint of Celtic folk style, the sharp and quavering approach of Balkan women’s music, blue notes bent like Billie Holiday’s…”.

Gerrard sings many of her songs, such as ‘Now We Are Free’, ‘Come Tenderness’, ‘Serenity’, ‘The Valley of the Moon’, ‘Tempest’, ‘Pilgrimage of Lost Children’, ‘Coming Home’ and ‘Sanvean’ in idioglossia — although she also sings in English. With respect to such work she has said, “I sing in the language of the Heart.  It’s an invented language that I’ve had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.”

Her early, formative singing experience, was influenced by the Bulgarian choir’s technique. Gerrard’s influences on the language she sings since her youth has been exerted mainly by the conversations and the music she heard in the Melbourne area where she had grown up, where a large Greco-Turkish community lived. Gerrard’s first musical influences came from her father, as she grew up listening to Sean Nós songs in an Irish family, and also the “abstract forms” with which Antonin Artaud worked that she heard on radio documentaries.

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