Lisa Gerrard emerged as an acclaimed Australian vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist through her foundational role in Dead Can Dance during the 1980s, later sustaining a busy career as a frequent collaborator and creator of film music. Renowned for an ethereal contralto and mezzo-soprano delivery often shaped in an invented tongue, she crafts material that resists easy categorization by blending folk themes, acoustic traditions, electronic textures, and symphonic elements. She demonstrates particular mastery of the yangqin, the hammered Chinese dulcimer. Following a string of Dead Can Dance releases across the 1980s and into the early 1990s, her first independent full-length, The Mirror Pool, arrived in 1995. By the turn of the millennium she had become a recognized screen composer, sharing a Golden Globe for the 2000 Ridley Scott feature Gladiator alongside Hans Zimmer while earning an ARIA Award for her original score to the 2009 drama Balibo. Her screen credits encompass A Thousand Roads (2005), Burning Man (2011), Samsara (2014), and Valley of Shadows (2018); additional solo albums include The Black Opal (2009) and Twilight Kingdom (2014). She has recorded and performed with Pieter Bourke, Patrick Cassidy, Klaus Schulze, Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, and numerous others. In 2021 she issued the joint album Burn with former Dead Can Dance keyboardist Jules Maxwell.
Born in Melbourne to Irish parents who filled the household with Mediterranean recordings, she first created music within the city’s late-1970s experimental post-punk circles, where she encountered Brendan Perry; the pair formed Dead Can Dance in 1981. Relocating to London the following year, they joined 4AD and issued a series of acclaimed albums that fused art-rock with worldwide influences. Gerrard launched her solo path with the 1995 album The Mirror Pool, an assemblage of pieces unsuited to the Dead Can Dance catalog. She integrated digitally composed and arranged fragments that she later reconfigured for live performance, also drawing on a Handel theme and traditional Iranian sources. Produced primarily at her rural Australian residence, the record extends the group’s global-music leanings through bouzouki, tablas, and camel drums while retaining the ensemble’s somber orchestral grandeur in her operatic, frequently wordless vocals and passages performed by the Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra.
Her second solo outing, Duality, appeared in spring 1998 in partnership with Pieter Bourke, after which the duo supplied the score for the 1999 film The Insider. With Hans Zimmer she composed the music for Gladiator, and in 2003 she scored Whale Rider for director Niki Caro. The 2004 album Immortal Memory resulted from work with Irish composer Patrick Cassidy; the next year she teamed with Jeff Rona for the Native American drama A Thousand Roads. Dead Can Dance also reconvened that year, issuing limited live recordings from 21 European and North American dates plus the Show-label compilation Selections from Europe 2005.
The solo album The Silver Tree, released in 2006, earned a nomination for the Australian Music Prize. In 2007 Clive Collier’s documentary Lisa Gerrard: Sanctuary appeared, together with the retrospective The Best of Lisa Gerrard covering both her independent and film work as well as Dead Can Dance selections. She undertook a world tour that included her first performances on home soil. Farscape, a collaboration with Klaus Schulze, surfaced in 2008 and was followed by a tour; she also contributed to several film and television scores that year. Launching her own Gerrard Records imprint in 2009, she toured again with Schulze and saw the live set Dziekuje Bardzo: Vielen Dank issued during those dates. Her label debut, The Black Opal, followed in October, featuring appearances by Michael Edwards, Patrick Cassidy, Pieter Bourke, and James Orr. That same year she received the Best Feature Film Score prize at the APRA Screen Music Awards and an ARIA Award for Best Original Soundtrack/Cast/Show Album for her work on Balibo, and she supplied vocals for the theme of the Japanese NHK taiga drama Ryōmaden.
In 2010 she and Marcello De Francisci completed the album Departum and the score for Tears of Gaza. The following year she composed the music for Jim Loach’s Oranges and Sunshine, nominated for Best Music Score at the 2011 IF Awards, and finished her score for Burning Man, which won Best Music Score at the Film Critics Circle of Australia awards. Further releases arrived in 2012, including another full-length with De Francisci titled Departum, the singles “Coming Home” (featured in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole), “Entry,” and “Come This Way,” plus The Trail of Genghis Khan, a collaboration with Cye Wood drawn from their music for Tim Cope’s documentary series. Dead Can Dance reconvened late in 2011 for a global tour supporting Anastasis, their first studio album in sixteen years, concluding with assurances of an ongoing reunion. Three years later Gerrard issued the solo Twilight Kingdom on her own label, and in 2015 she contributed vocals to Antony Partos’ score for Tanna. That September Dead Can Dance announced the sale of Perry’s Quivvy Church Studio and their move to France to begin a new studio project. Over the ensuing two years she concentrated on solo endeavors, appearing on the soundtracks for Jane Got a Gun, The Bible, and 2:22. At the close of 2017 she collaborated with Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares on the single “Pora Sotunda,” later included on the choir’s 2018 album BooCheeMish alongside three additional Gerrard tracks.
Dead Can Dance delivered their ninth studio album, Dionysus, in November 2018; Hiraeth, a collaboration with David Kuckhermann, followed, as did the 2019 release Melodies of My Youth with Zbigniew Preisner and Dominik Wania. In 2020 she performed as soloist with the Genesis Orchestra under Yordan Kamdzhalov in a studio recording of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3: The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Jules Maxwell, who had joined Dead Can Dance as keyboardist for the 2012 reunion tour, co-wrote “Rising of the Moon” with Gerrard; the piece became a nightly encore and later contributed material to BooCheeMish. Those tracks formed the basis for an extended joint project recorded across three continents with Maps’ James Chapman serving as additional collaborator and producer during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine. The resulting album, Burn, appeared in April 2021.
