Toward the Within (1994) is the first official live album of Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard's group Dead Can Dance. It contains 15 songs, of which only four appeared on their previous albums, and two of which were later re-recorded and included on Lisa Gerrard's first solo album, The Mirror Pool. The others previously existed only in live performances and unofficial bootlegs, but were not officially released until Toward the Within. Along with Perry and Gerrard were a number of musicians who had performed with them on other occasions.

Spiritchaser is the seventh studio album by Dead Can Dance, and the last before Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard went their separate ways. It expands on its exploration of world music, and like Into the Labyrinth, was recorded at Quivvy Church, Perry's personal studio in Ireland. The album was dedicated to Lisa Gerrard's deceased brother, Mark Gerrard. The track "Indus" contains a melody that is very similar to that of "Within You Without You", a Beatles song that George Harrison wrote and recorded with Indian musicians in 1967. Although not deliberate, Perry and Gerrard were asked to contact Harrison for his permission to use it; he granted it, but the record company insisted that they give him partial songwriting credit on "Indus".

Si Rod Stewart a certainement imposé le respect au début de sa carrière de chanteur, à mesure qu’il a pris de l’âge et accordé plus d’importance à son statut de vedette, ce respect s’est érodé. Il fut un jour le meilleur interprète vocal du rock & roll ainsi qu’un compositeur accompli, créant une combinaison brute de folk, de rock, de blues et de country incomparable à n’importe quel morceau de folk-rock ou de country-rock. Plutôt que de montrer le folk dans le rock, il a montré comme le folk pouvait " rocker " à lui tout seul. Une fois devenu célèbre, il commence à perdre les éléments les plus fondamentaux de sa musique et abandonne son propre chemin artistique en faveur des tendances pop qui se présentent.

Perry and Gerrard continued to experiment and improve with The Serpent's Egg, as much a leap forward as Spleen and Ideal was some years previously. As with that album, The Serpent's Egg was heralded by an astounding first track, "The Host of Seraphim." Its use in films some years later was no surprise in the slightest – one can imagine the potential range of epic images the song could call up – but on its own it's so jaw-droppingly good that almost the only reaction is sheer awe. Beginning with a soft organ drone and buried, echoed percussion, Gerrard then takes flight with a seemingly wordless invocation of power and worship – her vocal control and multi-octave range, especially towards the end, has to be heard to be believed. Nothing else achieves such heights, but everything gets pretty darn close, a deserved testament to the band's conceptual reach and abilities.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Janáček’s birth, this Decca Collector Edition brings together most of the composer’s chamber works and solo pieces plus his most popular orchestral works and the magnificent Glagolitic Mass in a superb digital recording with Riccardo Chailly and Wiener Philharmoniker. The recordings of the solo works and chamber pieces feature one of the world’s most distinguished ensembles: the London Sinfonietta and David Atherton. Their recordings were originally released as a 5-LP set in 1981 and many of these performances have not been available for several years; many also make their first international appearance on CD. This set provides the listener with all the essential non-operatic Janáček in one convenient collection.

With this amazing album, Dead Can Dance fully took the plunge into the heady mix of musical traditions that would come to define its sound and style for the remainder of its career. The straightforward goth affectations are exchanged for a sonic palette and range of imagination. Calling it "haunting" and "atmospheric" barely scratches even the initial surface of the album's power. The common identification of the duo with a consciously medieval European sound starts here – quite understandable, when one considers the mystic titles of songs, references to Latin, choirs, and other touches that make the album sound like it was recorded in an immense cathedral.

Their reputation growing by leaps and bounds, including a huge underground following in the U.S. – they were able to tour there even without one domestic release available, while at one point Dead Can Dance was the biggest selling band in 4AD's history – Perry and Gerrard once again did the business with Aion. Its cover taken from Bosch, Aion's medievalism was worn more openly than ever before, with songs adapted from centuries-old material. The beautiful, entrancing "Saltarello," with lead performance by what sounds like an old wind instrument, comes from an Italian dance of the 14th century, while the mysterious moods of "The Song of the Sibyl" derive from 16th-century Catalonia. The group's command of not merely recording possibilities – witness the exquisite layering of vocals on the opening "The Arrival and the Reunion" – but of musical traditions, instruments, and more from around the world was arguably never stronger. Gerrard's vocals in particular have an even stronger, richer feeling than before, not merely able to command with its power but softly calm and seduce.

Recorded by the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra and various soloists and ensembles in churches in Tallinn as well as the Estonian Concert Hall, the five compositions heard on Arboles lloran por lluvia (Trees cry for rain) give deeper insight into the unique sound-world of Estonian composer Helena Tulve, into music that is nourished by both contemporary and ancient currents. Tulve draws upon a wide-range of inspirational sources. She explores the raw fabric of sound and the nature of timbre in both analytical and instinctive ways, in compositions that are unmistakably her own, yet her work is inclusive - here incorporating aspects of Gregorian chant, melody from Yemenite Jewish tradition, and texts from Sufi, Sephardic and Christian mystic poetry. Reyah hadas 'ala (The Perfume of the Myrtle Rises) unites the ensemble of the Gregorian chant and the early music instruments. This is the only work in which Tulve has used a pre-existing melody, a song of the Yemenite Jews. Extinction des choses vues (The Extinction of the Things Seen) is an orchestral piece in which the musical ideas are derived from a text by the Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau called Extase blanche (White Ecstasy).

Often referred to as the "King of Nubian Music," the Egyptian musician has enjoyed a remarkably varied career. Collection includes: Music of Nubia (1964); Al Oud: Instrumental and Vocal Music of Nubia (1965); Eclipse (1978); Muwashshah (1995); A Wish (1999).

Art of Noise (also The Art of Noise) were an English avant-garde synth-pop group formed in early 1983 by engineer/producer Gary Langan and programmer J. J. Jeczalik, along with arranger Anne Dudley, producer Trevor Horn and music journalist Paul Morley. The group had international Top 20 hits with "Kiss" and the instrumental "Peter Gunn", which won a 1986 Grammy Award. The group's mostly instrumental compositions were novel melodic sound collages based on digital sampler technology, which was new at the time. Inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century revolutions in music, the Art of Noise were initially packaged as a faceless anti- or non-group, blurring the distinction between the art and its creators. Collection includes: (Who's Afraid Of?) The Art Of Noise! (1984); In Visible Silence (1986); In No Sense? Nonsense! (1987); Below The Waste (1989); The Ambient Collection (1990); The FON Mixes (1991); The Seduction Of Claude Debussy (1999).

One listen to Lisa Gerrard's The Silver Tree (originally available only digitally, then as an Australia-only import, and finally, as a U.S. release) is enough to convince anybody – who isn't already convinced – that there's a very specific reason she has been courted by directors to compose soundtracks. There are 13 tracks here full of wispy ambient soundscapes, on top of which the former Dead Can Dance vocalist places her almost otherworldly gift of a voice. Sung nearly as prayers or meditative mantras, Gerrard employs monosyllabic glimpses of other languages – and occasionally English – to create her own tapestry of dreams. Some may be tempted to call this "new age" music, but it's so much more melancholy than much of what passes for that trash, and it's nearly sacred in its approach to articulation, creating the feeling in places ("Come Tenderness," "The Sea Whisperer," and "Abwoon," to name a few) that she is actually singing inside a cathedral. In other places, such as "Wandering Star" and "Serenity," her voice offers a drone approach that is as subtle – yet powerful – as her instrumentation.

Immortal Memory is a collaboration between vocalist Lisa Gerrard and Irish composer Patrick Cassidy. Billed as a cycle of life and death and rebirth, Immortal Memory is better described as an orphaned film score. Cassidy's warm arrangements allow the former Dead Can Dance singer to step out of the dark medieval world that she's called home for nearly 20 years – though there is much of that world within these castle walls – and focus on the simplicity of love, faith, and loss with a grace that's bereft of the icy perfection of her previous work. Gerrard, whose voice has aged like the finest oak, displays an almost supernatural mastery of the material. Her effortless contralto wraps itself around the ten Gaelic, Latin, and Aramaic spirituals like an evening prayer, making each stunning entrance the equivalent of audio comfort food.

Ella Zonis Mahler’s compilation of these Iranian classical music performers was originally issued on Folkways Records in 1966. Ten of the twelve model melodic patterns (dastgahs) are represented here, in a variety of instrumental and vocal performances.

What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.

This retrospective of the legendary Cameroon saxophonist Manu Dibango includes 10 prime examples of his eclectic style, including his internationally successful hit, "Soul Makossa", the percolating percussion and layered brass of "Africadelic", and the '80s disco of "Sun Explosion".