Lisa Gerrard | Artist
Lisa Gerrard is an Australian musician, singer and composer born 1961 in Melbourne. Growing up in Prahran, an inner suburb with a substantial Greek-Turkish population, she recalls growing up with "Mediterranean music blaring out of the houses" and said that this influenced her music, particularly on later Dead Can Dance albums and in her solo and collaborative works. Gerrard began in music playing with Melbourne post punk bands Junk Logic and Microfilm, where she met future collaborator Brendan Perry. Gerrard and Perry formed the highly influential gothic-darkwave group Dead Can Dance, which released many superb albums on the 4AD record label. In 1995, Gerrard recorded her first solo album, The Mirror Pool, but continued to work with Dead Can Dance. She has recorded a further 20 albums, many of them movie soundtracks including notable works such as "Whale Rider" and "Gladiator", for which she won a Golden Globe Award. Gerrard has an extraordinary vocal ability, singing many of her songs in her own invented language, or idioglossia, which she started singing in when she was 12 years old. As an instrumentalist, she plays the yangqin - the Chinese hammered Dulcimer. Outside her work with Perry, Gerrard collaborates with artists such as Klaus Schulze, Hans Zimmer, Marcello de Francisci, Pieter Bourke and Patrick Cassidy. Outstanding albums include The Mirror Pool (1995), Duality (1998), The Insider (1999), Gladiator (2000), Whale Rider (2003), The Silver Tree (2006), The Black Opal (2009), and Samsara (2012). Lisa Gerrard possesses an incredible three octave vocal range with a vocal timbre which is regarded as "simply not of this world." Jon Pareles, music critic for The New York Times said that Gerrard uses "distinct voices that draw 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."
Artist Website: lisagerrard.com
Featured Albums: Lisa Gerrard
Related Artists: Dead Can Dance, Brendan Perry, Klaus Schulze, Hans Zimmer
Collections: Women of Note
