The taxi cab turns left onto a narrow cobblestone road into the fortress of Vysehrad, overlooking Vltava River, in Prague, the Czech Republic.

"To your right is one of the oldest buildings here in Prague--St. Martin, built in the 11th Century," says the taxi driver, pointing to a stone rotunda chapel.

"Oh, this is lovely--look at the arches," says Lisa Gerrard, looking at St. Peter and Paul's Church.

The cab stops.

"This is the cemetery here with many well-known people," says the taxi driver, shutting off his meter. "93 Crowns."

"Thank you very much," says Gerrard.

"In the cemetery you can find the tomb of [19th-century composer] Smetana," the taxi driver says.

With its steep towers, high gothic arches and red, black and gold door mosaic, St. Peter and Paul's Church would seem to be the perfect backdrop for a Dead Can Dance photo shoot in Prague.

"I'd rather we find a tree or take some photos by the river," says Brendan Perry, walking toward the bank of the Vltava. "it doesn't have to be gothic."

As groups of Czech children on a school tour walk by Perry and Gerrard, they curiously stop to look and point, whispering to one another.

A train crossing the river passes by.

"Listen," say Perry, imitating the movement of the train with his hands. "Everything has its own rhythm--even the machine."

When Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, collectively Dead Can Dance, set out to record their most recent album Spirit chaser (on 4AD), they posed a series of musical questions: Can rhythm tell a story? From where does it come? Where will it take you?

Their musical journey from the Australian bush and the Irish countryside into the world of South American and African polyrhythms. Working from the rhythm up, Perry and Gerrard then dovetailed their visions, which had been growing further apart on recent releases, and wrote together in the Cavan County church that is Perry's home in the Irish countryside.

After assembling a nine-piece group which includes four full-time percussionists, Perry and Gerrard then took to the road. Perry, in the middle of a European tour, is enjoying a televised soccer game between Scotland and Holland. The band have a day off in Prague where they will perform the following night.

The score is 0-0 at halftime, and Perry is contemplating the catch-22 that confronts the group: They don't like to talk about their music (because they attempt to "make manifest the unspeakable"), yet for this reason they're seen by many to be "mysterious icons."

"We are literal-language creatures explaining most of our lives away," says Perry. "That's why you need a vehicle--a metaphor or an allegory."

So he reaches for a story, a rhythm.

"There's a group of people who live in the mountains near the Basque territory [in Spain] who have a form of music that's based on horse strides and gallops," he says. "So the rhythm is based on the various modes--from walking to galloping of the horse--and played on tree trunks."

He demonstrates by slowly tapping a static rhythm on his lap.

"It goes from walking, and then there's a skip in the rhythm," says Perry, speeding up and varying the tempo. "And then there's happiness and then intensity."

He taps out a Morse-code-like rhythm.

"And then the siren--urgency! And then the flight of the horse."

He stops and then resumes tapping on his lap at the initial tempo.

"And it's all self-referential, it's part of the experience. It's primal..."

Perry looks at his watch.

"It's 7:30; we better be running to join Lisa for dinner."

When Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard formed Dead Can Dance in Melbourne Australia in 1979, they set out on a journey to wed experience with music.

Until then they were pursuing similar paths, separately.

Perry was born in East London in 1959 of Anglo-Irish parentage.

"I had a real swinging auntie who worked in a casino in London, and she spent a lot of money on records," he says. "So I grew into a love for psychedelic music. It's the music of the consciousness."

From the acid-punk of the Electric Prunes to the psych-fold of Tim Buckley, Perry got hooked on mind-altering music.

"There are mysteries contained within us that we are not aught to bring out or explore as a child," says Perry. "It's more like, 'You're a child, you're in this world, and you must embrace our world.' That's why some drugs can open those doors of perception to your inner self."

Early on Perry embraced another passion: soccer.

"As a child I've always supported Arsenal [a London soccer club] because my family did going back," says Perry. "Sports is an alternative to people killing each other. The reason soccer fans riot is because the exorcism of sports wasn't enough for them."

And what about Dead Can Dance fans?

"What happens after the performance I don't know," says Perry. "I just hope we can perform."

At age 14, Perry moved with his family to New Zealand. Three years later, his primal pursuits came in the form of Stooges-influenced punk rock.

"When I discovered Iggy Pop, it was amazing: animism--the celebration of the animal," says Perry. "We all become too fucking top-heavy. Iggy Pop was all about trying to get that balance with the raw, the primal."

In 1977, Perry formed the Scavengers and started playing the New Zealand pub scene. Two years later, the band moved to Melbourne, Australia, where Perry would meet Lisa Gerrard.

Gerrard, also of Anglo-Irish parentage, was born in Australia after her parents migrated there from England. For her, music came as an accompaniment to her surroundings.

"When I was 16 years old, I used to sing with the automobile traffic under this tunnel in Australia," says Gerrard. "It was like singing with an orchestra."

Gerrard was self-taught, and her musical interests were more freeform and less rock-oriented, except for Roxy Music [which she liked as a teenager] and Melbourne's Birthday Party.

"I liked the fact that they were so demonstrative and passionate," says Gerrard of those bands.

In 1980, she joined Dead Can Dance, a group Perry had already started in Melbourne. Two years later, they moved to London as a couple and signed to 4AD the following year.

"When we did our first album [self-titled, 1984] we were naïve and we required someone who could manipulate the technology," says Perry. "we were unfortunate to have an engineer [in the studio] who was noncompliant and very obstructive. It was a major disaster."

Like much of the 4AD roster at the time, the debut takes Joy Division as a touchstone--hence the "gothic" tag, which inappropriately still haunts the group. Though undeveloped, the record forced the duo to learn how to manipulate sounds. The cover artwork, a drawing of a ritual mask from New Guinea, provided a visual for the meaning behind the group's name: The mask, once a living part of a tree that is dead, comes to life through the artistry of its maker.

By their third LP, 1987's Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun, Perry and Gerrard were expanding their guitar, bass and drums set-up, broadening their instrumentation, via samplers, to include baroque and classical textures.

"With the earlier records we embraced technology, and the source is the machine," says Perry. "Sometimes you want something that sounds like a real violin, and other times it doesn't sound like a violin, but it's interesting--so it becomes something else--and then you use it because it's relevant."

Subsequent releases (The Serpent's Egg and Aion) took them in a new direction--backward in time into the Baroque and Renaissance periods. Time-traveling via sampler, the duo transported the instrumentation of Europe's liturgical past into the present to make timeless music.

Yet, recreating an era was never the intent. And often intent had little to do with the outcome.

"Your choice of the instrument is directly related to the internal composition of the music," says Perry. "Sometimes you have a sound in your head, but it isn't right for the job. 'It should be a flute.' But then something else gives it energy."

"The process determines what the end will be; we don't have much control," says Gerrard. "Sometimes you do something and say 'Oh, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever done.' But it doesn't bring you to the point where it's finished.

"It's like the ancient Solomon dances where you dance in a way that half your body is working against the other half, and by doing that you make it possible to work in different ways," she continues. "We don't know where the pice is supposed to go, and that is what those dances are all about."

After the pair's romantic relationship ended, Gerrard moved to the Australian bush (where she lives with her husband and two children). Perry stayed in Ireland where he lives in a 19th-century church built by the British government to encourage Irish Catholics to convert to Protestantism.

"I bought it off the Irish Government for 7000 pounds, a bloody good deal," says Perry.

While Into the Labyrinth, their first U.S. release of all-new material, the following year was considered a commercial breakthrough (it was 4AD's best-selling record at 750,000 copies worldwide), it is also their most divided. They both wrote songs independent of one another--on separate continents.

A single off the record, "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove," featuring Perry's baritone backed by a "Venus In Furs"--like tribal rhythm and an infectious whip-cracking sound, broke the group onto American commercial radio. Its success left them in an enviable position: They can record whenever and whatever they want.

"Lisa and I manage the group and make all the decisions," says Perry.

"And it only takes one 'no' for something not to happen," adds Gerrard.

"It's a true democracy," says Perry.

They don't make MTV videos or hawk t-shirts, and they've turned down offers to play Lollapalooza, in favor of concert halls that typically book orchestras and chamber groups.

"A lot of the music we perform live never materializes on records," says Perry. "Towards the Within [a live album released in 1994] turned out because so much of the concert was new music."

After Gerrard released her solo record, The Mirror Pool, last year, and rumors surfaced of a Brendan Perry solo record ("Don't hold your breath," he says), the duo joined together to work on songs based on the primal rhythms of Africa and South America.

We meet Lisa Gerrard in a French restaurant located in the hotel at which Dead Can Dance are staying in Prague. Perry sits down next to Gerrard, as the piano player plays a Bohemian-tinged lounge version of "Love Me Tender."

AP: Do you ever fear that indigenous culture will be wiped out in the name of a "one-world community"?

Lisa Gerrard: I don't fear that because I don't believe it is possible. I believe you can interfere with the morality of man, but you can't take his spiritual dimension away. Definitely in things like the Internet. It's such a wonderful form of communication because people can bypass the whole media--and the bullshit--and speak to each other in a medieval way like letter writing. Instead of having this abstract world of commercialism of media broadcasts or magazines telling us how it is--we don't really know how it is-we've got maybe five or six people in our lives that are close to us out of the millions in the world. And we judge everything on those six people that are close to us.

AP: Do you think that eventually Western commercialism will penetrate every corner of the world?

Lisa Gerrard: No, I don't think so. I think we're turning off to it. The machine isn't as strong as we'd like to think it is, and the only reason it's there is because we contemplate it. All we have to do is ignore it and it will have to go away. At the end of the day we entertain it--we keep it alive.

AP: Do you find that even in the way in which interviews with Dead Can Dance are conducted?

Brendan Perry: Didn't you just describe it as an onion?

Lisa Gerrard: Oh, shut up. I knew you were going to say that. [starts laughing]

Brendan Perry: She called our music an onion. [laughs]

AP: Does listening to other music give you inspiration?

Lisa Gerrard: No. A lot of people think inspiration comes from music. I've known Brendan since he was 19 years old and he was doing very complex rhythmic things that he had never been exposed to at that time. I don't really understand where my singing came from or where Brendan's musicality came from. When I listen to the early stuff that Brendan did and hasn't been released--it's not that different from some of the stuff we're doing now.

Brendan Perry: The bass riff on "Song Of The Dispossessed" just came to me after fourteen years and found itself on the new album.

Lisa Gerrard: There are things that are similar to the early stuff in the drive of the material.

Brendan Perry: It's a coming-home type of album. [starts laughing]

Lisa Gerrard: A lot of the previous records have been exploratory--understanding other works--whereas this work is our own.

AP: Was there any pressure, self-imposed or otherwise, after the last record being such a breakthrough?

Lisa Gerrard: Absolutely not.

Brendan Perry: If we allowed ourselves to think of what our public would perceive--we don't even know who our public is--if our audience is going to exist, it must be willing to go on a journey through a process.

AP: Brendan, why did you shave the beard?

Lisa Gerrard: This guy I was sitting with, he's Polish, he's a really big guy--huge beard with a bolo tie and boots, flared jeans and a checkered shirt. He's sitting backstage--he's my husband's uncle and people were coming up to him after a show and saying, "Hi, Brendan," and they're asking him fo his autograph. We thought it was hilarious.

AP: How would you go out incognito?

Lisa Gerrard: We don't need to go incognito.

Brendan Perry: I can't imagine getting shot in the back by a fan.

AP: Are your fans in the States different than fans in Europe?

Brendan Perry: They're warm and gushing.

Lisa Gerrard: They cry a lot more. It really worried me at first: "Why are they crying?" When I did the solo record and I did different signings for the record, I found that people almost didn't want to buy my record because it might be disrespectful to Brendan. They were so worried about my relationship with Brendan--"What's gonna happen? Is he okay?"

Brendan Perry: We don't promote the iconization process--"Here we are on a pedestal as celebrities"--because we've attended to our first child--the music. That's what we want people to hear, and this creates a problem because you want to break down the reliance on a model that lends itself to worship, but you invariably create a mysterious vacuum in its wake. As a result, people invent who you are.

Lisa Gerrard: I wouldn't like to think that people thought that we were very mysterious or strange because of the work that we do. I prefer for people to realize that we are normal people that are maintaining our sanity by virtue of the creative output and encourage others to have a creative output to maintain their own sanity.

AP: What do most fans ask when they meet you?

Lisa Gerrard: People have false illusions. It's really inspiring to know how ordinary some people can be and yet do something that really appears to be extraordinary. Every human being is capable of doing that.

Brendan Perry: I attract all the loonies. I don't know what it is about me. I thought it might have been the beard--shaved that off and they still kept coming after me.

AP: Is there a certain type of person you can see out in the audience?

Brendan Perry: Girls with big breasts. It's really hard when you're trying to play these polyrhythms and there's someone out there... You can drop a few polyrhythms easily. [he laughs]

Lisa Gerrard: He's a nightmare--he doesn't even look at the audience. He's telling us what to do, screaming at us. He's relaxed now 'caue he's got a belly full of beers, but he's not relaxed onstage--he's got thunderbolts coming out of his head. The first three to four shows I go back to the hotel and just cry: "I want to go home. Oh, what am I doing--what am I doing?" And then it all starts to calm down and you let things go more, and after a couple weeks of concerts you know how to create a balance.

The waiter brings the check. Gerrard excuses herself from the table saying, "See you tomorrow--don't drink too much," and walks away. Minutes later Perry gets into a taxi cab outside of the hotel. "Do you know of any Irish pubs here in Prague?" Perry asks the driver. "Yes," the driver responds. "Well, then great," says Perry.

The next day Brendan Perry is rushing through the lobby of the hotel toward the elevator. He's running late for a sound check at the venue when he is approached by two men in their 20s. One has long black hair and an unkempt beard and is wearing a Motörhead t-shirt. The other has long black hair and is wearing a bootleg Dead Can Dance t-shirt.

"Excuse me, Mr. Perry. We came 500 miles from Greece to see Dead Can Dance concert. Can we have signature--sign name, please?" says the man in the Motörhead t-shirt, making a signing motion with his hand.

He hands Perry the cover of the first Dead Can Dance CD.

Perry signs it and returns it to the man.

The man hands Perry more CD covers to sign--some multiple copies of the same album.

Perry signs all the CD covers--about ten of them--and hands them to the man.

"Now picture please? With my friend?" says the man.

"I'm sorry, we're running late. I have to leave," says Perry, who waves at them and walks towards the elevator.

"Thank you very much. Pleased to meet you," says the man in the Motörhead t-shirt.

Perry and Gerrard are having their photos taken on the bank of the Vltava River. They are talking about Australia.

Lisa Gerrard: It's a really mad place. There's a lot of wild life where I live: kangaroos, wallabies, goannas, koala bears, parakeets and snakes.

Brendan Perry: Deadly snakes.

Lisa Gerrard: It's gotta be really hot for them to be visible.

Brendan Perry: They sunbathe.

Lisa Gerrard: The times I've see them at my place is when it's boiling outside.

Brendan Perry: There's some dangerous fucking animals over there.

Lisa Gerrard: The funniest thing is, one time we were driving along, and all of a sudden Brendan felt something crawling on him, and he went crazy trying to get his shirt off in the car.

Brendan Perry: Yeah.

Lisa Gerrard: Remember that spider?

Brendan Perry: Scared the shit out of me.

Lisa Gerrard: I couldn't stop laughing. One day I was in the car, and it was amazing--I parked it under a tree, and the tarantulas are all over in the trees. They're not poisonous--they bit you, but it's just a nip--I had the children in the back of the car and I was driving them to school, and the kids started screaming. This tarantula was crawling up my seat belt, and I felt his leg on my neck.

AP: They're big.

Lisa Gerrard: They're huge!

AP: They bite and it hurts.

Lisa Gerrard: It does--but it doesn't kill you. There's one called a funnelweb, and it jumps a meter on you and you're dead in 20 minutes. It actually pulverizes your muscles into liquid. When I was first going to move there I saw one and said, "I'm not going to buy this place," so we caught it and took it to the lab, and they said it's a different one--it'll bite and ulcerate, but it doesn't kill. The only thing I wouldn't like is a snake in the house. Our next-door neighbor--he's about two kilometers away--has 27 car wrecks on his land. He's saving them up because when he gets 30--he gets the crusher to come down and take 'em away for crushed metal. And there are heaps of snakes, so I'm worried that when the crushers come all the snakes are gonna be moving.

[Gerrard walks over to her purse, takes out a compact and powders Brendan's nose.]

Lisa Gerrard: He never would've let me do that five years ago.

Brendan Perry: I would've never let her do that.

Lisa Gerrard: I moved there because I've always been attracted to the birdsongs of the Australian bush--it's very noisy. It's hard to explain, it's an atmosphere. Some people can't bear it--they go crazy--and a lot of people suffer from depression--from the trees. It's so dark. In Ireland it's so quiet, but in Australia we always have gunshots flying by the house.

AP: Brendan, do you get gunshots where you live?

Brendan Perry: No, not that much. We get tourists in the summer.

Lisa Gerrard: They walk in thinking that it's a church even though it's so messy and there are beer cans all over.

Brendan Perry: Sometimes I'm sitting there, and someone just walks in.

Dead Can Dance have just finished a performance in Prague's Palace Of Culture. The show sold out the capacity for the venue--3500 people. Lisa Gerrard, dressed for the stage in a flowing white gown, is in her dressing room. Even though she had problems hearing herself through the sound system, the crowd response was overwhelming--from thunderous applause to attentive silence. Most strikingly, the set contained moments where the nine-piece band locked into one polyrhythm, with each individual playing a distinct rhythm, never overtaking any of the others.

Brendan Perry, dressed casually in a white button-down shirt, jeans and brown suede ankle boots, is hanging out with his band backstage, chatting with fans and signing autographs.

"Mr. Perry--please, signature for Dead Can Dance," says the man in the Motörhead t-shirt, the same one from the hotel lobby earlier in the day.

Perry takes the pen, signs a Dead Can Dance poster and hands it to the man. The man hands Perry a stack of Dead Can Dance CD covers and more posters to sign.

"Photo please," the man says.

Perry looks up. "I signed a whole stack of things for you today. I signed the poster--no--what are you doing? Selling this stuff?" Perry asks.

"Picture, photo," the man says, holding a camera.

"Piss off. No, that's enough. How did you get back here anyway?" Perry says.

"Just one photo. C'mon, c'mon," says the man.

"No, piss off; no more--that's enough," says Perry.

"Thank you, thank you," says the man, walking away with a stack of Dead Can Dance memorabilia.

The lights dim.

"Why are the lights going out? Didn't they pay their electric bill?" Perry asks.

A middle-aged man responsible for maintaining the backstage area walks toward Perry, motioning with his hands that he will fix the lights.

After turning the lights back on, the man sits across from Perry at the same table. He points to an empty can of Guinness Stout and explains, in Czech, that he has never seen such a can of beer ("pivo").

"Ah, would you like some? This is the best stuff. Irish," says Perry, pointing to the can.

Someone hands Perry a can of Guinness. He opens it.

"Listen to the gas when you open it," Perry says, pouring the beer into a glass for the man. "No! Not yet! Wait for the gas to rise from the bottom to the top, and then drink it."

The man doesn't understand Perry but waits for the beer to settle before he drinks it.

"Interesting aroma," the man says, in Czech. He then puts his fingers up to his mouth and opens them up. "Dorbry!" ("Good.")

"Irish beer!" says Perry, who gets up to find a member of his road crew. He asks the crew member to open up a storage cooler the band is taking on the road. He comes back to the table with another can of Guinness in his hand.

"This is for you to take home to your wife," Brendan says, shaking the man's hand.

"Thank you," the man says, smiling. "Good night."

Having finished the photo shoot, Perry and Gerrard are standing on the riverside fortress of Vyschrad, overlooking the city and the river that flows out of it.

"The irony of the situation is that in our music we've chosen not to speak in spoken language, and yet we're expected to explain what it is that we do through the spoken word," says Gerrard.

"The music is self-referential to our lives: We live and breath and eat it, and it really is a language to us," says Perry. "It's difficult because we're trying to make manifest the unspeakable."

Such is the dilemma of the artist in search of sound and sensibility. German film director Werner Herzog might understand. In his 1972 film Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, an expedition sent by the King of Spain travels down the Amazon in search of the city of El Dorado. Beset with jungle disease, the spears of Amazonian tribes and the cruel forces of nature, the crew perishes, leaving only the ship's mad dictator alive--cursing the earth and dreaming of transcendence.

Sitting down on the wall of the riverbank fortress, Brendan Perry looks out over the Vltava River.

"You're flying upstream in the face of nature,," he says. "So you look for a good fucking boat because you need a vehicle, and then you ask, 'Where's the port?'

"Well, I think it's down there somewhere. So you need a bloody good boat, and you want to go on that journey with people who believe in the same thing you do.

"I've got eight people with me, and it's not going to make sense until we reach the end. And that is the musical journey."