In 1981, the young couple left their hometown of Melbourne, Australia, for London, where they began Dead Can Dance. The duo's first record, Dead Can Dance, emerged three years later, a mesmerizingly dark and portentous affair that did not garner many positive reviews in the British tabloids.

"Of possible interest only to undiscriminating fans of moody psychedelia" is how the album was described in The Trouser Press Record Guide. "Mostly shapeless guitar music with chanting, singing and howling." Certainly, the band's name came with some heavy baggage: in record stores Dead Can Dance usually wound up in between the Dead Kennedys and Death in June. Even today, it's obvious that the harsh treatment the band received early on still leaves scars.

Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard are the main protagonists of Dead Can Dance.

"In the beginning, we were berated for being gothic two years too late; today we are applauded for being at the vanguard of world music," says Perry in the group's current tour program. "I think as the music has grown up, we still get a cynical look at the things we're doing, but it's a very far stretch from being 20 years old, turning up in England as a group and really being put through the mincer," said Gerrard in a interview with Boulder Weekly.

In fact, it's only recently that Gerrard has resumed talking to the press at all. In interviews, she can come off as being haughty and nebulous; as a result, some journalists used that to characterize the band as pretentious airheads.

"It was only after going to America that I started speaking to the press again. I'd stopped for nearly six years. I thought, 'there's no point because they're going to make it up anyway and it's going to be very funny and very nasty so let them get on with it.' And when I stopped doing press, they made it up! So America restored our confidence in talking about the things we do because of the accuracy there," says Gerrard.

Twelve years and eight albums later, Dead Can Dance are more accustomed to prestigious soundtrack work, sell-out world tours (their latest carries them to such locales as Budapest, Istanbul, Mexico City and Buenos Aires) and reverent respect than to negative publicity. Some of this international appeal is addressed with Dead Can Dance's newest effort, Spiritchaser (4AD). Over the years, the group's music has passed through goth-rock and symphonic works during their early period, Celtic and medieval sounds in the middle and a more pan-global, world beat direction of late. Haitian voudon (voodoo) influences, Latin percussion, Algonquin Indian lyrics, Chilean spice and Mediterranean instrumentation combine to create a new framework for Perry and Gerrard's voices. But for what it's worth, there is still a thread connecting all of Dead Can Dance's diverse works. Spiritchaser's first track, for example, the trance-inducing "Nierika," has much in common with the first piece of music the two ever wrote together, the 15-year-old "Frontier."

Perry characterizes Dead Can Dance's methodology as "adopting musical traditions and tailoring them to our own needs."

"When Brendan and I get together to make a record," Gerrard explains, "we work apart for two years or so and then we get together for 12 months to do an album. Over the last couple of records, things have been becoming more percussively based, and the orchestral parts of the work I've always done have been building up." Gerrard released a solo album last summer as an outlet for her more fragile, delicate pieces.

Indeed, Spiritchaser is the most drum-dominated album of the group's career. Perry, living in his Irish castle, delves into a rhythmic world with workshops involving up to 15 drummers. On the other hand, Gerrard, who lives in Moondarra, deep in Australia's Snowy Mountains, recorded part of her solo record, The Mirror Pool, with the 45-piece Melbourne Philharmonic. While Spiritchaser is filled with the spirit of the beat, Gerrard's beautiful soprano still soars unimpeded within the percussive context, and "Devorzhum," which she calls "a lullabye for a sleeping spirit," ends the disc on a placid, shimmering note.

America seems to be keener to embrace the band, even now, than England does. Their current tour takes them through 25 U.S. cities; by contrast, the band canceled its sole London date last month without bothering to reschedule.

"In England especially, there's a lot of cynicism about us," declares Gerrard. "It's always a pleasure to go and play in America. The people who come to the concerts we have found to be extremely warm, deeply intelligent and very sensitive. We were quite surprised because the angle we often get on American culture is very tainted because of television, et cetera."

But that doesn't mean American writers are above taking occasional shots at the two, who often do seem too serious for their own good. When Dead Can Dance visited the U.S. back in 1990, their first performance was met with this quote from a New York scribe: "They have no musical training, but that's how they pull it off, idealizing different types of music, striving only for the ersatz. They're rebuilding the wheel as a perfect circle. No treads, no ridges, no resilience. Not very practical, but nice to look at."

But Gerrard and Perry have always made their music by synthesis and appropriation, by journeying through space and time and coming back with bags of musical goodies that end up as fodder for Dead Can Dance. On Spiritchaser's "The Snake and the Moon," for instance, Perry indulges in previously unevinced South American shades, and tracks like "Dedicace Outo" and "Nierika" seem to emerge from a dense jungle of African and Haitian percussion. Perry seems to have joined Gerrard, at least for now, in her realm of wordless chants; absent are the mythological and literal narratives that have always showed up on the band's records. Also missing is the rich thread of Gaelic imagery that ran through their last studio album, 1993's Into the Labyrinth.

But it would not be in Dead Can Dance's interest to find one path and remain on it; indeed, their most endearing and important attribute is the way the two have managed to remain a creative team for 15 years without making concessions to the music business, or, it would seem, to each other: once inseparable, the two now live as geographically separate as possible, and Gerrard is married with a young daughter. The dissolution of their romantic relationship put an enormous strain on the stability of their musical partnership at first, but now the two appear to work in synch more than ever.

And through the course of their nine albums, they have made a monument to their art and their work on their own terms. The band struggled "as poor as church mice" during their formative years in England, yet Perry and Gerrard never wavered in their vision: to construct a synergistic music that can touch the reaches of the human soul and capture a sense of the human experience that is almost never seen in today's universe of media. Undaunted by criticism, misunderstanding and remaining impervious to musical trends, the best work of Dead Can Dance is timeless. Spanning centuries, their music aspires to divinity - and often attains it.

"We have always endeavored to remain true to our convictions, in the belief that our music would eventually find its audience on its own merits and not by way of slavishly pandering to the whims of an industry that continually lacks imagination and is subservient to formula and greed," writes Perry from Marrakesh.

Noble idealism like that is usually crushed by the wheels of industry; somehow, Dead Can Dance have flourished in the harshest of environments. Their success should give us all hope - that music can be more than entertainment, distraction or even acquisition of "culture." It can go beyond - and take us with it. Peter Townshend once described music as "pills that make you fly." Dead Can Dance not only do that through their songs, they take you to far-away locales and let you sightsee a bit.