Featuring a large orchestral sound that transcends definition, Dead Can Dance is in fact the creation of only two artists, Australians Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard. If this music could be placed within a genre, and I doubt it can, that genre might include a wide spectrum of artists such as Tangerine Dream, The Mystical Moods Orchestra, Clannad, The Cranberries, Girls Against Boys (GVSB), Loreena McKennitt, The Doors and diverse others. Common among these groups is an inherent sense of mystery that crosses the eons, yet is contemporary as tomorrow's news. Like the others, Dead Can Dance fits this mold yet stands apart and is unique.

There's a lot here. This release includes 26 tracks spanning almost 20 years of recording, from 1981 through 1998. The set begins with the pair's 1981 demo recording of "Frontier" and includes tracks from every release after that, including the 2001 box set, The Lotus Eaters. Also included is a thick, information packed, 24 page jewel case insert that includes extensive biographical information plus song lyrics and more. As retrospectives go, this release is very comprehensive.

High in Alberta's Rocky Mountains, a cloud will envelope you as you drive, sometimes swirling and shifting around you, sometimes placid and enveloping, its shape and density changing constantly and the world within the cloud seeming changed and somehow more mysterious. The impressions are at once complex and yet the most simple and even primitive. Then, as quickly as it came over you, it's gone and there is only sunshine. The music of Dead Can Dance is like that.

The music in these performances is dense and highly complex, rich with expression and with allusions to music from a multitude of ages and cultures, all rising and ebbing and flowing over the listener like some mystic cloud. It's intellectual music that can challenge the perceptive listener and yet it's music that's easy to passively settle into and absorb. In all of its complexity, this music manages also to be involving at the most primitive level. The music and the voices are drawn from many cultures ancient and modern and includes sounds drawn from nature and modern audio science. The effect is electrifying.