Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry and Peter Murphy to co-headline world tour next year

Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry has completed work on Ark, his first solo album in a decade, and plans to support the record with a 100-date world tour early next year with co-headliner Peter Murphy.

According to a post on Perry’s website, the recording and mastering of Ark — the follow-up to 1999’s Eye of the Hunter — is complete, and the record is expected in “early 2010.” It’s being billed as “more reminiscent of the music Brendan has written for Dead Can Dance than his previous solo work.”

Perry plans to support the album with an extensive co-headlining tour with the former Bauhaus frontman starting in March, which “will commence in South America via Mexico to North America and then on to Europe.” Tour dates, Perry notes, will be announced “this side of Noel.”

On his microsite dedicated to the new album, Perry — in both a video, shown below, and in writing — explains that Ark contains “eight original compositions in total that explore the recurring themes of identity, alienation, war, political corruption and the threat that we as a specials now pose to our environment.”

He continues:

“Despite the dystopian themes that pervade these eight compositions, there are also expressions of great hope and optimism for a better world to be found within the subtext of the songs. For an Ark as well as being a refuge from the world’s harsher realities is also a vehicle for regeneration and renewal.”

Unlike Eye of the Hunter, which used live guitars, bass and drums, Perry writes that “practically all of the instrumentation on Ark is derived from sample libraries and synthesizers.” Two of the album’s songs, “Babylon” and “Crescent,” originally were written for Dead Can Dance’s 2005 reunion tour.

As for Murphy, he’s nearing the end of the European leg of his Secret Cover Tour, which wraps up next week with concerts in Tel Aviv and Beirut. Earlier this fall, he took time to appear at some of Trent Reznor’s final Nine Inch Nails concerts, and, in September, he spent a couple days filming a cameo as a vampire in “Eclipse,” the third film in the “Twilight” series.

See Brendan Perry’s video about ‘Ark’ after the jump…

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