Lisa Gerrard brings a worldwide range to her new release

Adjectives are useless when it comes to describing Lisa Gerrard's music. Words like ethereal, stirring, and timeless are accurate, but hardly adequate. Dead Can Dance, the band she formed 20 years ago with fellow Australian Brendan Perry, made nine albums -- each a striking mosaic of ambient pop and medieval chants, Celtic ballads and electronic samples, rock elements and lush orchestrals.

Gerrard's voice is otherworldly, and she often sings in unfamiliar languages -- some indigenous, some antiquated, some invented. In the mid-1990s, the writer/director Michael Mann asked her to write music for the film "Heat," and against all odds the uncompromising Gerrard has become a sought-after soundtrack composer, working on "The Insider," "Ali," and "Whale Rider,"among others, and receiving an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for her score to "Gladiator."

Gerrard's new album, written and performed with the Irish classical composer Patrick Cassidy, comes out Tuesday. "Immortal Memory" grew out of "the desire to bring things from the ancient world into the contemporary world," Gerrard says on the phone from a London hotel."We've got a 6,000-year-old poem on the album, and it still resonates with the same compassion and beauty."

Gerrard spent long hours learning the phonetics of Gaelic -- in which she sings the first words, according to legend, uttered by a mortal in Ireland -- and Aramaic, so that she might perform the Lord's Prayer in the language Jesus spoke. It wasn't until they had finished recording that she and Cassidy realized that the album was a cohesive, thematic whole.

"Patrick and I had both had a difficult year," says Gerrard. "I was supposed to do the score for `Tears of the Sun,' and it didn't work out. Someone didn't think I could pull off a huge, generic, Bruce Willis mainstream film. They were probably right. So Patrick and I wanted to get back to our roots. We put together all kinds of soulful ideas that we wanted to express, something that felt like a whole palette. But then suddenly it took on this natural harmony, tracing a cycle of life, death, and rebirth."

Gerrard grew up in a melting-pot neighborhood in Melbourne among Turks, Greeks, Italians, and Irish. Her first instrument was voice, and her second was the accordion, which she loved, Gerrard says, because "it was like a huge wooden lung that breathed so awkwardly, and when I played it slowly it sounded like an orchestra." She soaked up the sounds of her immigrant community, sowing the seeds of an expansive musical universe that would be enhanced by Gerrard's belief that there is a language of the soul, one that's spoken in music that transcends time and place.

"There's a certain amount of risk to what I do," she says. "I have to audition for virtually everything, and that's fair enough. I won't ever be a huge composer who delivers the goods. I'm there for someone who wants to do something different. On `Whale Rider,' the director Niki Caro came and lived with me. It was very intimate, and we were able to really crack the poetry. In this esoteric, minimalist score we were able to conjure up all the special effects that weren't in the movie. That must have been how Hitchcock worked with Bernard Herrmann. That's what film scoring used to be about."

Now Gerrard is setting her sights on working in the theater. She'd like to turn her original fairy tale, "In the Magic Rain Garden," into a theatrical production. All she'll say about the story is that it starts at the beginning of time and that it's about her own children.

"My daughter called me this morning to tell me that the cats were talking about her," Gerrard says. "That's how we think as children. My music comes from that reality."

More Pixie dust The Pixies -- alternative-rock pioneers and onetime pride o' Boston -- will reunite for the first time since disbanding in 1993. They'll play the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival May 1 and 2 in Indio, Calif. The German art-rockers Kraftwerk and Radiohead are also scheduled to headline the two-day festival.

Helping hand Former Gang of Four drummer and current New England Institute of Art instructor Hugo Burnham is traveling to Los Angeles at the end of the month to attend a National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences tribute to his old friend, former Zombie and A&R executive Paul Atkinson, who is battling liver and kidney disease as well as inoperable cancer. Burnham hopes to present a contribution from the Boston music community to the Atkinson Family Trust to help with their financial burdens. Anyone interested in donating can contact Burnham at hugenjolly@aol.com.

In clubland and beyond Tonight: "Rock 'n' Roll Will Save Your Life" features readings by Steve Almond, Jen Trynin, Tim Parrish, and Brett Milano, and music from Boris McCutcheon and the Blackouts, at the Attic in Newton Center; Ambulance at the Middle East Downstairs; Count Zero, the Franc Graham Band, and Fritter at the Lizard Lounge; local hip-hop artist Mike Boston's CD release at the Milky Way; Amy Fairchild at Toad. . . . Tomorrow: Former Black Crowe Rich Robinson with Sparticle (featuring Royston Langdon, a.k.a. Mr. Liv Tyler of Spacehog) and Tommy Dempsey at Harpers Ferry; the Collisions and the Brett Rosenberg Problem at the Abbey Lounge. . . . Tuesday: Starsailor at the Paradise; 3 Doors Down at the Orpheum; Kevin Devine at the Middle East Upstairs. . . . Thursday: Ari Hest and Andy Stochansky at the Paradise.

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com