There was a flurry of new from Cocteau Twins this week, with the announcement that their collaborative album with the late ambient composer Harold Budd – The Moon and The Melodies – was getting a vinyl reissue for the first time since its initial release in 1986 on August 23, featuring a new remaster by Robin Guthrie. It was a relatively low-key release in its day, going so far as to be credited not to the Cocteaus but Budd, Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde individually, but has gone on to become one of the favourites of their catalog in certain quarters; I collected some pieces on the album back in 2021 when Slowdive’s Simon Scott penned an essay on it for Sonic Cathedral, but that piece is sadly gone after a redesign of the Sonic Cathedral website. Most of the other links are still good, though, I think. And there’s also this piano lesson of “Sea, Swallow Me” if that’s your jam:
Anyways, seeing as there were no videos or any other sort of multimedia to accompany that record, the band had a gift for their fans in the form of fresh transfers of the remainder of their videography to their YouTube channel. Accordingly, I’ve gone back and updated the embeds in my various Cocteaus posts over the years.
All of which is to say, despite there being Cocteaus news, I have net nothing new to post from it, so I’ll instead turn to this one that’s been sitting in my drafts folder for quite some time now – a Reverb.com article about the band’s mechanical rhythm section. Niche, to be sure, but considering how dedicated the band remained to drum machines over their lifetime and how Robin Guthrie was always embracing and experimenting with the latest in musical technology, it’s actually quite an interesting topic, particularly for compulsive drum machine-buying-but-not-really-learning types like myself.
Their choice of drum machines also came from a pragmatic place. As Guthie told Sound On Sound in 1989:
…Drummers make an awful lot of noise—imagine Liz trying to sing with a great big drum kit behind her.
Robin Guthrie, Cocteau Twins
“A voice, a few guitars, a bit of processing, and a hell of a lot of inspiration” @ Sound On Sound via CocteauTwins.com
In the Reverb piece, it tracks their drum machine timeline from the Roland TR-808s and Linns of their earlier works, through the E-Mus of their middle period through the Akai samplers that held the beat for the late-era albums. For nerds only!
The Drum Machines of Cocteau Twins @ Reverb
And as a chaser, a couple of video tutorials on crafting Cocteaus-esque sounds in your home studio:
And as long as I’m clearing the Cocteaus decks, here’s a piece from Discogs celebrating the band’s influence in essentially creating the dreampop genre:
