I’ve been filling a few longstanding holes in my Cocteau Twins collection, most recently getting the Lullabies To Violaine, Vol. 1 compilation of all their 4AD-era EPs – easy enough, as it’s still in print in CD – but the second volume, which covers their Fontana years but was also released by 4AD, is somewhat harder to track down at a reasonable price – probably because of intra-label licensing.

But that it contains treasures like the Twinlights EP really does affirm that I need to pull the trigger on one of those Discogs listings and just, like, get it already. Released in September 1995, the mostly-acoustic recording included two songs that would eventually appear on their final studio album Milk & Kisses the following March. a reworking of a decade-old track from their Tiny Dynamine EP, and one song – “Golden-Vein” – that appears nowhere else.

Said bassist Simon Raymonde of the release:

“Really, [Twinlights] was kind of an exercise, if you like, for ourselves. We thought, ‘We write nice bits of music, but can we write a song?’ You know, if you took all this stuff away—if you took all the effects off a minute—is there actually a song underneath? Four-track EPs are just brilliant because they’re like little experiments. You’re dipping your toe in a pool you don’t normally spend any time in. You think, ‘Well, look, I’d like to do something acoustic. I don’t really want to make a whole album of it, because people will think this is our new direction.’ With the Twinlights thing and the Otherness thing, we were able to do that and do things we don’t normally do. That’s a great arena for us. I want to put out two or three of these every year.”

Simon Raymonde, Cocteau Twins
Twinlights @ CocteauTwins.com

While Elizabeth Fraser said, referring to her relationship with the late Jeff Buckley which informed the record:

My love addiction was worse than ever. I was maniacal. Twinlights is about that man. My ‘last goodbye,’ as it were. I was too needy and he was too much of an avoidance person. Naturally.

Elizabeth Fraser, Cocteau Twins
Twinlights @ CocteauTwins.com

While the intention had been to shoot a film accompaniment for all four songs from the EP, only two were completed due to financial constraints. Said Robin Guthrie:

We wanted to make this film around Twinlights – which I was really quite pleased with: I just wanted to see what happens if you take away the atmospheric textures and all that stuff; see if there’s any songs left underneath because that’s interesting. We wanted to get the money to make it from our record company and the freedom to do it. They said, ‘well, what’s it promoting?’, we ended up saying ‘well, it’s not promoting anything, it’s just something we want to do’. So we ended up not getting very much money but we still went ahead and made the film we wanted to make. We were very happy. We shot it ourselves. We bought a 16mm camera and shot it in 16mm and Super 8 and video and multiformat. It’s all cut between the formats, and lots of text comes up on screen with some performance in between. It’s quite beautiful. I’m really pleased with it – unlike a lot of our promo videos which just suck…

Robin Guthrie, Cocteau Twins
Cocteau Twins @ Facebook

The collected videos for “Rilkean Heart” and “Half-Gifts” won the Grand Jury Prize at the US Charleston International Film Festival that year.