“Heart to Tape”

• By Adam Beyda
• Mix
• Dec 1993

Throughout their more than ten-year career, the UK’s Cocteau Twins have constructed thick, thoughtful music that weaves ethereal sounds with rhythmic and plaintive melodies.

Multi-instrumentalists Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde combine layers of heavily processed melodic guitar noises and washes of bass, piano, syncopated drum machine tracks and the odd sample. But it’s singer Elizabeth Fraser’s stirring voice that sends the songs into a uniquely emtional, intuitive space.

Intuitive is, not coincidentally, a good word to describe the trio’s way of writing and recording. Rather than focusing on traditional songwriting, the Cocteaus work around a sound or try to achieve a sonic feel. The band writes, performs and records all of their material, and they intermingle the writing and production processes; songs quickly coalesce out of finding sounds and laying down instrument tracks. More than most bands, they use the studio as an instrument, so right from the start, studio work is an integral component of their creative process.

Because of this, it’s been important for the band to have their own recording capability. They’ve been collecting gear pretty much since they started out, and they had been recording at various temporary spaces since the mid-’80s. In 1989, they finally settled into September Sound (named in honor of the birth month of Fraser and Guthrie’s daughter, Lucy Belle), a 24-track studio located in The Boathouse, a studio complex owned by Pete Townshend in the Middlesex section of London. In addition to offices and a lounge, the well-equipped studio comprises a pre-production room, a small room used mainly for vocals and a control room (recently refitted with a 40-channel Amek Hendrix), where most of the instrumentation is recorded. The Cocteaus’ recently released seventh LP, Four-Calendar Café (on Capitol in the U.S.), is the second album they have completed at the studio.

The band worked with outside engineers and producers in the beginning of their career, but after some frustration, Guthrie realized that he had to take on the recording chores himself. “I had certain sounds in my head,” he explains, “and I wasn’t getting them. I was just searching for that sound, and I found it easier to just take off on my own. When we did our second album, Head Over Heels, I bullshitted the record company. I said, ‘We’ve got loads of songs, and I’m goign to try it myself. Of course I know how to do it.’ I didn’t, but it didn’t take me long [to figure out]!” The band shared co-production credit on that one with John Fryer, and now Guthrie and Raymonde handle all the recording duties.

Raymonde says that they begin with piano and guitar and that guitars are mostly recorded direct. They get sounds from a variety of sources: No less than three songs on the new album partially emerged from their experiments with the newly acquired Eventide H3000, and Raymonde says, “A lot of times we used little guitar processors, like th eMarshall JMP-1, which is basically a reprodcution of all the different Marshall tube amps from over the years. We tend to get a good sound from there and then spin some effects through and usually just go straight to tape.”

To start the process, Guthrie says, “I like to have something to play that’s in time, so I’ll usually generate something from a drum machine or a loop and build from there. I like a lot of synched-up delays and pulse-y and resonance-y things, just to get something that’s almost musical to play to. I like things like little old analog beat boxes—pulsing ‘em and sticking ‘em through different effects. Then I have something I can play with. On some songs on the new record that are acoustic-y songs, I’d just strum the three chords and build from there. Others are more sort of soundscape type of songs. Basically, I don’t think we’ve ever done two songs in the same way. It’s always something different.

“In the getting-the-sounds stage,” he continues, “I do use a lot of old pedals and old tape echoes and really just noise—getting all hte knobs up to 11 just to see what stuff can do. I’ve got some bizarre old pedals like the Maestro guitar and rhythm box, where you plug in the guitar, and drum sounds come out. When you start messing around with things like that, and frequency analyzers and pulse modulators, you can get some good sounds. Then when I get some stuff on tape, I can start messing about with some of the more modern technology, just things as simple as gating.”

“We work instintively,” Raymonde adds. “We don’t like to have a set pattern to the way we work. In terms of sound, you’ve got to have an idea of what sound you want before you get there. You’ve got to have the sound that suits the song in particular. Sometimes you don’t know what that’s going to be until you’re fiddling about with the parameters. You just know by muchking about with something when you’re there. I like to get inside something and arse about with it, much about with feedbacks and things.”

“I have a clear-cut idea of what I want the thing to be like as I’m working on it,” Guthrie says, “as opposed to not having an idea, putting it down and hoping to sort it out in th emix. By the time we have instruments going down, and the tune’s being made, I know where I want it to go—I know the feel.”

Much of the feel is actually achieved in the final steps before mixing—recording vocals and drum tracking. For the latter, Guthrie tackles the full drum programming only after the music is close to completion. He uses an Akai MPC-60 exclusively, relying mostly on a large library of samples. He admits to nicking loops off records and says that he’ll often mix in real cymbals, shakers, tambourines or hi-hat, but he makes no bones about not using a live drummer (although the band may use a drummer for the first time on their upcoming tour).

“I’m under no illusions,” Guthrie says. “I’m not trying to replace a drummer with a drum machine. When I start dropping the hi-hat out when somebody’s playing the toms, then you’ll know I’m trying to copy a real drummer. But the fact of the matter is, I’m doign things with a drum machine that a drummer would do if he could.”

The one wholly inimitable elements of the Cocteau Twins is Elizabeth Fraser’s singing. Her poignant, mellifluous vocalizing and eccentric phrasing are the signature of the band’s constructions. She lays down her vocals after all the music’s finished, with Guthrie and Raymonde taking turns at the board. A primary consideration is creating an atmosphere that will enable her to open up and give her best performance.

“She needs to be really relaxed,” says Raymonde, “because she’s quite a sensitive person, as many singers are. You need to create an atmosphere where there’s no fear around. Just the presence of other people can be distracting. She has to have quiet and, ideally, no interruptions, which is tough around here. You have to be encouraging, I must say, it’s the most brilliant thing recording Liz’s vocals. If I’m doing it, I have to wear two hats: I have to pretend to be an engineer for a while, whereas really I’m like a fan. She’s doing something, and I’ve maybe got it on solo so I can hear everything she’s doing, and it can give me a real lump in my throat and shivers up the spine. When she’s finished, I want to go, ‘Yeah!’ but I have to say, ‘Umm, I’m not sure Liz, maybe you should do that again.’”

Fraser usually is recorded very dry with a Neumann U87i. “She likes to have reverb in her headphones just to help her relax, but we put all the effects on in the mix,” Raymonde explains. They put some compression to tape on the vocals, often using a UREI 7110 or 1178, and limiting (Summit Audio TLA), too. Guthrie says that the BSS DPR 402 de-esser also comes in handy on vocals.

And though there’s often multiple, intertwining vocal parts, individual tracks are generally one-offs, not composites. “She’ll work out a whole part and sing it in one go, after lots of practice,” Raymonde says. “No matter how idiosyncratic the vocal is—no matter how many strange little inflections there are—by the time we actually come to record it, she can lay down a 30-second verse and then double-track it exactly the same. She has this uncanny ability to reproduce the most complicated part, which is quite handy for the engineer: not a lot of cutting and pasting. There’s not a lot of work to be done after she’s sung the part.”

There is a lot of work to be done in the mix, though. In the past, the band have spent days mixing a single song, an overindulgence that Guthrie, who tends to be responsible for the final, attributes to insecurity. “It’s difficult to know when to stop,” he says. “This time I really disciplined myself and said, ‘Well, this song is okay. Let’s not lose where it’s coming from by tarting it up beyond belief.’” They mixed the entire new album in ten days.

“On the new record,” Guthrie continues, “I would mix something and then listen to it at home, in the car, then come back the next day, do some fine-tuning and move on before I changed my mind. And if I do change my mind, I’ll go back and do it again. I like to take a fresh appraoch each time I do something. I don’t build up a monitor mix while I’m recording and then tart that up and finish it. I like to strip the whole board down and start afresh, and just get into the sounds individually.

“The mix is a building process,” Guthrie says. “I like to slot everything into its own little place—using EQ for setting instruments, using panners. And then there’s a big smoothing-out process, taking the lumps out—compressing things that need it, compressing the whole mix—that’s something I do on virtually every mix. I use an Aphex Compellor religiously over the whole mix. I’ve got Virtual Dynamics on the board as well, which I use a lot more than I thought I would. For things like expanders and gates, it’s so much easier and straightforward—you just press a button on the board, and it’s happening. I rely on automation entirely! My idea of the perfect mix is just sitting at a desk and not touching anything, where every effect, every EQ and every level is automated. The Amek’s SuperTrue automation is the best automation I’ve ever used.”

The band do not do a variety of mixes of a particular song, instead treating each mix as the mix, stopping when it feels done. And because, in general, they work by following their feelings, talking about the Cocteau Twins’ methods is a reconstruction of something that has, at best, a tenuous existence. Their music emerges not from a set of procedures but from an experience.

“Basically, we go into something with no concept and come out with something complete,” Guthrie says. “It’s like producing something with your hands, like making something from nothing—I like that. It’s not a fractured sort of process like a songwriter writing a song, making a demo, getting someone else to perform it, then going into a proper studio. [For us], from idea to creation is a very short period of time. I think that maybe comes out in the music, which can be quite intense. We are highly emotional people, I can swear to that, and just to be able to get it from heart to tape in a very quick time is something I’m really grateful for.” ▣