“Perfect Calibrations: Simon Raymonde’s Favourite Albums”

• By Colm McAuliffe
• The Quietus
• Feb 2014

Following the release of his new album with Snowbird, the former Cocteau Twins man and Bella Union boss gives us his rundown of his all-time (on this given day) favourite records.

Simon Raymonde has spent the past seventeen years in a state of deep mourning. Despite his staggering successes as Bella Union head honcho, the one-time Cocteau Twins bassist was somewhat at odds with his history, his legacy and the protracted, fraught demise of his former band. “As a writer, the last thing I was involved in was the last Cocteau Twins album [1996’s Milk & Kisses,” he reflects on a crisp January morning in Hackney. “I didn’t realise how much of an effect the break-up must have had on me. I didn’t realise I was in mourning. I didn’t want to do something for the sake of it… that I wasn’t really committed to. Being in band with Liz [Fraser, Cocteau Twins singer] makes everything else seem only quite good [in comparison]. She really was something amazing and until I found Stephanie, there was nothing. Not that I was looking; I was producing, keeping my toe in and I loved being in the studio with bands. I still liked that part but I’ve been so busy with the label. So doing this has been a breath of fresh air.”

The fruits of Raymonde’s renewed interest in musical proclivities has resulted in Snowbird, a partnership with Denver-based singer/songwriter Stephanie Dosen. Their debut album, moon, is ostensibly a collection of night-time vignettes, paeans to nocturnal perambulations through a bucolic idyll. However, the album is far from an exercise in narcolepsy; this moon is wide-eyed and brilliantly lit, Dosen’s vocals evoking a child-like world shimmering in equipoise between fantasy and reality. And yes, it does sound—in places—like the Cocteau Twins. “Stephanie does sound like Liz, there’s no running away from it!” admits Simon. “She was a huge Cocteaus fan and a huge Liz fan. And if you listen to Stephanie’s folk albums and her arrangements, her vocal melodies, they are influenced by that period in music: Vega, Bush, Mitchell. And the fact that I was in the Cocteau Twins for so long means that it’s bound to rub off a bit.”

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