“A Guide to the Solo Discography of Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie”

• By Ned Raggett
• Bandcamp Daily
• 17-Nov 2021

Ned Raggett of AllMusic.com takes listeners new and old on a tour of Guthrie’s extensive post-Cocteau Twins catalogue.

The warm spirit that Robin Guthrie conveys in conversation ought to be bottled and sold as a pick-me-up. Speaking from his home studio in France, the Cocteau Twins veteran is passionate, wry, and utterly engaged with life, his family, and his art (if an hour’s worth of conversation is any measure of things). While he’s got plenty of experience to draw on, he’s not afraid to learn new tricks. “I really don’t do social media,” he says. “I come from a background of being a computer nerd, and I loved the internet when there was nobody else on it, and it was just like-minded geniuses. All of a sudden, it’s democratized and I’m lost because I have to be social!”

Reminiscing about his early ’80s interests in computer science, he says he’d get “big expensive digital things which would be completely redundant after 18 months because it would be replaced by one that cost a hundred bucks.” At one point he mentions “rooms full of hardware” where he stashes old gear—though these days, he prefers a more modern approach. “I use an awful lot of emulations of the classic equipment that I used to,” he notes. As for temptations to use the old stuff, he adds with a quick smile: “I’m like, really? Get the cables, go under the mixing desk? I don’t think so.”

All this attention to detail about his recording process—as well as other artistic ones, including his deep interest in photography—comes together in the range of albums Guthrie has released over the decades after the Cocteaus came to an end due to various personal and professional reasons. In both collaborative and solo contexts since, the famed approach that Guthrie brought to his guitar in his earlier band has taken on new forms, combining a lightness of touch with deep, beautiful work on both guitar and electronics.

For this guide, Guthrie discusses a variety of his favorite strictly solo instrumental works. It’s just a small amount of an ever-growing total, including October’s Mockingbird Love EP, this month’s new full-length, Pearldiving, and a December EP called Riviera. Guthrie further mentions a slew of projects for 2022 as well as a continuing practice of putting up what he calls “orphan songs”—“I can do that for months. I can keep doing that indefinitely—seriously!” ▣

Read the full article online from its source.