Robin Guthrie releases new LP, promises more to come
- By CocteauTwins.com
- NEWS
- 19-Nov 2021
Founding Cocteau Twins member Robin Guthrie continues his prolific solo career with the November 2021 release of his latest album, Pearldiving.
The new LP follows closely on the heels of an EP, Mockingbird Love, released in October. Both are now available online from Robin’s Bandcamp page, Darla Records, and the major digital music outlets. Guthrie has been sprinkling his Bandcamp page with a number of limited-availability single tracks—“orphans,” he calls them—since the beginning of October, which have included the songs “Silverbell,” “Ajo,” “Providence,” and “Septime.” And there’s more forthcoming: on 24 November he announced another EP, Riviera, will be released on 10 December.
This is the latest in a series of releases by Guthrie on his Soleil Après Minuit label. In a recent interview with Yorkshire Post, Guthrie explained that, in the wake of the sudden loss of longtime friend and collaborator Harold Budd in 2020, “I thought, ‘I should just do this, what could go wrong?’ So I decided to clear out my studio and got rid of loads of things and just started afresh, writing and creating music [again].”
“The first thing that came together was Mockingbird Love—when those four titles came together I thought, ‘that’s the one’—and by that time I was thinking, ‘I’ve got music that I’ve done over the last ten years that I’ve never released,’ so I started putting those out on the internet for a week, stuff that had never found a home.”
Reflecting on his place in the music pantheon, Robin went on, “I’m not resting on my laurels, and I’ve got quite a lot of laurels to rest upon. The idea of, ‘We’re going to release your record but it’s going to be in four months,’ I can’t be bothered with that, and in the end you’re going to get like, no percent off it. I can live for my music, thank you very much, if I’m not giving it away to all the intermediaries, all the distributors. I was looking at a 400 per cent mark-up on my CDs if they come out on Amazon. That kind of thing has nonplussed me and made me quite ambivalent about releasing music. My error being that there’s actually people that like what I do.”
And so Guthrie has reinvigorated his public image and is re-engaging with the world and his fans, mainly through Facebook and Bandcamp, though he maintains a presence on Twitter and Instagram. His official website is being redesigned.
Fans can purchase Mockingbird Love, Pearldiving, and pre-order Riviera directly from the source on Bandcamp. ▣
