Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd Visit ‘The Moon and the Melodies’
- By John Bergstrom
- popmatters
- 19-Sep 2024
These days, “ambient music” is almost a household term. In 1986, the phrase wasn’t even a decade old. British musician Brian Eno named and helped formalize and popularize the style with his work in the late 1970s. On some of that work, including Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980), Eno collaborated with American avant-garde pianist and composer Harold Budd.
Certainly, the three members of the Scottish indie group Cocteau Twins were aware of Eno and his work. Though the circumstances remain muddy, their pairing with Budd made sense. Cocteau Twins made their name in the UK with their singular, otherworldly sound, which fused Robin Guthrie’s heavily-treated guitars, Simon Raymonde’s phased-out bass, and a pummeling drum machine with Liz Fraser’s beguilingly melodramatic vocals. What’s more, Fraser sang in a rarely-decipherable mixture of English and patios of her own making. “Shoegaze” was a term that didn’t yet exist, and it never would have if Cocteau Twins hadn’t inadvertently provided the blueprint.
For their 1986 album, Victorialand, though, Cocteau Twins scaled back their sonic icebreaking. Raymonde was working with the This Mortal Coil collective, a sort of house band for the 4AD label, of which Cocteau Twins were a part. Guthrie and Fraser recorded Victorialand as a duo, and the album’s instrumentation consists mainly of Guthrie’s acoustic guitar, albeit still run-through effects.
Raymonde rejoined the fold for the subsequent Harold Budd collaboration. Only on an independent label could such a meeting of minds occur. David Byrne of Talking Heads had made an album with Eno in 1980, but the Budd/Cocteau Twins hookup was unprecedented nonetheless. Budd was 25 years older than the Cocteau Twins’ members and had never worked in pop music.
Read the full article online from its source.
