Bleep

One of the most captivating and enigmatic records of the 80s came about by complete chance. Famed dream pop band Cocteau Twins and eclectic neoclassical / ambient composer Harold Budd had crossed paths only briefly in 1986, yet something sparked immediately, leading to a burst of improvisational sessions that would become the quartet’s collaborative album The Moon and the Melodies. Almost four decades later, it contains some of the most popular material in the artists’ discographies, and is remastered on vinyl for the very first time.

To enter The Moon and the Melodies is to enter another world completely. One of glossolalic language, instrumental sighs yearning in evening shades, piano notes ricocheting in blue swirls of synths. Cocteau Twins emerged from the minimal, fanciful fantasia of Victorialand while Budd was recording the evocative, submerged cinematics for his next solo album Lovely Thunder; for artists only just acquainted, these sounds merged perfectly into the shimmery ripples of keys and guitars pushed by pneumatic drum machines on ‘Sea, Swallow Me’, Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals lifting off the floor while the song is glossed in a magical scintillation.

As the songs drift away from pop, each artists’ sounds ricochet further between each other. The milky mixture of ‘Memory Gongs’ is all at once icy and liquid, reverent like underwater ruins rendered in song, made all the more fluid with the piano pendulums of ‘Why Do You Love Me?’ unravelling beneath the long, stargazing drawls of Robin Guthrie’s guitar shreds. Everything melts in ‘Eyes Are Mosaics’, guitars blurring together, drums gaseous, Fraser’s vocals in ecstatic delay. Simon Raymonde’s bass plucks punctuate the humming pastoral oscillations of ‘The Ghost Has No Home’, which blushes a melodic melange of saxophone (courtesy Richard Thomas), piano, and plucks unfolding in slow motion.

Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s performances on the enduring The Moon and the Melodies seem scooped straight out of the blurry peripheral glow of a dream.