Multifoiled

 

I’d never seen anything like it. There was this fucking tape machine and this incredible angel of a woman, and these two guys with big hair, making the most sublime noise.

                                                                                            (Rudy Tambala, AR Kane)

The funny thing about writing a book like [post-rock] is you can have all the fancy theories you want about ‘development of a sound’ and ‘collective influence’ (and so on), but until you actually start talking to the musicians, you’ll get it at least partly wrong.

Before I heard them music was just something I listened to. When I heard their music it was genuinely life-changing. I think partly because I realised I didn’t have to be good to play, it was more about making sound. […] They were revolutionary. Everything about them, the whole set-up, the sound, the singing, everything.

                                                                                                        (Mark Clifford, Seefeel)

 

Cocteau Twins. Like all the best revelations, it’s a complete curveball that, once you’ve caught it, makes perfect sense and you wonder why you were previously so blind to it. I missed it because, before now, I was distracted by the shiny baubles of Cocteau Twins (voice; indecipherability; hypnagogic atmospherics) and, to my shame, had never tried to understand why they sounded like they did.

I started addressing this with 1982’s Garlands. And why not? It was the first, and I knew nothing from it. I was initially surprised that it was indebted to Siouxsie And The Banshees, but the more I thought of it the more it fitted with the picture I’m building up. The Banshees are another area of underexplored influence, since John McGeoch and his delay pedal fashioned black ice soundscapes, something enthusiastically taken up by a strand of [post-rock] musicians.

 

Back to Garlands. This track, this, is currently everything to me.

 

If people know anything about the Cocteaus, it’s Elizabeth Fraser’s voice. They know it’s beautiful; they know it’s hard to understand the words (and even harder to grasp their meaning). What listening to ‘Wax And Wane’ taught me, and which I had not appreciated before, was that Fraser is not difficult to take in because she’s being obtuse, evasive, mannered, or mysterious. Instead, she’s about emotions and situations so intrinsically ambiguous that the only possible way to make sense of them is to deliver her words in a way reflective of that ambiguity.

‘Wax And Wane’ was my entry point into this understanding because, compared to some other songs, Fraser enunciates just enough for some contact between your straining ears and her quicksilver voice.

‘The devil might steady me / wax and wane’.

   - The devil might steady me as I wax and wane.

   - The devil might steady me; his steadying of me waxes and wanes.

   - The devil might steady me; ironically, this steadying makes me wax and wane.

The thought processes ‘Wax And Wane’ triggers off within me are somewhere between an interwar Mitteleuropean novel and R.D. Laing’s Knots. This relationship of possibility between artist and listener is central to my very favourite [post-rock]; that opening up of meaning to such an extent that it can induce nausea, agoraphobia, and euphoria.

As I move on through the back catalogue, I’ve found many hugely impressive moments on Head Over Heels (1983), Treasure (1984), and especially Heaven Or Las Vegas (1990). But, CRAPPING CRAPPING HELL: Victorialand.

 

Released in 1986, during the period when bassist Simon Raymonde buggered off to work with This Mortal Coil and Richard Thomas of Dif Juz was called in on sax and tabla, it is a mindblowingly voluminous work. Guitars so saturated they’ll shapeshift into sodden grass, while the vocals reach for the essence of devotional fervour. It seems – to me – that Victorialand is a primal scream arising from shared unconsciousness. The spaces between the words and the sounds are important, and obviously so; the music concentrates on the liminal zones of life that are usually, sometimes intentionally, rendered imperceptible.

 

Now, when was the last time I had an eye-opening musical experience like this, one that made me look at life differently while trotting out ornate phrases like a sixteenth century court poet? Oh, yes. This man.

It happened when I was writing Seasons They Change, and it was at exactly the same point in the process as I am with [post-rock] now. Unaware of much of his music, I’d dismissed Tim Buckley for two childish reasons (I didn’t like Jeff Buckley; I didn’t like the group Starsailor) and one genuine one (his music wasn’t obviously psychedelic or even, in many cases, folk). But as soon as I started to talking to musicians, the influence was clear. Tim Buckley freed folk music from expectation and structure and, in doing so, he let all kinds of crazy shit into it. His musical children, the best ones, didn’t sound like Tim Buckley. Instead, they took on his ideology, and filled folk music with loads of crazy shit of their own.

And that’s why Cocteau Twins are important. The relationship between [post-rock] artists is not wholly, or even primarily, sonic. Instead, it’s about something far less tangible. And something far more intoxicating.