There was a recent announcement that the Cocteau Twins collaboration with Harold Budd The Moon and the Melodies was to be finally released on vinyl since its initial pressing in 1986. Suddenly I was transported to those crazy days in the 80’s.
In 1986 I was in college studying photography at Red River collage. The 80’s were an amazing time musically, I had several obsessions musically, one being the label 4AD. The label for my fave band Cocteau Twins, everything about the label connected the visuals to the music. The majority of the album covers were designed by 23 Envelope. Before we even knew the word “ascetic” 4AD defined it, You looked at the album covers you could hear the ethereal dream pop they contained.
At the same time while studying the history of photography, I become enamoured by the Pictorialist movement, a collection of photographers in the early 19th century who utilized photography to create images that involves paintings. Obscuring details through darkroom technics or lenses Pictorialists creates an ethereal feeling in their images, a gauzy dream like vibe.
You could see the lineages between the Pictorialist movement and the imagery on the label 4AD. It got as overt as using an image by Gertude Kasbier on a Cocteau twins 12 inch, one of my first.
Even though I thought I was studying to be a photojournalist, I did my best to discover images that invoked these moods. Using motion blurs, repurposing old busted cameras, or soft focus lenses, embracing alternative processes, trying toning and bleaching, I did everything I could to make dreamy images. Keep in mind this was in 1985-86, resources were limited. Beyond one book in the library on alternative processes, I had to learn this stuff by doing, trial and error.
Many of my classmates couldn't understand what I was doing. One joked that if you inadvertently took an extras picture while advancing your film to the fist frame while loading, I’d print that blurry, jiggy accident. Looking back now I wished I had the confidence to truly embrace this pursuit. I did have some encouraging words from a few instructors, but it honestly felt like I was out on my own.
If you had ever heard Cocteau Twins while they were producing their music you’d know that at the time there simply was nothing else like it, they were a beautiful gorgeous anomaly in the alternative world that inspired and influenced so many great artists. They still continue to influence and awe music listeners, hence this reissue. The song Sea Swallow Me continues to fuels countless TikTok’s, and today that’s how music blows up.
When The Moon and The Melodies dropped, it was a complete shock to me as it was a collaboration with the ambient artist Harold Budd. Budd rose to fame working with Eno in his ambient series, another obsession of mine, and the second album they did The Pearl is absolutely magical. I didn't even know Cocteau Twins knew Budd and here they were working together! The album feels like a true collaboration, half the tracks featuring Elizabeth Fraser singing and feel like classic Cocteau Twins, the other half are instrumental and feel more like Budd compositions. Together they produced the ultimate dream pop ambient collaboration.
So why am I telling you all this? Well one of the final assignments in my college classes was to create a slide show. A slide show was a number of slide projectors that all run off a controller. Pro level Kodak slide projectors had ports in the back where you could run cables into a controller. You could control all the projectors either by hand or you could program it on a track of audio cassette, set to music. You could only record music on one side of the cassette and then the other side you could program pulses that would signal to the projectors to change images, either hard cuts or in slow crossfades. Creating slide shows set to music was an art unto itself, at the time there were a few people who were doing it well and at scale! (I think Dean Collins was running 6 projectors when he came to our city) It was incredibly time consuming to program and fraught with all sorts of possibility of errors. You can barely find anything online about the tech, it faded very quickly once computers and LCD projectors came on the scene.
Our final assignment was to create a slide show that was a commercial, that sold something. My commercial was an ethereal perfume ad for Dali perfume. I created a number of images of flowing water, motion blurred interspersed with dark headlight nudes of my girlfriend at the time, again motion blurred. These were all in Black and White. I created the black & white slides using a kit designed to used Pataomic X film. I know it wasn’t using the Polaroid Black& white that was available at the time, it was too expensive and delicate.
Setting the slide show to the track Why Do You Love Me it took days to program the 2min slideshow to crossfade effectively across three slide projectors. In the end I scored top marks, it was definitely the most ethereal presentation with many classmates scratching their heads. The slides are somewhere in a box, the cassette and the technology to make it all happen are now long gone.
I often wonder what might have happened if I really dove into this style imagery beyond college. Might I have pursued a fine art practise? Instead I settled upon freelancing and trying to make a living producing images that sell. Though I still practise creating moody ethereal images in my spare time, even now after all these years trying to visually capture the feeling I get when I listen to Cocteau Twins.