The recently departed composer Harold Budd once said: ‘I’m somebody who played the piano…sometimes.’
This statement laid at the heart of his music’s appeal; a genre explored by everyone from Paul McCartney to Aphex Twin, the largely uncategorisable movement known by one label as ambient is about much more than just notes played out into the ether.
Former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie worked with Budd on his final album Another Flower, and almost four decades on from the Twins’ debut Garlands, Mockingbird Love opens another chapter of what has been a prolific career since their dissolution.
Each of the EP’s quartet of tracks offers something different whilst following a fluttering, purely instrumental whole; closer My Courtesan could in another world be lifted from Julee Cruise’s Lynchian dreamscape Floating Into The Night, whilst In Love And At War comes closest to the minimalist nirvana of his former collaborator.
Guthrie has revealed that in the background he’s been creating a wealth of new wordless music whilst being uncertain of its merits – now firmly on course, Mockingbird Love marks the prelude to a full-scale release later in the year.
On this evidence it’s something to look forward to; opening track Copper is a skeletal, tentative foray that evolves into something his first venture might’ve recorded, whilst Eight East has flecks of rustic Americana as heard in work by The Dead Texan or Stars of the Lid.
This is music which can be everything – sometimes. Robin Guthrie has decided that his contribution is worthy of being added to a canon made global by pioneers such as Harold Budd, a decision not taken lightly but one which at some point soon seems certain to be vindicated.