This Mortal Coil - The Song of Hecate

“What dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause”

“Hamlet”, Act III, Scene I

A girl dressed in red coming out of a forest, at night. A song on the border between two worlds.

These images, the starting point for David Lynch in “Twin Peaks”, perfectly illustrate a song he loved dearly: “Song To The Siren” by This Mortal Coil. More than just a song, it's actually an entire imaginary world that, throughout the Eighties, was brought to life on film by Lynch and in music by the 4AD bands. When, in the Nineties, the director would use the track for a devastating scene in “Lost Highway”, the circle would close, handing those atmospheres over to pop's collective imagination, as a fascination that never ceases to captivate and win converts.

The independent record label 4AD was founded in England in 1979 by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent, riding the punk spontaneity that across the country was channelling youthful energy into music. But 4AD immediately stood out for a series of precise aesthetic and cultural choices, so distinctive as to create a genuine, recognisable trademark running through everything the label put out, both visually (Vaughan Oliver's famous sleeve designs) and musically. On the musical side, 4AD was defined by its leaning towards a particularly atmospheric, dark new wave charged with symbolic meaning, epitomised by Liz Fraser (voice) and Robin Guthrie (guitar)'s Cocteau Twins, forerunners of what would come to be called dream-pop, and by Lisa Gerrard's Dead Can Dance, interpreters of the movement's more properly esoteric side, pushing all the way into world music territory.

Over just a few years, 4AD's musical coordinates were established, above all through the Cocteau Twins, who moved from the Siouxsie and the Banshees-style darkness of their debut “Garlands” (1982) to the sound of “Head Over Heels” (1983), dominated by Guthrie's heavily effected guitar, as psychedelic as it was minimal, and by the abstract warbling of a Fraser who proved to be the standout talent capable of defining an era. Meanwhile, Dead Can Dance made their debut with “Spleen And Ideal”, and it became clear that there was a fairly substantial niche audience ready to embrace this music's spiritual, esoteric tension, setting aside punk's fury in favour of an inward turn that had already been foreshadowed in works that immediately followed it (just think of Joy Division).

From the idea of a single on which the Cocteau Twins could try their hand at a cover of “Song To The Siren”, Ivo Watts-Russell moved on to a far more ambitious project: an open-ended group bringing together 4AD's biggest names, coordinated by the label boss himself as producer, with the aim of creating a genuine sonic manifesto, a celebration of their shared musical journey.

This is how This Mortal Coil came into being, along with the album It'll End In Tears, released in 1984. Besides the two aforementioned bands, obviously the main protagonists, it features members of groups like Cindytalk, Colourbox, The Wolfgang Press, Xmal Deutschland, Modern English, as well as other musicians including bassist Simon Raymonde, who would later join the Cocteau Twins as a permanent member for their next masterpiece, “Treasure”. The musical contributions come in two forms: carefully chosen cover versions alternate with original tracks (almost all instrumental), creating a cohesive, consistent atmosphere that is as rigorous and austere as the mingling of the various musicians is vital in bringing each individual piece to life.

The choice of covers is the album's defining feature, amounting to a meticulously curated series of tributes to cursed, tormented figures, heroes left in the shadows of Sixties and Seventies rock history, like Tim Buckley and Alex Chilton of Big Star, who would be rediscovered by the new wave generation and by critics precisely thanks to this record. There's a third name, not covered directly but evoked by the harrowing voice-and-accordion duet of “Wave Become Wings”: that of Nico, chanteuse of the Velvet Underground and a true tragic icon of female rock.

So this isn't simply a matter of rediscovering beloved artists, but of establishing a line of descent, of underlining a spiritual kinship with musicians who managed to push, in defiance of commercial laws and at the risk of their own lives, into the outer reaches of the musical spirit, where song sits on the border between two worlds. In “Song To The Siren”, over Guthrie's sparse guitar touches, Fraser manages to transform the romantic, typically-Sixties yearning for the infinite found in Tim Buckley's “Starsailor” into something altogether different. The This Mortal Coil version evokes a liminal dimension, a dialogue and interpenetration between the bodily, earthly aspect of the mother-woman's voice and its lunar ghostly counterpart, elusive and irreducibly given over to the beyond, whose archetype is Diana-Hecate. This duality of the feminine sphere, which makes woman the viaticum toward the elsewhere for so many travellers in literature, through love's spiritual elevation (need we mention Dante and Beatrice?), makes the obsessive recourse to female voices indispensable to a musical project like this one. Yet none, within This Mortal Coil, would manage to go as far as Liz Fraser does on “Song To The Siren”. A deity of the sea's waters, boundary of the afterlife, protector of thresholds and crossroads (the lost highways?), bearer of light in the night, lunar goddess, Hecate, as the embodiment of the eternal feminine archetype, lies at the heart of This Mortal Coil's sonic world and its cultural coordinates, which reach into sacred territory without slipping into the easy neo-paganism of so much post-punk, instead preserving the elegant austerity of one who, lending an ear to the night, enters into deep relation with the world beyond.

On “Another Day”, a Roy Harper cover, the singer conjures a different but equally captivating spell, over a chamber-like bed of strings, with Arabic-tinged melismas that pick up from the previous track and foreshadow Gerrard's contributions. The choice of Harper falls within the rediscovery of spirituality in the folk music repertoire. Gerrard, for her part, performs solo in the arcane, medieval-tinged prayer of “Wave Become Wings” over drones produced by the accordion, introducing a properly sacred and esoteric dimension, in line with Dead Can Dance's output. On “Dreams Made Flesh” she is accompanied by the drones of her partner Brendan Perry and by an Eastern stringed instrument, for a more free-form lament, as hypnotic as it is overwhelming when her voice rises into vibrato.

The male contingent contributes tracks from a more properly rock area, in particular “Not Me” by Colin Newman, sung by Robbie Grey of Modern English, which ultimately lightens the programme. But Chilton's songs — “Kangaroo”, sung by Gordon Sharp, and “Holocaust”, performed by ex-Magazine man Howard Devoto — are transformed into mournful chamber ballads, unleashing all the existential anguish of the original lyrics. Rema-Rema's “Fond Affections” is another piece sung at the edge of the world, marked by the fateful tread of its percussion.

Holding everything together are the instrumental tracks, among which the suspended ecstasy of “The Last Ray” stands out, a duet between Simon Raymonde and a Robin Guthrie torn between delicate acoustic filigree and sharp electric inlays, foreshadowing the best of the Cocteau Twins. But also worth mentioning are the martial electronics of “Fyt”, with sound effects straight out of a Walpurgis Night that gradually give way to a mystical, proto-new age serenity, and the duet between Raymonde (this time on guitar) and Gerrard (on accordion) in “Barramundi”.

The whole thing closes with the sweet piano sonata of “A Single Wish”.

Filigree And Shadows, from 1986, revived the This Mortal Coil project under the banner of musical continuity with the past, but with a different line-up of musicians. This time it featured members of Wolfgang Press, Breathless, Dif Juz, as well as Peter Ulrich from Dead Can Dance and Steven Young of Colourbox. The link to the first album is Simon Raymonde, who here takes on the role of arranger and musical glue, playing bass, guitars, piano and keyboards. His heavy involvement in the project briefly pulled him away from the Cocteau Twins, who that same year released a purely acoustic album, “Victorialand”, presenting themselves as a duo.

A comparison between the two albums reveals a broader trend within 4AD during the mid-Eighties, namely a gradual retreat from the wave element (and thus from rock, however atypical) in favour of more classical, chamber-like sonorities and arrangements. From this standpoint, Filigree And Shadows stands as a work of rare elegance, unfolding slowly and expansively across two LPs. Compared to the first album, there's continuity in the choice of covers, with a return to Tim Buckley via "Morning Glory" and "I Must Have Been Blind", and the arrival of Van Morrison's "Come Here My Love" (from "Veedon Fleece"), continuing the exploration of spiritual unease within the folk tradition.

The covers, however, carry less weight in the overall picture, perhaps also due to the lack of singers on a par with those on the previous album, while the instrumentals make more of an impression, leaning ever more explicitly towards ambient, as shown by the hazy enchantment of "Ivy and Neet". The group's debts are made explicit through a cover of the Talking Heads' "Drugs", a track originally touched by Brian Eno (the father of ambient music), though here it's rendered in a more rock-oriented key, making it one of the liveliest episodes on the record.

On the whole, the album, partly due to its length, risks falling at times into the pitfalls inherent to this kind of pursuit — namely tedium and over-sweetness. That said, the serene grace of pieces like "Tears" (by Raymonde), the solemnity of tracks such as the electric "Strenght Of Strings", and the soulful spirit that surfaces in certain performances more than make up for the flatter moments.

The darkest, most gothic moments, such as "The Horizon Bleeds And Sucks Its Thumb", further confirm the band's absolute superiority in this field.

This Mortal Coil, although in this case speaking particularly to a specific niche of enthusiasts and to a genre with well-codified boundaries, never stop engaging with musical themes of broader relevance: the dialogue between ambient and gothic, of which the group and 4AD are the absolute archetype, would go on to bear important fruit throughout the Nineties, with masterpieces such as "Remnants Of A Deeper Purity" by Black Tape For A Blue Girl.

Blood, from 1991, revives for the last time the format of the double LP, the varied cast dominated by female voices, and the covers of revered songwriters. In keeping with the mood of the times, the arrangements, especially in the usual atmospheric instrumentals ("Andialu"), lean more decisively towards electronics. The mood is also lighter and hazier, almost fable-like, with many songs turning into sweet romances for one, two or three voices, as in the case of "I Come And Stand At Every Door".

Among the female voices, Caroline Crawley of Shelleyan Orphan stands out — older Cure fans will remember her backing Robert Smith's group on the "Disintegration" tour.

Another notable moment is the duet between the two Breeders, Tanya Donnelly and Kim Deal, who breathe life into the nursery-rhyme-like "You And Your Sister". Their presence, somewhat at odds with the group's past, underlines how This Mortal Coil was increasingly becoming a female-led project, while also highlighting the greater fragmentation of this work compared to its predecessors. Watts-Russell's presence grows stronger on the compositional side, with many tracks credited to him for the music as well ("The Lacemaker", "Bitter"), but the sense of self-indulgence — admittedly baked into the group's concept from the very start — becomes more evident.

If the cover of solo Syd Barrett's "Late Night" comes rather late in rediscovering yet another doomed hero of the Sixties, Blood as a whole is not without points of interest for listeners beyond the 4AD faithful.

The spiritual tension of these works would resurface in the Nineties across the countless streams of new age music, at times bringing with it a tedium and sickly-sweetness far worse than anything This Mortal Coil ever conceived. The marriage of electronics and noir, cinematic atmospheres, on the other hand, would be picked up with great creativity by the early-Nineties British trip-hop scene. Here too female voices would dominate (Beth Gibbons of Portishead), and with Massive Attack, the open-collective model would reappear, albeit drawn from a very different cultural sphere (hip-hop). It was Massive Attack, in fact, who paid the finest tribute to the 4AD sound with the track "Teardrop", on 1998's "Mezzanine". Singing it was once again the siren voice of Liz Fraser, for another moment of ecstatic beauty.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google