Rocket Girl | Discography

Robin Guthrie

Continental

rgirl44, Release Date: 12/6/2006

Robin Guthrie released his second instrumental album, Continental, on June 12th 2006 on Rocket Girl.

As you'd expect from the former Cocteau Twins guitarist and producer, this is a record of beautiful, hazy, absorbing and provocative music. One of Guthrie's qualities has always been the ability to create or sculpt sound so it connects with something nameless and primal within the listener, resonating with something usually hidden and silent. The title track shimmers the album into existence, promising an intense and moving experience. The ten tracks here are billowing with possibility: there are moments of extreme sadness – 'Crescent' is the plaintive howl of one man reaching for the stars and having his fingers close on empty air, yet the whole record hums with energy, glows with hope. Guitar lines climb and vault over themselves; tentative spiderwebbed passages give way to soaring slabs of pure, plangent sound, whipping the ground from under your feet and the air from your lungs. The textures create a sensuous cocoon of gossamer… truly, this is a record to drown in.

The release of 'Continental' is timely. Obeying the rules of the much-mooted music-comes-in-cycles hypothesis, the shoegazing aesthetic appears to be 2006's new black. Club nights like Sonic Cathedral and Club AC30 regularly have people queuing round the block, and artists like Jeniferever, Engineers, Ulrich Schnauss (who Guthrie has remixed for) Serena Maneesh and The Radio Dept are drawing much love from fans and critics alike. The debt owed by all of the above to Guthrie is incalculable, both for his work with the Cocteau twins and as producer for so many others. His distinctive, instinctive talent for expressing the elusive, has turned heads, ears and hearts, opening the doors for fellow sonic visionaries My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride et al.

Robin Guthrie's first instrumental album, 'Imperial', was released in 2003.

As well as continuing his production remix work, he worked with seminal minimalist Harold Budd to make the soundtrack to Gregg Araki's award-winning film 'Mysterious Skin', and has also made his own film, the hour-long animated Lumière, which was recently shown at the NFT with Robin performing a live soundtrack.

Tracklisting
- Continental
- Conquering The Romantic
- Crescent
- Monument
- Amphora
- The Day Star
- Radiance
- As I Breathe
- Last Exit
- Pale