Six minutes into Arca’s new release Entrañas, a familiar sound cuts through the din with the force of the sky ripping open. Until that point, the Venezuelan musician had teased us with a miasmatic mix of ambient chords, orgasmic groans, laser zaps, mewling cats, and the same soft-spoken gender evisceration from the 1993 film The Cement Garden that Madonna excerpted on “What It Feels Like For a Girl.” But what happens next is a different sort of déjà vu. Over pummeling industrial noise, a shimmering riff flashes up and falls silent, again and again. If you’re like me, you may find yourself desperately casting about to place it. Could it be Autechre? Aphex Twin? Then Liz Fraser’s voice swoops in and it all comes rushing back: It’s Cocteau Twins’ “Beatrix,” a dizzyingly gorgeous song from their 1984 album Treasure.
It’s a startling reference, if only because Cocteau Twins’ ethereal qualities stand starkly at odds with Arca’s preference for bloody fists and broken glass. But it also makes a certain kind of sense: Fraser’s ululating delivery helped pave the way for the otherworldly hiccup and chirp of Björk, one of Arca’s close collaborators. And the links run deeper than that, too. As wispy as Cocteau Twins could be—think of their burbling, spa-friendly 1986 collaboration with the pianist Harold Budd, The Moon and the Melodies—an undercurrent of unease runs through their work, especially albums like Garlands, Head Over Heels, and Treasure. Soaked in reverb and dissonance, Cocteau Twins’ early records conjured a terrible kind of beauty, a blood-curdling view of the sublime.
That all-or-nothing quality means that, curiously enough, not many musicians have sampled the Cocteau Twins over the years, despite their influence reaching far beyond 4AD nerds and ‘80s goths. But an intrepid few have tried, drawn—from the worlds of techno, R&B, even hip-hop—like seafarers to the Scottish group’s seductive siren song.
The Weeknd — “The Knowing” (2011)
What Kanye did to introduce heavy metal iconography into hip-hop, the Weeknd did to bring goth aesthetics to R&B. Abel Tesfaye made his Cocteau Twins fandom explicit with “Heaven or Las Vegas,” the closing track on his 2011 mixtape Thursday, named after the band's most beloved album. But it was the closer on his debut from a few months earlier, House of Balloons, that actually sampled Cocteaus: “The Knowing” grows out of a woozy sample of Heaven or Las Vegas’ “Cherry-Colored Funk,” Robin Guthrie’s reverberant guitar spreading like a sticky pool of spilled liquor in a trashed condo on the morning after a long, depraved night. Tesfaye earned even more OG goth points with “House of Balloons’” dizzy loop of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Happy House.”
The Field — “The More That I Do” (2009)
Back when many indie fans still had to come up with elaborate ironic ruses in order to satisfy their craving for easy-listening sounds, Sweden’s Axel Willner blew minds by wringing the ethereal bliss of his 2007 breakout song “A Paw in My Face” from a jazzy loop of Lionel Richie’s slow-dance staple “Hello.” Two years later, Willner—aka the Field—applied the same techniques to hipper source material: Cocteau Twins’ 1984 song “Lorelei,” snippets of which he looped into an eight-and-a-half-minute maelstrom of ambient techno. On “A Paw in My Face,” he held off on the reveal until song’s final bars, but here he pulls aside the curtain early on, dropping out the beat just three minutes in and focusing on a telltale loop of Guthrie’s chiming guitar. And for anyone who hasn’t figured it out by that point, Willner follows up the breakdown with a loop of Fraser’s unmistakable coo.
Dettinger — “Blond 2” (1998) + “Oasis 3” (2000)
More than a decade before the Field looped his way to the sublime heart of “Lorelei,” another artist on Cologne’s Kompakt label was exploring the overlap between ambient electronica and the Cocteau Twins’ watery atmospherics. The untitled second track on Dettinger's debut single from 1998 loops a portion of “The Ghost Has No Home,” from the Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s 1986 album The Moon and the Melodies, and sets it to a clattering, echo-soaked beat. Two years later, on second album Oasis, Dettinger layered slowed-down scraps of the same album’s “Ooze Out and Away, Onehow” with even lumpier drums, turning them gloopy and gelatinous, like a plate of Jello pocked with bits of gravel.
Martika — “Love… Thy Will Be Done” (1991)
Prince often spoke of his appreciation for the Cocteau Twins. In his 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, he said of his listening habits, “What I like is stuff that I can’t do. That I would never do. Like the Cocteau Twins, I would never do that.” Maybe not, but he did lean on them on at least one occasion. That’s almost certainly a sample of “Fifty-Fifty Clown,” off Heaven or Las Vegas, woven into the background of Martika’s 1991 single “Love… Thy Will Be Done.” As a user on the Popjustice message boards points out, if you listen to the introduction to the Cocteaus’ song, right before the drums come in there’s a filtered ringing over the bassline that is audible in every second bar of Martika’s song, which Prince wrote and produced.
If the PrinceVault Wiki is to be believed, the New Power Generation recorded another version of “Love… Thy Will Be Done” for their 1994 album Exodus that features a “prominent looped sample” of “Fifty-Fifty Clown”; unfortunately, the song never made it to the album’s final release. But maybe when Prince’s vault finally opens up, we’ll get to hear it.
Antwon — “Lay With You” (2014)
When the San Jose rapper Antwon wasn’t moshing to thrash bands as a kid, he was getting teary to This Mortal Coil, the 4AD supergroup that Fraser, Guthrie, and Cocteaus bassist Simon Raymonde played with from time to time. Today, Antwon remains such a fan of Cocteau Twins that he put together an entire playlist of his picks for FACT, complete with deep cuts from 1985’s Tiny Dynamite EP and 4AD’s 1987 Lonely Is an Eyesore compilation. So it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that the beat to Antwon’s 2012 song “Lay With You,” produced by Steel Tipped Dove, is just a coruscating loop of guitars and bells from “Lorelei.” The Twins didn’t seem to mind the sample, either: The following year, Raymonde signed up Antwon for a single on his Bella Union label.
Orbital — “Omen” (1990)
Plenty of ravers know the exquisite melancholy that This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren” can evoke on the morning after. In 1990, just six years after This Mortal Coil's debut, Orbital’s Hartnoll brothers cannily snuck a loop of Fraser’s vocal into a rugged, bleep techno field-filler, masterfully collapsing peak-time and the comedown into one shiver-inducing stroke. (Slightly stranger was their decision to rely on ABC’s “How to Be a Millionaire” for the snarling vocal hook.) While not technically Cocteaus, Fraser's voice always conjures a strong feeling of what Cocteau Twins did so well, so we're including it anyway.
