Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd
Before The Day Breaks

The music of "Before The Day Breaks" begins and immediately leaves a wet trail behind, as if the sound were too dense and moist to exhaust its presence in the mere act of listening. The environment becomes saturated, the walls of the room are coated with soft and muffled sounds: you in the middle, with no possibility of escape.

To achieve this result, only a few elements are needed, but well-dosed: the electric guitar of the Scotsman Robin Guthrie, a somber protagonist in the 1980s with one of the most significant bands in the new wave scene, the Cocteau Twins; the piano of Harold Budd, a Californian author of some decisive works between ambient and minimal ("The Pavilion of Dreams" from 1978; "The Plateaux of Mirror" from 1980, with Brian Eno); and cascades of reverb, because no sound on this album is allowed to finish on its own but remains in the listener's consciousness thanks to long acoustic tails, ghostly threads that invade the sound environment.

Released in July 2007, "Before The Day Breaks" revives a collaboration that began in 1986 with "The Moon and the Melodies" (an album credited to Budd plus the three members of the Cocteau Twins, who appeared on the album cover with their respective first and last names) and repeated with the soundtrack of the film "Mysterious Skin" from 2004.

Electric guitar, as mentioned: almost no chords, few notes that draw piercing melodies wandering through space. Piano: but filtered through electronics, nocturnal in its timbre and softened in dynamics. And the reverb, with its wet trail behind it. Nine tracks, Guthrie provides the creative spark for the first, then leaves the piano to Budd for the second, then again the guitar introduces the third, and the piano replies in the following one. So it goes until the conclusion of the album, which presents in the last track a rhythmical cue from a drum machine as if to release in a joyous impulse the emotional tension accumulated in the previous eight tracks. But not for a moment do Guthrie and Budd stop dialoguing throughout the absorbed meditation of these 41 minutes of music.

Ethereal music, for dreamers: to be listened to before the day breaks, as the album title suggests, or after the night has fallen. The latter title is of the twin album that constitutes its necessary complement: two separate works, two halves waiting to meet