Track Listing

1. Late October
2. Stream With Bright Fish
3. Silver Ball
4. Against the Sky
5. Lost in the Humming Air
6. Dark-Eyed Sister
7. Their Memories
8. Pearl
9. Foreshadowed
10. Echo of Night
11. Still Return

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #182147 in Music
• Released on: 1990-08-31
• Number of discs: 1

Album Description
UK reissue of this digitally remastered edition of Harold Budd's 1984 collaboration with Brian Eno. 11 tracks. Virgin. 2009.

Amazon.com
This sublime, tranquil recording features 11 haunting ambient tone poems for treated piano. They are crafted from simple chords, arpeggios, or melodies that are frequently trailed by delicate electronic whispers to produce dreamy results. Even though Budd and Eno chose to compose and record in a minimalist style, their gorgeous, moody music evokes so much more, for the reverberating spaces between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves. In an interesting experiment, both "Against the Sky" and "An Echo of Night" explore the same melancholic musical theme in different settings--the former is a sparse piano piece with gentle electronic treatments, the latter is a murky synth work set against a nocturnal outdoor backdrop. (Budd later explored the theme again as the ethereal elegy "Olancha Farewell" on his 1986 solo album, Lovely Thunder.) Beautifully understated, the slow-motion ballet of The Pearl is a piece of striking ambient impressionism that was highly original in its day, well before the myriads of New Age imitators its composers spawned, and it remains fresh and vital two decades later. --Bryan Reesman

Customer Reviews

One of the finest ambient albums
I love this album. It consists of minimalist pieces (some being no more than a few notes making up a lovely, sometimes quietly dramatic phrase) on an altered piano with some subtle tonal colorings added. The effect is contemplative, zenlike, trancelike, spiritual, calming, profoundly restful, like a musical still life-take your pick. This album serves many purposes for me. It helps me to sleep, read, think, or just construct a quiet space in my home when I want to relax. It is beautiful and endlessly repeatable. I must have listened to this album hundreds of times-and I am still not tired of it. There is New Age music and THEN there is "The Pearl". This album avoids all of the cliches of cheap New Age music. It set the standard years ago and I only wish that there was more music in this vein available.

Harold Budd, Part 2
This album and the preceding one, "Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror", really have to be taken together in the same listen. They both feature the same sparse piano melodies over a treated Eno-scape. These two albums are my favorites for relaxation, reading, painting - you name it, they're great for it. That's why it's called "Ambient" music - it is made to fit in with almost any atmosphere, blending with, as Erik Satie once said, "The sounds of the knives and forks at dinner".
My favorite time to listen to these records is in a rainstorm, especially with distant thunder in the background. The rain sounds seem to bring out subtleties in the music that can't be heard otherwise.
So if you like Eno's "Ambient 1" or "Discreet Music" or Steve Roach's "Structures from Silence", this is the album for you.

My Favorite Recording of All Time!
I've been listening to this CD for 15 years, and am still stunned by it. Each one of these soft pieces is a world unto itself. The closer one listens, the more one discovers there. The wonderfully precise programmatic song titles long ago led me into "visualizations" of the "mental places" the music conjures (this is one aspect of Eno's "ambient" ethic--these pieces of music are set in imaginary PLACES. The other part of the ethic is that these are meant to become a part of your space, like your furniture or paintings). Like "The Plateaux of Mirror," their previous collaboration, Budd seems to be the primary keyboard player, with Eno's chosen task being the setting of those aloof and cyclical compositions into very wide sonic environments. There are a few experiments, too--the last two tracks are re-recordings of tracks 4 & 1, slowed down and reprocessed into new forms. Simply wonderful!
This album completes a trio--the others being "Thursday Afternoon" and "Ambient 4: On Land"--of the most masterful use of electronic equipment ever recorded.