If Ambient I was Eno stretching Satie to his breaking point, then his next entry into the series was him meeting him head-on. To do so, though, he brought in a collaborator: Harold Budd.
Budd, like Eno, had grown up with an art school sensibility, enrolling in Los Angeles Community College at the age of 21 to study music theory. His interests were varied, but soon focused upon the trance-like qualities of Mark Rothko’s color field paintings and works of composers like Morton Feldman and John Cage.
After hearing a tape of the initial sketches of Budd’s initial experiments and what would eventually make up his first album, Pavilion of Dreams, Eno felt inspired. In fact, he liked it so much that it was one of the only pieces of Western music that he took on a four-month trip to Thailand in 1979.
Coming off like Philip Glass to Robert Wyatt’s LaMonte Young, Budd here is allowed free rein to construct far ranging melodic lines. Utilizing both electric and acoustic pianos for the recording, Budd works some Feldman-esque punctums to tracks like “First Light”, “Not Yet Remembered” and “Among Fields of Crystal”.
Eno, for the most part, takes a backseat in the proceedings, credited on the liner notes for “other instruments and treatments”. That being said, his contributions are key to making this a much stronger piece than Budd’s earlier solo album. Eno cans the extraneous notes, probably following from this idea that he talks about in a Melody Maker interview from 1980, “Arabic singing is so developed….[because] presumably they don’t have a history of harmony, so the whole musical energy goes into developing the single line, making that more and more interesting.”
The critical reaction was muted, at best. Perhaps, as Lester Bangs wrote of Music for Airports, his audience’s patience was beginning to warn thin, especially since “there [were] now more ambient albums out under his name than “regular” ones”.
Strange, since along with The Pearl it’s probably Budd’s best work and easily the most underrated record of the four in the Ambient series.
More to come in a future article for the main site, so stay tuned…