Harold Budd was a minimalist/avant-garde composer beginning in the early 1970s and continuing right up to 2020, the year he died at the age of 84. In 1980, Budd collaborated with Brian Eno on Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror, the follow-up to Eno’s very successful Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Hot off of the highest profile work of his entire career to that point, Budd released this EP, six tracks adding up to just under twenty minutes of music. The entire thing revolves around Budd’s piano and it’s a quiet, atmospheric little album. This isn’t transcendently beautiful or anything, but it’s nice. Afar, the opening track, is distinct from the others because it features a mournful pedal steel guitar. The best track probably is the final one, the title track; Budd said it was inspired by an apocalyptic image of a world devastated and poisoned where almost all life is gone because of the toxic environment. The image that haunted him was, as he termed it, “a lethal viper gliding glacially in a pond of mercury.” Wow. Brian Eno said of Budd that he was a poet trapped in a composer’s body and a line like that makes you believe it. The track itself is dark and brooding and beautiful, the perfect way to end this bite-sized little piece of minimal music. 3 stars.
tl;dr – eighteen minute EP of quiet, calm piano compositions isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a nice little bite-sized piece of minimal calm. 3 stars.