opal evenings

The real value of the iPod shuffle facility is that it throws up long forgotten music, forcibly reminds you what you've been missing, then makes you play old albums that haven't been played for way too long.

Two tracks recently, both from 1988, made me abandon my shuffling and delve deeper into the albums this music came from.

Firstly - "Balthus Bemused By Colour" from Harold Budd’s synth and reverb heavy White Arcades. It's a great piece of music, way too echoey, but that’s what you get if you hang around with Robin Guthrie for too long. The White Arcades is a lovely album, but is perhaps the only Budd record that sounds dated, or rather, of it’s time. All his other stuff is timeless.

But just when I was thinking - I must play the whole of The White Arcades again, I heard -

"Winter Music" by Roger Eno, from Between Tides. Interestingly this dates from the same time as the Budd track, but this one, as with all of Between Tides, really is timeless. The mix of strings and piano on this album is quite magical and although I adore Voices I think that Between Tides is perhaps the better album.

Roger Eno is Brian Eno's brother, younger by some eleven years. He worked with his brother on Apollo in 1982 and in 1985 Brian assisted in the recording of Voices, the ironically titled all instrumental debut album from Roger. The frosty synth embellishments contributed by Brian are excellent and give the album a real sense of a chilly winter’s night. But these also invite comparisons with the piano / synth albums Brian made with Harold Budd and at times Voices veers close to being Son Of Plateaux Of Mirror, a comparison which is quite understandable but is perhaps a little unfair to Roger. Whilst Budd's playing is pretty and sparse, much like the younger Eno's on Voices, in general Roger's piano work relies more on melody and is imbued with a peculiarly English flavour which sets it apart from Budd's minimalist beauty.

Roger worked without his brother on the 1988 follow up album Between Tides. Contributions and production from infinite guitarist Michael Brook, and the addition of gorgeously simple string arrangements mean that Between Tides is a large step away from the wintery ambience of the debut. Most of the pieces are wistfully melancholy, utterly beautiful, calming and reflective in a very English pastoral manner.  

In 1988 Roger Eno, Harold Budd, Michael Brook and electronic zither player Laraaji played a series of joint concerts under the title An Opal Evening. Opal was the record label set up by Brian Eno and his soon to be wife Anthea which had signed all four artists.

These concerts would typically allow for a solo set by each musician with joint ventures and improvs often joining the sets before all four would combine for a finale. The improvisational nature of much of the music extended to the casualness with which the quartet approached their stagecraft. Dr Martin and I saw the show at the Royal Festival Hall at which there was a surprising amount of laughter, not least when Michael Brook announced that Roger Eno would be onstage next, 'when we can find him'. Roger eventually arrived to huge applause which clearly baffled him.

One of the tracks played at the RFH went by the clearly ironic title of "Optimistic Prelude" at that point. A lovely, slightly wistful piece with a repeated piano motif overlaid with gently increasing strings, and a mournful oboe, this piece was wonderful in the hall, and this actual performance appears on Between Tides as "Winter Music".

A later Opal Evening, at a Festival in Lanzarote in December 1989 gave rise to a number of semi-official albums. It seems like the usual Opal suspects played at this Festival, which was televised, either just locally in the Canaries or across Spain, it’s not too clear. The artists, Budd, Brook, Roger E, and Laraaji (plus Peter Hammill, who was also on the bill) obviously gave their permission for the tv broadcast and possibly for the subsequent Spanish only home video of some of the performances, but it seems that was as far as it went.  

So when Sine Records issued half a dozen cds in the mid 1990s taken from these performances the artists weren’t terribly impressed. But there seems to be some sort of legal grey area here as the cds were apparently dubbed from the tv recording. Obviously these cds weren’t strictly bootlegs as I bought most of them in HMV in Oxford Street, but they obviously weren’t strictly authorized either. And that led to all sorts of made up titles on the discs. Check out Budd’s Aqua for a right old muddle with the track names. Roger’s Night Garden seems to feature all new pieces, so it’s unclear what the titles ought to be, and Laraaji’s music is pretty much untitle-able anyway! Michael Brook says he’s never been paid for his disc, so I guess the others haven’t either.

The sound quality isn’t bad on all of these but while most tracks have the audience / applause neatly faded out there are a few pieces that shake you out of your ambient induced reverie when some overloud clapping crashes in. But… despite all that, there’s some excellent music to be found on these. The Brook one is especially good I think.

Anyway, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting re-acquainted with Between Tides. Lovely music for a quiet evening unwinding with a glass of wine. Perfect.

harold budd

Harold Budd is a Californian pianist who creates some of the most gorgeous music ever made.

He began composing in the 1960s, working on decidedly avant-garde music, but by the end of that decade his work had become ever more minimal and he was experimenting with drones. After his lengthy gong solo piece "Lirio", Budd felt that he'd painted himself into a corner and decided to retire from composition (he memorably described this as "I'd minimalised myself out of a career").

Taking up teaching Budd rediscovered his love of lyrical piano music. By 1972 he'd begun a cycle of works under the title "The Pavilion Of Dreams". Parts of this were based on resolutely old fashioned madrigals, as far from contemporary avant-garde music as could be imagined. Delighted by the innate prettiness of his new work Budd was content to move further in that direction, embracing the beauty of the music above all else. It somehow seems entirely fitting that the "Madrigals Of The Rose Angel", full of angelic female voices, harps and gentle percussion, received their debut performance in a church.  

By 1976 he'd stepped down from teaching and was recording his new compositions for Brian Eno's newly formed Obscure Records. Released in early 1978 The Pavilion Of Dreams contains four lengthy tracks, two new linked songs, the aforementioned Madrigals, a meditation for piano and (very quiet) chorus entitled "Juno" and perhaps the most impressive track in Budd's whole career, "Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim". This is a calming, gorgeous and surprisingly emotional collaboration with jazz saxophonist Marion Brown, whose muted sax is backed by gentle vibes and distant piano flourishes. The 18 minute piece is probably the most relaxing piece of music I've ever heard. It is transfixingly beautiful and I could, quite genuinely, listen to this piece all day long.  

However, it was the more straightforwardly piano based "Juno" that really pointed the way forward. Budd's next albums were fully fledged collaborations as Budd's sparse but deeply atmospheric piano style was embellished by Brian Eno's equally sparse and atmospheric electronic backings. The Plateaux Of Mirror conjures up empty roads, wide open fields, frosty landscapes sparkling in the winter sun. Even without the stunningly evocative titles ("Wind In Lonely Fences", "Among Fields Of Crystal" etc) the music shivers in the snow and shimmers in the moonlight.

Mirror was followed by The Pearl which further refined the techniques used to create an even more delicate selection of music; at times the listener can scarcely breathe for fear of disturbing the ice covered spider webs of sound.

By the mid 1980's Budd was incorporating the fuller electronic textures of synths into his work. Occasionally this threatened to overbalance the always delicate piano work. Lovely though 1988's The White Arcades is, it's also perhaps too far from Budd's real strength of beauty through simplicity and thus the listener loses sight of Budd behind the layers of electronics.

1991's By The Dawn's Early Light found Budd collaborating with Bill Nelson who introduced subtle guitar textures. One of Budd's most overtly melancholy albums, many of the songs also feature a mournful violin, something which Budd had begun to develop on 1986's Lovely Thunder though with mixed results. Here however, the stark vistas of the Old West are conjured up as Budd draws on his childhood memories of the Mojave Desert. He would return to desert landscapes time and again in his work, and would physically move back to the edge of the Mojave during the 1990s. At the same time his love of old beat poetry found a home in a number of evocative poems recited by Budd in that dry old voice of his. They fit perfectly with the music on Early Light. A few years later and his collaboration with XTC's Andy Partridge was something of a continuation of this approach with another successful mix of minimalist guitar textures, piano and poetry.

Many of his subsequent records have been in conjunction with other artists. John Foxx played the Brian Eno role of electronics wizard on three stunning albums beginning with 2003's Translucence. Guitarist Clive Wright has recorded a series of gorgeous albums with Budd in recent years. And Robin Guthrie, the guitarist and sonic sculptor from Cocteau Twins has joined forces with Budd on a number of projects. Budd had first met Guthrie back in 1987 when they recorded The Moon And The Melodies with the rest of Cocteau Twins, but the recent work has included film soundtracks and a number of devastatingly lovely records including the linked pair from 2007 Before The Day Breaks and After The Night Falls.

Meanwhile Budd still finds time to release entirely solo records. The Room from 2000 created an album from a series of thematically linked variations of an old track from The White Arcades. 1996's Luxa successfully mixes electronics with acoustic piano to create Budd's most successful and accessible album in some years. Dripping with invention and appealingly upbeat melodies this was in many critics' top ten of the year. On a more sparse note, in 2003 Daniel Lanois surreptitiously set the tapes rolling without Budd realising as he improvised at the piano in his living room. The result was the delightful La Bella Vista - simple melodies, unencumbered by any production techniques, this was pure Harold Budd.  

A similarly improvised work was 2007's Perhaps, released only as a download via David Sylvian's Samhadi Sound label. The link with Sylvian had been made a couple of years before with the 2004 release of Avalon Sutra. This record, which mixed beautifully understated strings and woodwinds with some of Budd's most romantically lyrical piano work in years, was billed as Budd's last ever recording. When asked why, Budd simply replied that he felt he'd done enough and was quite happy to disappear back to the desert. There was a lull for perhaps a year, but since 2005 more than a dozen albums have been issued bearing his name. Far from disappearing into retirement, Harold Budd seems much busier than ever before.

He later relected on his spectacular failure to retire - "It was a time in my life when things weren't just falling together for me... I was sincere about it but if I had been more conscious of my real feelings I would've seen that it was a preposterous thing to do. I was living alone in the desert and had been for too long, really, and it's probably a version of self-pity, I'm sorry to say, to have publicly said something like that. But there it is, I said it, turns out I wasn't telling the truth - I didn't know it at the time."

Now in his mid 70's Harold Budd is still issuing an astonishing three or four records each year, and he shows no sign of stopping. His latest solo album In The Mist combines some of his sparsest piano work yet with some beautiful vignettes arranged for a string ensemble. In creating a totality of mood the silences between the tracks are as important as the music. Indeed at times the music seems to exist only at the very limits of human hearing. It's another record that has me holding my breath as I don't want even the slightest extraneous sound to disturb the fragility of the playing. 

There's a certain quality present in all of Budd's work - that of delicate beauty, infused with just a tinge of sadness. It makes you think of deserts, fields, long dusty roads, the Wild West, vast empty plains and solitary figures. His music conjures up feelings of things just remembered - people, events and especially places that exist on the edge of your memory. Memories that are dormant most of the time but are awakened, just a little, by Budd's evocative piano playing. No-one else plays like him, no-one else creates quite this sort of music.

I added up all the tracks on my iPod and I was a little surprised to discover that I have 24 hours worth of Budd's music. A whole day. I do occasionally wonder if I really need another Harold Budd album. After all doesn't one gentle piano abstraction sound much like another? Well, yes, sometimes they do. But when music is this lovely, and the outside world is in such a state, it seems churlish to turn down the opportunity of allowing a little more beauty and light and hope into your life. If only more people listened to Harold Budd's music, for even a few minutes, let alone a whole day, then the world might be a considerably calmer and happier place. 

harold budd / cocteau twins - the moon and the melodies

It's weird how just one song can conjure up so many memories.

A chance encounter with the rather ungrammatical "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow" from The Moon And The Melodies took me right back to the house I rented in Lancaster for the autumn term 1986. After a long winded series of housing disasters three of us ended up in a lovely three storey Victorian terraced house in lofty Regents Street. A great house, with high ceilings, large rooms, a scarily dark basement and a bathroom that might well have been the original (I'm pretty sure the very clunky plumbing was).

The top storey of the house was locked up - the landlord lived there, or rather he did when he was in the country. I think he was a roadie or something like that, he certainly wasn't a responsible landlord as we were to find out. The bedrooms were all on the first floor and we drew lots for the rooms. I ended up with the biggest, across the whole of the front with two tall windows overlooking the leafy street. Kevin and Tim, both of whom I've entirely lost touch with, had rooms at the back, still decently sized though not as enormous as my room. It was about 25 feet across by perhaps 15 deep, furnished only by a ricketty wardrobe, a massive bed, a big, saggy armchair dragged upstairs from the lounge that we never bothered to use, and a tiny desk that I never found a satisfactory home for, moving it almost daily around the huge room so that it constantly faced a different direction.

Music came from my solid little Sony cassette deck and a constantly growing selection of tapes. That term I remember playing lots of Cocteau Twins, lots of Grace Jones, King Crimson and the two Cluster and Brian Eno albums which I must've just got hold of as I played them loads - I remember one night playing "Broken Head" over and over as I loved the weird wobbliness of the keyboards.

So far so good. We had friends just a few houses down the street in an identical house, though their cellar was clear and clean and perfect for some excellent parties. We settled in well, my £200 Vauxhall Viva worked just enough to get me to and from the campus and apart from reversing into a tree everything was great (I genuinely didn't see the magnificent oak behind me; I swear it must have leapt about three feet forwards).

Then the landlord vanished. He had never been around much, but he just disappeared completely. And the bills, which were all in his name (electricity and gas were all included in our rent), started to mount up. After a few weeks of increasingly red reminders dropping through the letterbox we decided to open one. Hundreds of pounds were owed, going back way before we'd moved in. A phone call to the Gas Board found them sympathetic, but not enough not to cut off the gas. The electricity company kindly let us keep the power, but they installed a meter (looking back, I'm not sure why the gas people didn't do that too, but they didn't). So with about 4 weeks of term left we had lights and power but no hot water or central heating. And it was then that having the biggest room became a problem. The lovely huge windows were very draughty, and a the wind would howl down the chimney into my impressive chunky fireplace. I froze.

I spent more time than ever in bed, keeping warm under the duvet. Tricky when it came to write essays though. I can remember working late into the night, which everyone knows is the best time to write history essays, and sometimes it was bitterly cold. One night I woke up at about 4am to watch the Australian Grand Prix, live. I dragged my little black and white portable over and perched it on the end of the bed and watched through a gap in the covers. Nigel Mansell simply had to finish in the points to win the Championship. Towards the end of a race that he'd led from the start he managed to blow a tyre along a dead straight bit of the track and put himself out of the race and the Championship. Poor Murray Walker was beside himself.

Anyway, that song, the strangely titled "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow". It's from an album recorded by the brilliant Californian pianist Harold Budd in conjunction with Scottish ethearalists Cocteau Twins (who aren't twins, and there's three of them). I was already a big fan of both Budd (especially his groundbreaking ambient records with Brian Eno) and the Twins so this collaboration was perfect for me. The eight tracks that comprise The Moon And The Melodies are divided cleanly into four songs and four instrumentals, with the songs beginning and ending each side of the record (remember them?). The album was released on 10 November 1986 so I must've had a good month in which I played that chilly echoey music to death, in my chilly echoey room. The songs are basically gentler Cocteau Twins songs, with the drum programmes turned down a bit. Budd's atmospheric keyboards are to the fore where they compete with Robin Guthrie's equally atmospheric guitar. The instrumentals are more Budd, but with added synths, swirly guitar effects and sometimes a saxophone so faint that you wonder if you've imagined it.

Despite the clear cut division of labour the whole album works extremely well as a whole album, and without exception every track is superb. Harold Budd reused "Memory Gongs" on his own album, the excellent Lovely Thunder (released around the same time as TMATM. For no obvious reason he retitled the piece "Flowered Knife Shadows" which is a rather silly title, though secretly I'm rather impressed by the sheer pretentiousness of it. Some of the other track titles derive from earlier Cocteau's songs - "Ooze Out And Away, Onehow" actually comes from a line in a song on Head Over Heels. 

It's also the final song on TMATM and begins imperceptibly, building halfway through with the introduction of the drums. Elizabeth Fraser's vocals are magnificent; no idea what she's singing as usual, but it doesn't matter as the sound of her voice is far more important that the meaning. Every track gives off a glacial feel, every track is imbued with winter itself creating images of chilly fog and ice on branches... I played it over and over; the album was the soundtrack to those chilly nights as I tried to write essays at my itinerant little desk, or as I sat in the huge armchair drinking extremely cheap wine (hey, we were students) while candles lit the room and dribbled multicoloured rivulets of wax down the old wine bottles I used as candlesticks (really, how much more student-y can you get?).

At the end of that term the University took pity on us and found us all rooms back on campus after Christmas, so we were back in the warm, and with hot water once again!

Sometimes that all seems such a long time ago, but then I hear something like The Moon And The Melodies and it all comes back again. It's a record that is absolutely right for a house in which you could see your breath indoors.