Harold Budd - The Pavilion Of Dreams

Gavin Bryars heard Harold Budd's music and passed it to Brian Eno, who was running a small label called Obscure for precisely this sort of thing. Eno produced the sessions at Basing Street Studios in London in November 1976, then sat on them until 1978, when The Pavilion Of Dreams arrived as the last record Obscure ever released. It is where minimalism stopped being austere and started being beautiful.

Four pieces, none of them in any hurry. The eighteen-minute "Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim" opens with Marion Brown's alto saxophone drifting across harp, celeste and marimbas. "Two Songs" and the choral "Madrigals Of The Rose Angel" follow, and "Juno" closes. The ensemble is quietly extraordinary: Bryars on glockenspiel, Michael Nyman on marimba, Maggie Thomas on harp, Richard Bernas on celeste and piano, a six-voice chorus, and Eno himself singing alongside his production work. Budd plays piano and sings. Nothing pushes. Everything glows.

This is the second album Budd released and the first that sounds like the composer he would become. The soft-focus warmth here leads straight to Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror with Eno two years later, to The Moon And The Melodies with Cocteau Twins in 1986, and by extension to an enormous amount of what has been filed under ambient in the decades since. Nearly fifty years on, it still makes the case that this music can be lush without being cheap.

Reissued on LP by Superior Viaduct, SV 162. A cornerstone record that spent far too long out of reach.