Harold Budd — Avalon Sutra / As Long As I Can Hold My Breath

Over the last twenty-seven years Harold Budd has released a slow but steady stream of albums of beatific minimalist contemporary classical  music. Sadly the master of the soft pedal piano is leaving the stool with this his swansong. Fortunately Avalon Sutra could not be a more fitting end to an understated and at times underrated career.

As usual Budds trademark piano playing takes centre stage, his Feldman like cascades of notes falling like leaves from a tree. He is joined by a number of players for this collection who along with the synths and electronic treatments meld to produce a wider range of moods and textures than some of Budds previous work. The string quartet used on tracks 2,3,4 and 5 are a superb addition to the sound which tugs on the heartstrings ever harder for their presence. But the finest addition to the sound is the lamenting sax work of Jon Gibson who draws serpentine wisps of colour and mood from his sopranino and soprano sax on the three tracks titled Arabesque one two and three, and the wonderful How vacantly you stare at me.

Budds brilliance always lay in the moods and atmospheres he was able to create with minimal instrumentation. While albums like The Room and his classics The Pearl and The Plateaux of the mirror, both recorded with Brian Eno showcased a more mystic and otherworldly ambient sound, Avalon Sutra takes us back to Budds debut recording The Pavilion of dreams with it’s introspective and deeply personal sound pallet. The chords are at times clear as on tracks like Three faces west and Porcelain Ginger but it’s on pieces like Rue Casimir Delavigne and the stunning Little Heart that the soft haze of electronic manipulations well up bathing the piano in a half light that heightens the mood further. The aforementioned Little Heart being built upon a gorgeous undulating synth wave and delicate bells as Budds ghostly playing rolls and meanders in the background. A truly beautiful album of songs to strip the night bare.

There is also a second disk titled As long as I can hold my breath. This is a long form remixed version of the track of the same name from the first disk. It is remixed and produced by composer and software developer Akira Rabelais who takes elements from both the short form version of the song and other elements from the album as a whole to loop, manipulate, and twist them into a seventy minute meditative lament. The first few minutes with have you in bliss as the various elements make themselves heard and the looped strings throb away amid a delicate swirl of piano, and violin. Unfortunately the same string loop continues for the whole duration of the disk and the various elements seem not to vary very much giving the impression that the whole thing is on a three minute loop. Thus despite it’s quality it neither holds the attention nor sends us into meditative rapture. It bares a resemblance in form to Current 93s long improvised drone, string and piano workout that formed their part of the Horse hospital release in 2002 for David Tibet and Steve Stapleton’s art show. However despite this slight disappointment it doesn’t detract from the beauty or power of the liquid gold compositions found on disk one.