Articles
Backtracking Andy Vaz
Spotlight 2

Albums
Aardvarck
Anonymeye
Balam Acab
Balmorhea
Blue Sausage Infant
Steve Brand
Harold Budd
Causa Sui
Cosmin TRG
cv313
Dalot
Ricardo Donoso
Paul Eg
Fjordne
Roman Flügel
Emmanuelle Gibello
Greie Gut Fraktion
Gurun Gurun
Chihei Hatakeyama
Saito Koji
Tobias Lilja
Martin & Wright
Jasmina Maschina
Mobthrow
Nickolas Mohanna
Muskox
Namo
offthesky
The OO-Ray
A Produce & Loren Nerell
Jody Redhage
The Mark Segger Sextet
Static
Sub Loam
The Teknoist
To Destroy A City
Damian Valles
Andy Vaz
Yard

Compilations / Mixes
Audible Approaches
Dave Clarke
Dixon
Marcel Fengler
Jamie Jones
Kompakt Total 12
Damian Lazarus
Soma Records—20 Years
Stilnovo Sessions Vol. 1

EPs
A Wake A Week
James Blackshaw
c.db.sn + Scaffolding
Dagshenma
Isan
Namo
Fabio Orsi
Pleq & Anna Rose Carter
Pleq & Lauki
Pascal Savy
Dirk Serries
Jeffrey Wentworth Stevens
David Tagg
Mano Le Tough
Simon Whetham

Harold Budd: In The Mist
Darla

American neo-classical composer Harold Budd has been releasing music for so many years now, one would think it might be fairly easy to predict what a new collection will sound like even before pressing “Play.” To some degree that is the case with In The Mist, as about two-thirds of it conforms to expectation when Budd again offers up a signature set of lovely, often sparsely defined piano pieces reverberant with sustain. There's one very real sense, however, in which Budd surprises the listener with an unexpected left turn—but more on that in a minute.

Harmonious, ethereal, meditative, pastoral—any and all such descriptions apply to the thirteen settings that Budd has grouped into three “movements”: The Whispers, Gunfighters, and Shadows. The tone of The Whispers' five pieces is subdued, minimal, and reverberant, with the latter sometimes taken to an extreme degree. Budd pays tribute to kindred artists, one presumes, in titling two of them “The Foundry (for Mika Vainio)” and “The Art of Mirrors (after Derek Jarman),” the former a soothing lilt of shudder and twilight ambiance and the latter as delicate as a ghostly apparition and as spacious as an empty colosseum. Don't let the Gunfighters title fool you: Budd doesn't abandon his normal style for a Cecil Taylor-like attack, but rather offers, compared to the opening section, a slightly more dramatic style, whether it's the subtly bluesy “Three-Fingered Jack” or “Greek George,” where twinkly percussive details augment the piano figures.

The surprise comes, of course, in the third part, Shadows, not simply because its five pieces are scored for string quartet (violinists Linda J. Lambie and Hisami Lijima, violist Peter Rosato, and cellist Richard Bock) and exclude piano completely but because in a subtle way the compositional tone differs from the other parts. Yes, the writing, as in the preceding sections, evidences Budd's penchant for restraint and sensitivity to space, yet it also expresses a sadness reminiscent of the more elegiac parts of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score. One hears that romantic tone emerge in Budd's recording during “Sun at 6 Windows” and “Mars and the Artist (after Cy Twombly)” (one also could easily imagine Budd's “Come Back to Me in Dreams” title as a distillation of John “Scottie” Ferguson's desperate desire in Hitchcock's film for Madeleine Elster's return to life). There's a softness as well about the strings' sound that complements the wistful mood of this final part. It's this third section, then, of In The Mist that most recommends the release, in particular for those listeners who already have Budd recordings in their libraries.

October 2011