harold budd

Peter Marsh of BBC Music reviewed:

Whatever the delights of his back catalogue, to my ears Avalon Sutra is possibly Budd's most consistently ravishing work. It owes a lot to the largely acoustic textures of The Pavilion of Dreams, his 1978 debut for Eno's Obscure label. Influenced equally by the more meditative moments of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders as well as minimalist Cage piano works like In a Landscape, it mapped out an area that he's not often returned to since.

Augmented by the woodwinds of Phillip Glass collaborator Jon Gibson and the occasional appearance of a string quartet, the composer's piano offers gentle, rippling arpeggios and skeletal, yearning melodies characterised as much by the space between the notes as the notes themselves. The four duets with Gibson are tiny gems; melancholic but never maudlin.

The pieces with string quartet makes me wish Budd had done more in this vein, or that maybe he'd stick around and do some more. For the remainder of the record the piano is left alone, sometimes with the haze of distant electronic textures. Nothing outstays its welcome; nothing is out of place.

Credits

• Art Direction – David Sylvian

• Art Direction [Artist Liaison] – Yuka Fujii

• Cello – Marston Smith (tracks: 1-2 to 1-5)

• Composed By – Jon Gibson (2) (tracks: 1-1, 1-6, 1-8, 1-11)

• Design [Original Design And Calligraphy] – Chris Bigg (2)

• Mastered By – Denis Blackham

• Mixed By – Michael Coleman (tracks: 1-1 to 1-14)

• Photography – Shinya Fujiwara

• Producer, Composed By, Mixed By, Arranged By [String Arrangements] – Harold Budd

• Recorded By – Scott Fraser (tracks: 1-1 to 1-6, 1-8, 1-11)

• Recorded By, Mastered By – Michael Coleman (tracks: 1-1 to 1-14)

• Viola – James Acevedo (tracks: 1-2 to 1-5)

• Violin – James Sitterly (tracks: 1-2 to 1-5), Peter Kent (2) (tracks: 1-2 to 1-5)