Random Review Week #2: Brian Eno & Harold Budd- Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror

E.G. Records, 2008

 

Not sure how to feel about the fact that the second Random Review Week album is yet another ambientish collab, but alas, fate has decided and I'm not complaining.

Released in 1980, “The Plateaux of Mirror” is the second in Brian Eno's influential four-part “Ambient” series. Where “Music for Airports,” the first and most famous installment, was largely an Eno solo effort, he takes a back seat here and leaves the center stage to American composer and pianist Harold Budd whose simple but pretty keyboard melodies dominate for the most part. At that time, Eno was in a kind of transitional phase, shifting from his previous identity as a performer to his new one as a producer and curator. And it shows in his contributions to this album. He subtly processes Budd's electric and acoustic piano playing through various reverb and delay units and adds some atmospheric, sampled touches, such as quacking ducks on the title track. In fact it's not a million miles removed from what he did on Roxy Music's “Sea Breezes” in 1972.

I admit I'm not familiar with any of Harold Budd's other recorded output, but the pieces on “The Plateaux” give me a strong Erik Satie vibe, maybe with a bit of Arvo Pärt (minus the religion stuff) thrown in. The mood is warm and melancholy throughout, occasionally slipping into the sentimental. The individual tracks sort of start to blur together, which I suppose is the intended effect. Like so much Ambient music, it often borders on New Age without ever fully embracing it. A pleasant album and the perfect soundtrack to lying on your couch reading a book on a rainy afternoon.

Random Review Week #1- Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald- ReComposed

Deutsche Grammophon, 2008

 

We kick off Random Review Week with a risky concept: Take two techno icons from Detroit and Berlin respectively and let them remix Ravel's “Bolero” and Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition,” two classical works ubiquitous enough to have become cliches. With a premise like that, it's easy to make a lame novelty record where a couple string themes you've probably heard in at least 5 car commercials get the four-on-the-floor bassdrum treatment.

Thankfully, that's not what “ReComposed” is, but despite the general tastefulness and musical competence on display, it's all a bit on the safe side. The name of the game here is ambient-leaning techno more geared towards home listening than club use. It's almost exactly what you'd expect from a Moritz von Oswald / Carl Craig collab too. Both the former's trademark use of delay and reverb and the latter's taste for warm melodies are in full effect, but the use of the source material is often a bit superfluous, particularly on the “Bolero” half of the album which lasts from tracks 1 to 5.

Over the course of 32 minutes the music slowly moves from warm synth drones reminiscent of krautrockers like Cluster and Harmonia to dubbed-out horn samples and marching snare drums. And then, just when things are about to get interesting, it turns into something that appears to contain no samples at all and sounds like a track from Moritz von Oswald's 90s dub techno duo Basic Channel, complete with wavering, synthscapes and filtered kickdrums. The remaining 3 tracks focus on “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “Movement 5” unfortunately sounds a kinda “strings plus techno beat” thing talked about earlier in places, but the closing 14-minute “Movement 6” is the album's strongest point. A reggae-like shaker-and-bongo rhythm(!) is enveloped in a gauze of manipulated samples and spacy synthetic swooshes. It's an odd combination, but it works well and uses the source material in an unexpected way instead of casting it aside

“ReComposed” is a well-crafted and enjoyable album from two towering figures in electronic dance music, but as a techno-meets-classical experiment, it's kind of a disappointment.

Heldon- Un Rêve Sans Conséquence Spéciale (1976)

1976 Cobra, re 1995 Cuneiform Records

New Age Guerilla

Founded by guitarist and former philosophy student Richard Pinhas in 1974, self-described “elctronic rock” band Heldon are one of the most influential and idiosyncratic groups to emerge from the 70s French progressive underground. Pinhas, an admirer of Robert Fripp's ambient work with Brian Eno, recorded the first three Heldon albums in impromptu sessions with a varying cast of musician friends, processing his axe through a maze of effects devices. The result is trippy, droning “cosmic” synth music in the vein of contemporary work by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Album #4, entitled Agneta Nilsson, added dark Moog bass arpeggios to the mix, but it wasn't until 1976 and their 5^th full-length release that Heldon broke free from the ambient template and really came into their own.
  
With a title like Un Rêve Sans Consequence Spéciale (“A Dream Without Special Consequence”), you'd expect the space-age baroque escapism of Jean-Michel Jarre et al, but the cover art, a kind of surrealist/futurist rendering of a steel mill, comes closer to visually representing the sounds contained herein. The 11-minute opener “Marie Virginie C.” greets you not with swelling, bombastic keyboard chords but with dystopian landscape of reverbed, arrhythmic metal percussion, broken synth bleeps and Pinhas's buzzsaw guitar noise assault. And when Patrick Gauthier's filthy Minimoog bass sets in at approx. the 2-minute mark and drummer François Auger settles into a nervous, steady groove, it starts dawning on you that this isn't really “prog.” It sounds like noisy post-punk with a heavy industrial bent as filtered through a 60s/70s freeform rock jamming mentality. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the “rock” part of Heldon's “electronic rock” self-labelling ain't no joke! Pinhas unleashes some heavily treated bluesy guitar solos throughout the second half of the track, sort of like Manuel Göttsching with balls.

Synth 'n' Roll: Richard Pinhas of Heldon


The following “Elephanta” is just as interesting. A percussion-driven piece composed and mostly performed by Auger (Pinhas only contributes some synth), it starts out a bit like Herbie Hancock's Headhunters reimagining of “Watermelon Man,” with some African percussion. But instead of morphing into groovy jazz-funk, it piles on more and cymbals, drums, kalimbas and other things you can hit over its 8:30 duration, some of which run counter to the rhythm, culminating in a a dense, ethno-industrial cacophony.

“Perspective IV Ter Muco” (a bonus track on the Cuneiform reissue) really pushes the bluesy-rock-with-electronics angle to its absolute limit but doesn't seem to fit with the mood of the rest of Un Rêve... and “MVC II” is a slower, funkier, creepier postlude to “Marie Virginie C.” These two shorter tracks are entertaining enough but they are merely the hors d'oeuvre to the album's second centerpiece, “Toward the Red Line,” a 15-minute exploration for synths, drums and electric cello (played by Magma bassist Jannick Top). This one is much closer to Schulze and T. Dream than the preceding music, but done in Heldon's trademark bleak cyberpunk style. It opens with tidal waves of low-end Moog arpeggios that clash violently and occasionally coalesce into temporary grooves. Auger's drums fight to break out from beneath the molasses but never quite manage to. This is anti-ambient. Where other electronic cosmonauts of the 70s dreamt of glitzy high-tech space stations, Heldon's future is a hellish, inhuman wasteland.

The reissue on the Cuneiform label reviewed here adds two bonus tracks, the aforementioned “Perspective IV Ter Muco” and a live rendition of “Marie Virginie C.” that ditches most of the lengthy atmospheric intro and jumps right into the action but feels, interestingly, less aggressive than the studio version.