Harold Budd - Luxa

Fri 26th Aug, 2005 in Music Reviews

‘Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.’ – Brian Eno, liner notes from (the incredible) Music For Airports, 1979.

Ambient music is difficult to review. Whereas rock and pop music have definite cultural contexts within which to frame your opinions, ambient music exists in an altogether different space. It is based on single notes, simple patterns, repetition, and droning, lazy sounds that seem to last forever, with none of the easily identifiable leitmotifs of mainstream music.

The value of ambient music lies in its timelessness and placelessness. Its real beauty is found in the sub-conscious, making any sort of quantifiable analysis of its relative artistic merits nearly impossible. It is music for very late nights and early mornings, lazy Sundays or desperate essay writing – times when the brain craves patterns and order and melody, but in subtle doses, easily ignored by the conscious mind. Like a film soundtrack, ambient music is at its best when largely unnoticed. (Which is why, of course, it is so often the style of choice for smart filmmakers: see Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic scored by Cliff Martinez or Michael Mann’s The Insider scored by Pieter Bourke and Lisa Gerrard). Ambient music is successful when it becomes part of all that surrounds it; a desk, a chair, a white wall, an open door, the sounds of birds, the wind.

By that standard, Harold Budd’s Luxa – released in 1996 and reissued here – is a moderate success. It is a collection of darkish, sometimes jazz-inflected ambient compositions, grouped into themes with suitably pretentious titles (Butterflies With Tits, Inexact Shadows, Smoke Trees and Laughing Innuendos). At its best – the short, stunning neo-classical pieces from the Inexact Shadows group and the penultimate composition, Sweet Earth Flying – Luxa is a triumph, all cerebral, perfect melodies. Unfortunately, it suffers from an inconsistency of purpose, with the four groups lending the album a schizophrenia that makes the brain all too conscious of what will happen next.

The final track, for example (Pleasure) – is a synth and organ monstrosity, like The Residents getting drunk with The Phantom Of The Opera in Quasimodo’s bell tower. It is a brutal, unnecessarily provocative bucket of cold water thrown down on a mind previously relaxed, lulled by the beautiful track that came before it.

Budd can do ambient exceedingly well, as his stunning collaborations with ambient godfather Brian Eno on The Pearl and The Pearl 2: The Plateaux of Mirror attest. And the moments of candles-flicking-in-a-dark-room subtlety here are on par with his best work. Unfortunately, Budd too often feels the need to remind his listeners that they’re listening. If he’d resist the urge to be difficult and challenging, Luxa could have been stunning. Alas, the magic is too often lost.