HAROLD BUDD & BRIAN ENO: AMBIENT 2 - THE PLATEAUX OF MIRROR

This miraculous album provoked multi-level personal transformation in my life over the course of several years in the early 1980s--musically, spiritually, and even creatively. This album contributed to the broadening and expansion of my perspectives beyond Earth, "reality," and self, and into my own creative potential as both thinker, writer, and musician. This album provided me with my introduction to Brian Eno which then incited a desperate and frenzied search among a vast back-logue of his earlier creations and collaborations (a search that seems on-going as I am ever-surprised to find to this day Eno appearances or connections from the 70s and 80s). In retrospect, Brian Eno has been one of the top three or four artists to have led me to other artists that I now cherish and love. What Eno and Budd accomplished here, on "Plateaux of Mirror," was the full and complete arc of time--of a day, if you will, of something of a complete circle which opens with "First Light" and it's fleeting touches with the day's first beams of light using single piano notes, spaced sometimes seconds apart, flitting at the listener from an octave on the piano far above, but sometimes nearer to earth, nearer to hand-held, nearer to sleep, and then each song takes us through ordinary events and moments of a typical day on Earth, among nature, helping us to notice here-to-fore sights and moments we normally take quite for granted, and then ending the album with a return to the form and sounds of the opening song yet somehow more subdued, less immediate and less tenable. The notes from the piano seem to be floating away, receding, shimmering etherically as the light does at sunset and dusk. The effect is to me, to this day, one of the most amazing and masterful renderings of real life through art--of the emotional content of six-dimensional "physical" reality--that I've ever-EVER--encountered. It is an accomplishment that I can call nothing short of miraculous.