ABANDONED CITIES

While pianist Harold Budd is probably best known to the general music fan for his collaborations with Brian Eno (Ambient 2 and The Pearl), his catalog is deep. Various solo albums in the realms of piano driven Ambient and Classical, along with a slew of collaborations and work done for various films, tv series, and art installations, which is what Abandoned Cities seems to have been originally created for, "ABHASA: Image-Bearing Light by Lita Albuquerque, Harold Budd, and Robert Kramer", but I cannot find much of anything online about this installation.

On Abandoned Cities, Budd turns in two slow moving side long tracks of hypnotic, etheric, brooding, and ultimately bleak and depressive Dark Ambient, before that was even a genre proper. The A side, Dark Star, slowly sweeps along on a bed of mournful, layered, undulating synth drones, some darker and brooding, others a bit lighter and melancholic. It's like weaving your way through a dead, rubble strewn city. This is aided by some occasional guitar textures, slow and dour, almost abrasive, but not noisy. The B side, Abandoned Cities, takes things even slower, more minimal and more melancholic, but not quite as dark, like looking at the sun through grey clouds. If side A was a more intimate, personal look at the city, side B is a bird's eye view of everything, slowly drifting and wafting above the streets and buildings rooves, it's all depressive and introspective, but at arm's length. The bed of layered synth work is still present here, but instead of guitar we have somber, quiet, and extremely minimal piano work as our aid. Neither track really goes anywhere, but that's the point, simply wanting to show this place in your mind's eye for a while.

The album title "Abandoned Cities" could not have been a more perfect choice for this incredible release, same with the artwork, a B&W photo of the upper façade of a building, a teaser for all that is inside. One of the coolest musical experiences I've had comes with this album. Two of my hobbies, that are intertwined with each other, photography and urban exploration, lead me to a great deal of abandoned and interesting places. One of those places was the now demolished Saint Nicholas coal breaker nestled in the hills of Pennsylvania. A towering 6-7 story or higher hulking, industrial behemoth left to rot. Me and my pals had entered and were having a blast exploring and photographing the place. As often happens we tend to separate and wander around on our own. I decided to put the camera and tripod aside for a bit, put some earbuds in and just take a walk around listening to this album. It was an absolutely incredible experience to walk around this grey ironclad, rust flaked site, among old control panels and crunchy, sketchy catwalks. It sounds utterly insane to say but that was one of the most peaceful experiences I've had, either with music or exploring.

Following two minimalist and beautiful collaboration albums that are just short of being entirely boring, Harold Budd mostly loses the piano and instead opts for dense, dark, and murky long-form post-Berlin school electronic ambient tracks.

Gone are the electronic/acoustic piano impressionistic melodies that lead to nowhere, and gone are the aimless short-form compositions -- Abandoned Cities is an entirely different monster that looms over the listener like a post-apocalyptic dirge to psychological nothingness. I absolutely love when the overall mood and sound of an album is perfectly summed up within the album title, which is what this album has accomplished. This is a soundtrack to apprehensively walking from town to town and city to city only to observe that every area reached has long been entirely evacuated and the most lively entities in sight are the dark grey clouds that hang overhead like a blanket that appropriately colors the landscape in question with an ominous absence of light. In other words, this is kind of like a soundtrack to Silent Hill or Resident Evil games, minus the presence of the undead. Most similar to the scene in 28 Days Later where Cillian Murphy is walking through a mostly deserted London.

As far as significant progression goes, there isn't any on this album. Both tracks run at around 20 minutes, give or take, and are both sufficiently unhappy. "Darkstar" is dependent on a constant but subtly changing rumbling groan while powerful bursts of synth smash through and resonate for a few bars each, and a slightly hopeful wall of shimmering ambience occasionally fills the background, but the atmosphere never rises above being entirely unsettling. The title track is less heavy while maintaining the ominous synth dirge quality and is accompanied by very sparse use of texturally appropriate out-of-tune piano that sounds very lonely among the suffocating grey ambience surrounding it.

Even compared to Harold Budd's slow minimalist piano albums and his jazz- influenced debut, Abandoned Cities is such a slow moving album -- so slow, in fact, that I'm sure most people who are not too much into ambient will get sick of it after the first 3 minutes of each track, considering that each track is basically the same melody and atmosphere repeated for about 20 minutes with only subtle background element changes to add tension to the overall composition. However, fans of ambient music or music that generally makes you want to cry and bask in loneliness (whether it be real or imagined) will find much to enjoy (?) about this album. Abandoned Cities is for sure one of Harold Budd's most emotionally satisfying works.

Of the Harold Budd releases and collaborations I've heard, I think Abandoned Cities constitutes the most unusual and uncharacteristic. Consisting of two side-long dark ambient soundscapes, Budd's minimalistic piano playing is more or less entirely absent from the album, leaving in its place a haunting electronic evocation of total desolation. At points, its slow, ponderous rumbles border on full-on drone territory. It compares favourably to similarly glacial predecessors such as Tangerine Dream's Zeit, and may be an eye-opening experience for any listener who only knows Harold Budd as that guy who collaborated with Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins and plays a real purty piano.