You can’t have a sexy day without some music that gives you space to let your mind wander a bit.

Behind This Soft Eclipse is the latest track from Matthew Davidson’s ambient piano collection Brood XIV. If you’re familiar with the work of Budd & Eno, you’ll find that Davidson is exploring similar territory.

Davidson is releasing his music as free downloads and blogging about the process of creating them at his site.

You can preview Behind This Soft Eclipse below. Davidson has several complete albums of great ambient music available at his site as free downloads.

Image: desiretofire : music is the shape of silence

I’ve been enjoying raphdub’s videos for Harold Budd & Brian Eno’s tracks from The Plateaux Of Mirror.

The others, like this one for Not Yet Remembered, are simple but hypnotic, too.

Music video for Brian Eno & Harold Budd’s An Arc Of Doves, from The Plateaux of Mirror.

By raphdub, made with Bryce.

Interesting ambient psychedellic fan video for Harold Budd and Brian Eno’s Among Fields of Crystal, from Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror.

I’m a massive Budd & Eno fan. The Pearl & Ambient 2: The Plateax of MIrrors are two of the most gorgeous and important works of ambient music.

So I was excited to see music blogger Matthew G Davidson (Stretta) offer his take on the classic work of Budd & Eno. Here’s a little background on the piece, Where Abundance Lies:

This is the first time I’ve worked with tehn’s mlr. I’ve seen fantastic uses of mlr in a wide range of styles. It is the signature monome application.

A while back, a programmer friend at work opened up the source code for a freely-available application, modified and recompiled it to serve his needs better. This stirred some feelings of envy in me as a non-programmer. How great would it be to take a mature application and make a few tweaks to make it perfect for your needs? Well, if you’re familiar with mlr, you may be able to tell I made a few tweaks. Huge thanks to Brian Crabtree for making such a great application and keeping it open.

If you’re not following Stretta yet, make sure you check it out!

The CD explores the ambient territory pioneered by Brian Eno and Harold Budd on releases like Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors, and The Pearl. Though Lane visits similar territory, the CD sounds fresh and original, because he brings his own unique musical perspective.

The tracks feature piano and other keyboards treated with cavernous reverb and other effects. Lane makes the ambient environments a prominent part of the sound. In a sense, the pieces are Lane’s musical explorations of these otherworldly acoustic environments.

On Piano Dreams and Nightscapes, the space between notes becomes almost as important as the notes themselves. The cover of Lanes’s CD features a blurred photograph that hides the image’s subject matter, yet reveals colors and contrasts in the image that might otherwise go unnoticed. In a similar way, the tracks on this CD focus your attention on aspects of the sound that often go unnoticed.

There are seven tracks. First, there are three sets of two tracks, where each pair explores a common soundscape. In the first pair, Piano Dreams, Lane explores the sound of treated acoustic piano.

The next pair, Fallen Nightscapes, has more of an organic feel. Very quiet insect noises and other night sounds and synths create a backdrop for Lane’s piano work. On these pieces, the piano seems to have a reverse echo on it, so that each note fades in and out, rather than sounding percussive. 

The final pair, Moonlit Reflections, brings to mind some of Steven Halpern’s proto-new age work. The pieces feature electric piano in a more synthetic landscape. Faint metallic sounds fade in and out, along with high-pitched tinkling keyboards, almost like an electronic version of chimes blowing in the wind.

The final piece, Daze Gone By, is the longest, at 15 minutes. This piece has the most electronic feel of all the tracks, with buzzing synth washes and echoing droplets of white noise. The track also has more of an abstract feel, because of its lack of clearly recognizable instruments.

The overall arch of the CD moves from the familiar sounds of acoustic piano towards more abstract sounds, and from intimate soundscapes to more unfamiliar territory. The music is so gentle and relaxing, though, that even the abstract soundscapes towards the end of the CD don’t seem too alien.

When Brian Eno coined the term ambient music, he explained his concept like this: “Ambient Music…must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

With Piano Dreams and Nightscapes, Brannan Lane creates real ambient music. Play this CD quietly, and it will lull you off to dreams. Turn it up, though, and you may find yourself wondering at the strange and quirky sounds that Lane almost sneaks by you.

Highly recommended for fans of ambient music!

Tracks:

1. Piano Dreams (Pt.1)     
2. Piano Dreams (Pt.2)     
3. Fallen Nightscapes (Pt.1)     
4. Fallen Nightscapes (Pt.2)     
5. Moonlit Reflections (Pt.1)     
6. Moonlit Reflections (Pt.2)     
7. Daze Gone By

The Pearl, released in 1984, is a set of tranquil piano tone poems. The music is simple modal music in an ambient style. What makes it so captivating is the way Eno creates evocative spaces for Budd to play within. This has the effect of making the spaces between notes as important as the notes themselves.

Budd is sensitive to this play between the notes and silence, and tailors his music to allow the notes to drift towards silence. Think of Satie played underwater, and you have an approximation of the effect of these pieces.

There are 11 pieces on the CD, each intriguingly titled; “Late October”, “A stream with bright fish”, or “An echo of night”, for example. The CD artwork captures the idea of the pieces perfectly, too. Irregular patches of glistening iridescent water shine against dark pebbles, almost drawing your eye away from a perfect pearl.

This music is understated, but masterful. It may lure you or lull you, but either way, it is irresistible.

Each of Eno’s Ambient works has a different mood, with unique instrumentation and textures. On Ambient 2, Eno and Harold Budd create a intoxicating world that, once you’ve visited, you’ll want to return to.

Harold Budd creates slow piano works, reminiscent of some of Eric Satie’s more well-known work, or possibly Thomas de Hartmann’s. Budd treats his keyboards through effects, though, and adds reverberation, creating an unnatural context for the natural sounds. Eno processes Budd’s piano with phasers, tape loops, and backwards reverberation effects. Budd and Eno create sounds never heard before on Ambient 2.

The album is as listenable as it is ignorable, so it supports multiple levels of attention. Of Eno’s Ambient series, The Plateaux of Mirror is probably the most accessible. The pieces have clear melodies and form, less oblique than Ambient 1 or 4.

The pieces are slow and mellow, and their titles suggest quiet, contemplative places: “Wind in Lonely Fences”, or “The Chill Air”, for example. They are evocative and thought provoking. The pieces work together as a whole, also, because they have fairly consistent sound, pacing and mood throughout.

Ambient 2 is a great introduction to Eno’s ambient music. If you like this, you’d like his album The Pearl, also.