Harold Budd, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

Four years after The Plateaux Of Mirror, Harold Budd and Brian Eno reconvened in Daniel Lanois's Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario, with Lanois himself joining as third author. The Pearl (1984) is in many ways the inversion of its predecessor. Plateaux had been Budd's record, with Eno providing weather. Here Budd's piano is more central still ("Late October", "A Stream With Bright Fish", "The Silver Ball"), but Eno's harmonic frames have hardened into actual chord changes, and Lanois has added the kind of long, hovering guitar shimmer that he would soon take to U2's The Unforgettable Fire.

The result is the most cinematic of Budd's collaborations with Eno. The pieces are longer than on Plateaux. The tonalities are warmer, less abstract. "Foreshadowed" introduces a melody that could almost be sung; "Their Memories" works a single chord progression for nearly five minutes. There is no aggression anywhere on the record, but there is a kind of patient intensity, the slow accumulation of light through a stained-glass window. The influence of these forty-three minutes on the entire field of post-rock, modern classical and ambient is hard to overstate.

The original vintage Editions EG pressing on EGED 37, distributed by Polydor across Europe. Followed by Budd's The White Arcades (1988) and the Eno-Lanois Apollo of the same year. A pivotal middle-period Eno record and an early indication of where Lanois would head as a producer.