condition (record/cover): EX- / EX-

The second installment in Brian Eno's Ambient series and the first time he placed another composer's name above his own on the sleeve. Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980) is in essence Harold Budd's piano record, with Eno providing the atmosphere in which Budd's lines could float, soak, drift. Budd, then fifty, had spent the 1960s as a free-jazz drummer and then as a California minimalist composer in the orbit of La Monte Young. By the late 1970s he had decided to abandon almost all his earlier work and pursue an aesthetic he called "the soft pedal", a music made up entirely of held tones, slow piano figures and tonal warmth.

Eno supplied the wet world Budd's piano dropped into. Every note is treated, reverbed, sometimes delayed by minutes. "First Light", "An Arc Of Doves", "Above Chiangmai", "Failing Light": the titles read like a meteorological report from a country that doesn't exist. The piano sometimes plays only two or three notes per bar. Eno's tape manipulation and synthesizer pads make the space around those notes feel curved. One of those rare collaborations where the additive process is genuinely subtractive: each contribution makes the other quieter.

The original vintage European Polydor pressing of Ambient 2, 2335 205, the version distributed across continental Europe by Editions EG. A key document of the late-1970s Eno-Budd partnership.