condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (cut-out)

The White Arcades is the album where Harold Budd finally became the solo voice of the aesthetic he had been refining for a decade. Released on Brian Eno's Opal Records in 1988, recorded with Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins (with whom Budd had just made The Moon And The Melodies in 1986), it brings to bear all the lessons of his collaborations: Eno's treated atmospheres, Daniel Lanois's chord-based shimmer, Guthrie's chorused guitar. But the centre of gravity has shifted. Budd is the composer, the player and now the producer of his own world.

The opening "The Real Dream Of Sails" is the kind of piece that taught a generation of ambient musicians how to begin a record. "Balthus Bemused By Color" is a portrait piece, three and a half minutes of refracted light. "The Child With A Lion" returns to the soft-pedal vocabulary of Plateaux. The closing "The Room" is six minutes of close-mic'd Steinway with reverb tails so long they begin to feel structural. Guthrie's production is unobtrusive but everywhere, his guitar treated until it functions almost as a second piano.

The original vintage Opal/Warner Bros pressing, 9 25766-1. The White Arcades may be Budd's most polished single statement, and it is also the bridge between his Eno-era ambient work and the more song-oriented territory he would explore with Andy Partridge, Hector Zazou and the Cocteau Twins in the years to come.