erasing clouds
 

Harold Budd and Clive Wright, A Song for Lost Blossoms

review by dave heaton

A Song for Lost Blossoms opens with the 32-minute drift “Pensive Aphrodite”, an exciting one for music so seemingly tame. It’s not just oblique music. Wright’s guitar is very concrete, full of feeling, in front of Budd’s sweeping synthesizer, generating its own feeling and mood. It’s an evocative fog, pensive, like the title suggests, and calming.

A mix of in-studio and in-concert improvisation, the album is titled after a poem by Anna LaCazio, who slowly recites it over music as the second track. The poem opens, “Look at what’s happened while the world fell asleep.” The music similarly recalls both a dream state and the notion of an alternate world, of things going on in secret. And it carries the sadness and beauty of the image of ‘lost blossoms’ as well.

There’s versatility and emotional depth to these ambient pieces, though they at first seem all of one piece. “Forever Hold My Breath” is full of tension, “At This Moment” both soothing and strange, reaching peaks. The album is a great continuation of the legacy of these two musicians. But forget all of that and just listen closely, or sink into it more broadly, and you’ll enjoy it as much or more. There’s many ways to listen to a musical gem like this.

{www.darla.com}


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