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Harold Budd had already taken me by the hand in the enchanted translucent dream of "The Pavilion of Dreams" where his gentle playing gave life to an ethereal creature suspended between adamantine chimes and celestial chants. This was the shimmering dawn of his magnificent journey, a new musical language able to harmonize elements of classical music, jazz, and the then-current minimalist avant-garde to create something never experienced before, which would fertilize the soil of Brian Eno's ambient experiments and give rise to the early whispers of new age music.
After the magnificent madrigals of the Pavilion of Dreams, the Californian composer gradually and consciously left behind the well-crafted orchestral instrumentation among celeste, marimbas, and glockenspiel, and sat before the solo piano, creating a new sound texture that constantly utilized the calibrated use of the pedal and colored his luminous work with the soft tones of mother-of-pearl clouds. A magnificent example is the symphonic fresco of "The Plateaux of Mirror," composed and played four-handed with Eno as a new chapter of the nascent star of ambient music, but even more representative of this elegiac feeling is the splendid EP "The Serpent (In Quicksilver)" from 1981.
A little over twenty minutes to reconcile memory with perception through a long isthmus of melancholy and heartache. Six small watercolors with the emotional peak of "Children of the Hill," toward which the entire work converges, placing the track at the exact temporal center of the musical theme's development. The initial "Afar" and especially the restless piano symphony of "Wanderer" are the logical preliminaries that already manage to articulate the work's poetics, with the already cited prolonged use of the pedal translating into a melancholically dreamy atmosphere the themes of distance and ceaseless wandering. "Rub with Ashes" is probably a temporary sigh of relief, a small minimalist piece that would have been dear to Mertens or Nyman before the entry of "Children of the Hill." It is here that Budd's whole poetics hang by a lead thread, in these five minutes of painful indulgence in panism that binds human nature to the perception of existence. The hill is, in the quiet imagery of an afternoon sunset, distant enough to be perceived as other than oneself, because in listening one can only gaze at it as foreign spectators, yet close enough in the experience of memory to relive it, since that image of sadly rejoicing children on a remote atoll is unconsciously in the memorial of every man before his bare solitude. It celebrates all the slopes, the sunsets, the autumns, the old ages. It celebrates withered flowers and gray leaves. It celebrates the yellowed heaths. It celebrates dusty music boxes and with it all life in its slow decay.
After the bittersweet decline of the hill, everything else might seem ornamental, redundant. Yet even here, Budd's magnificent enchantment manages to place a golden seal on the short work that has already gradually reached its highest peak: it first proposes the static and instantaneous piece "Windows Charm," which seems closest to Eno's ambient speculations, and then ends with the silky harmony of "The Serpent (in Quicksilver)," where a simple acoustic melody layers, slowly vanishing, a sparse introductory phrase on the electric piano.
Faster and more intangible than the flutter of a wing, the spell vanishes, dragging with it the melancholic breath of a hibiscus folding in on itself at the onset of twilight. Harold's admirable journey through the sunny roads of perception has ended, and all the memory places that populated it disappear. The distances and pilgrimages disappear. The ashes and serpents, the yellowed heaths and gray leaves disappear. The sunsets and the memorials disappear. The bare solitudes disappear. The children on the hill disappear.
The hill vanishes.
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