Harold Budd & Clive Wright

Harold Budd’s reputation as progenitor of ambient electronic music, his career having started in the late ’70s and early ’80s, is undisputable. Alongside the other colossuses (Eno, Glass, etc.), he strode across becalmed liquid pools of tone. That slow burning torch has been carried into the present by the Stars of the Lids and the Eluviums of the world. Meanwhile, Budd has been relatively quiet (pun intended), his reputed retirement album, Avalon Sutra, having been released in 2004. Breaking cover here with guitarist Clive Wright, he un-spools a keyboard haze that seems unaltered since his Moon and the Melodies days. The 30-plus-minute opener is a bright and brittle monument to mournful beauty entitled "Pensive Aphrodite.” Over its course, Budd and Wright slowly call and respond, and theme and vary, until every last smoky shaft of light is prismatic. Sharp points of piano punctuate the epic echo/delay orchestrations of Wright’s strings. Unnecessarily, given the fulsomeness of this track, the duo fill another 42 minutes with more of the same.