Customer Reviews

Lovely Thunder

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Classic Harold Budd. If you liked the Pearl or Apollo, you'll like this one. The tracks kind of blend into each other and unless you're really listening you won't notice one end and another begin. Unfortunately it's all over too quickly. It's a roughly 45 minute album that seems like 20.

This music is the apotheosis of ambience but remains exactly tense ednough to keep you paying attention. Of what you're paying attention to, though, the music has no idea. The long piece (20:45), GVypsy Violin, that ends the cd, is so clean that it almost feels like your thinking itself is what sustains a high note for 4 measures.... For me, this is ideal music to listen to while I write. The other songs, too, provide mood with misty or glacial electronic music of not attack but flow. Harold Budd himself doesn't use the term "ambient" to describe his music, but it's beautifully permissive.

If you liked "The Pearl" then you will like this one. Harold Budd doesn't have Brian Eno on board for this one, but he seems to have been able to color his pieces almost as well as Eno could have done. Simple, altered piano pieces with undertones of rumblings, drones, hums, etc. "Gypsy Violin" is not too long to my ears. I found it to be one of the most enjoyable pieces on the album. A good addition to your ambient collection if you like your ambient music to be brooding and contemplative (which I do).

I have a lot of ambient albums, & this one is my very favorite. The very long piece at the end of the cd, Gypsy Violin, is so beautiful, with misty drones & occasional low-key, low-pitch booms & near-melodies (maybe where Harold Budd got the album title Lovely Thunder?). Gypsy Violin isn't limited to that, though. It stretches & reaches & almost leans back but stretches & reaches more with other long tones, slow treble tremors, & melodies that drift & fade in & out so easily that you can listen to them & be rapt or not even notice with your conscious mind & just FEEL it all. The shorter pieces on the cd before Gypsy Violin, that stunning finale, a great masterpiece, are in some ways like minimalistic classical music, with the repetition. & very slow. & brilliantly composed, like how a poet crafts a poem so that no word has more or less weight than it should, so that every careful placement of syntax makes for a balanced poem. Also, by the way, basically all the music on this cd is electronic.

I'm not really sure where Lovely Thunder ranks among Budd's other works. There's no denying the brilliance of The White Arcades or even the classics he did with Brian Eno (The Pearl & The Plateaux Of Mirror). Thunder ranks near the top simply for containing elements of those releases.

So powerful is "The Gunfighter" that it could have been used in any Sergio Leone film. I can see Clint Eastwood clamp down on his cigar everytime i listen to it. Budd shifts gears in dramatic fashion. Forcing you to feel the heat and isolation of "Sandtreader". Driving you into your sweltering introversion. "Ice Floes In Eden" plays like a cold sweat. Thunder claps of tension filled withdrawl, enhanced with the definitive drama of a syringe hanging from a junkies arm.

If anything, Lovely Thunder would have to be considered Harold Budd's comercial inspired ambience. Containing everything but a music video for MTV. Thunder is about as close as Budd ever came to being considered pop friendly. This is a must have release. Even if you're a casual fan, you'll enjoy Budd's graphic visuals.

olofpalme63

This album by Harold Budd is perhaps his best-represenative work, I think. One half of this release is a set of shorter pieces that echo both his work with Brian Eno (as on "The Pearl") and the Cocteau Twins (see "The Moon and the Melodies"), and these atmospheric little gems are perhaps some of his finest short works. But the capstone here is truly the 20+ minute "Gypsy Violin", which hearkens back to long works as those found on his initial Obscure release or on solo compositions like "Abandoned Cities", where the sounds sprawl out into atmospheric, darkened vistas that seem to have no end. This thing is worth buying for this one work alone; just consider the first half as fine, premium-grade extra cuts, just as good but shorter. An important New Music release, as well as critical for those into ambience and/or electronic music.

Music of Harold Budd surrounds us with its majestic limited approach more than it attracts us to its beauty. The way the sound grows and unfolds relates to, or at least it makes me think of the laws of nature. The experience can end up being solemn or magical, depending on one's attitude towards the unknown. This music really does overwhelm me with some strange respect towards the act of creation, much stronger than I usually get while listening to music. Harold Budd relaxes and focuses us at the same time. His music usually limits our attention to a couple of basic chords and surrounds us with the improvisations fulfilling their completeness. The mood created is airy and meditative. The sound of his ambient piano, played slightly off key, in relax timing against an atmospheric background fills our space with harmony. And when I find myself within Harold's landscapes for a while I almost feel like this particular ambience lowers my appetites and makes me want less of everything not essential. For a long time I have known beauty in simplicity and Harold just keeps on reminding me of it.

As much as his solo acts do cause in me all if the above, his many amazing collaborations truly add so much texture and variety to my overall experience of what he has been leaving behind. Just by looking in a rear view mirror i can point to so many spectacular songs which came out of these various sessions. It is almost like the presence of Harold Budd brings the best creative energy in his partners, perhaps because as they all say, his energy is so focused and so down to earth. Harold Budd had said once that he had minimized himself out of career. Although he had experienced and released that statement long before he started sharing his ambient music with us, a part of that experience of his journey to the centre of the sound must have triggered some mechanism which probably stayed with him, because he does work in a very interesting unusual fashion. His act of creation starts with central planning and the development of an idea in his mind, which can often take many weeks, months or years. Once he sits down to piano and actually starts composing, the album can take him a few days or weeks to complete. His poetry is beautiful and whenever I hear him say it against his music I feel like I have never heard it done any better. Leonard Cohen's poetry is great but it was sung not spoken.

It was not an easy decision for me to pick my favorite album by Harold Budd. Some of my favorite music came out of his collaborations with other people. Two of the preceding this album Pavilion Of Dreams (1978) and Abandoned Cities (1984) contain much powerful music. I have chosen this one Lovely Thunder (1986) because it does bring on a very strong and consistent mood and to me its music stands right in the centre of Harold's many creations, between the more developed textures dropped against heavy ambient backgrounds and the solo piano music of albums like The Room (2000). The music of Lovely Thunder was composed in 1986, the same year as the music of Moon And The Melodies, Harold's collaboration with Cocteau Twins. Track number 5 of Lovely Thunder was produced by Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins and it does resemble Mood And The Melodies a bit. My favorite music of Lovely Thunder is placed at the end of this album. Song number 6, Valse Pour Le Fin Du Temps and number 7, Gypsy Violin are spectacular. The ambience of these pieces is very Harold specific. The mood progression with its distorted motive coming back to the main landscape of constant but slight change of background are having a very meditative effect, on me at least. The beginning track, The Gunfighter is very powerful in its mild sinister approach. Something is going on, we can sense it but we can sense the effect of the music more than we can hear it. The following Sandtreader is a very meditative piece of music. Ice Floes In Eden is fairly complex for Harold Budd and it might be my least favorite song here. Following it Olancha Farewell although the shortest piece of this album but it is a beautiful mood again.

Harold Budd has left us with quite a few of his solo albums and many more projects were born out of his collaborations with other artists. Brian Eno was one of the main forces in music who noticed the strength of Harold's branch of ambience, and ended up creating Ambient 2/The Plateaux Of Mirrror (1980) and The Pearl (1984) together with him. Both of these albums belong to the classics of ambient music. Cocteau Twins at the height of their career turn to Harold to collaborate on Moon And The Melodies (1986). Gavin Bryars, one of the pillars of modern classical music, recorded Myths 3: La Nouvelle Serenite (1987) together with Harold Budd and Jon Hassell. Other collaborators of Harold Budd include Hector Zazou, Bill Laswell, Bill Nelson, John Foxx (the founder of Ultravox), Robin Guthrie (of Cocteau Twins) and more recognized names of our world of music. All these projects gave birth to unique beautiful music in which Harold's sound is very easily recognized and essential but reinforced and transformed by theses additional layers of other musicians. These collaborations seem perfectly suited to deliver the sounds of Harold's narrow fields of focus. However, to me personally, the most dramatic album coming out of all these joint projects is Music For `Fragments From The Inside' composed by Harold Bud and Eraldo Bernocchi, music created for and recorded at the Italian Art Exhibition in 2003. And here are my favorite songs by Harold Budd: And Then She Stepped Aside, Valse Pour Le Fin Du Temps, Wind In Lonely Fences, Fragment Two (From The Inside), Bismillahi `Rrahman `Rrahim, The Room, Totems Of The Red Sleeved Warrior, How Dark The Respnse To Our Slipping Away, Fragment Six (From The Inside), Stranger Thunder, You And Me Against The Sky, The Messenger, Algebra Of Darkness, Juno, An Echo Of Night, Tenochitilan's Numberelss Bridges.

One of my favorite ambient albums of all time, "Lovely Thunder" encapsulates serene piano passages and darkened landscapes. This album also features a track with guitarist Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins (the track is also on "The Moon and the Melodies," an a collaboration album with Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins). A must buy!

"Lovely Thunder" is just that: an ambient tribute to tumultuous weather. Harold Budd piles layer upon dark layer of texture to create what feels like a brooding day in mid March. It all ends with the relentless "Gypsy Violin," a twenty-minute masterpiece that seizes one by the soul. If you happen to paint landscapes, I recommend this album as background music for your studio sessions.

This is one of Harold Budd's central and best-known works, but oddly enough it is much more synth-based rather than relying on his signature treated-piano sound. It took me a few listens to get into because it sounded rather dated at first (as is the danger with any synth-based music recorded in the 80s!), but then I came to appreciate the well-realized thematic sonic program it represents. The best short description of _Lovely Thunder_ one can give is probably simply that it sounds like its title. Some pieces actually do incorporate sound effects of rumblings that sound like distant thunder. Overall, the mood is one of glacial stillness, but with a constant and vaguely unsettling undercurrent: it doesn't *quite* let you relax totally.

It does feel a bit slight overall, though: only 7 tracks, most of which are not that long (although the last is 20 minutes). But it is what it is, and still works. "The Gunfighter" is a haunting tone poem on piano with synth colorings; this is one of the pieces that does have Budd's immediately recognizable piano sound.

"Sandtreader" is gently undulating billows of synth.

"Ice Floes in Eden" I just did not like the first few go-rounds, mainly because of the periodic arhythmic stabs of synth that seemed cheesy at first. But I think it's meant to represent lightning, as that rumbling thunder sound immediately follows for each iteration. It's got that mood that makes it fit into the whole well.

"Olancha Farewell" is a rather short, very still synth piece.

"Flowered Knife Shadows," as so many have complained, is the same song as "Memory Gongs" from _The Moon and the Melodies_, Budd's album with the Cocteau Twins. As far as I can tell, it's the exact same piano performance, but remixed to be starker in sound, and without all the atmospherics and sound effects. Although I still prefer the "Memory Gongs" version, I kind of like the effect here, although it does seem a bit out of place on this album for some reason.

The aptly titled "Valse Pour Le Fin Du Temps" (which means "Waltz for the End of Time") is a forlorn, elegiac piece in three/four time. Again, just look at the title to "hear" it.

"Gypsy Violin" is a 20-minute stretch of vaguely foreboding atmosphere, with slowly modulating synth lines, and more of those thunder-and-lightning suggestive sounds punctuating and disturbing the equilibrium, just to let it settle back in.

Someone else said if you like _The Pearl,_ you'll like this, but I wouldn't agree: I liked _The Pearl_ immediately, whereas this one is really quite different. A good companion piece for this one, I think, would be Budd's _The White Arcades_, his next studio album after this one. I haven't heard any Budd I don't like, though from what I've heard I think I'll want to steer clear of _Pavilion of Dreams._