Customer Reviews

Pearl

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I love this album. It consists of minimalist pieces (some being no more than a few notes making up a lovely, sometimes quietly dramatic phrase) on an altered piano with some subtle tonal colorings added. The effect is contemplative, zenlike, trancelike, spiritual, calming, profoundly restful, like a musical still life-take your pick. This album serves many purposes for me. It helps me to sleep, read, think, or just construct a quiet space in my home when I want to relax. It is beautiful and endlessly repeatable. I must have listened to this album hundreds of times-and I am still not tired of it. There is New Age music and THEN there is "The Pearl". This album avoids all of the cliches of cheap New Age music. It set the standard years ago and I only wish that there was more music in this vein available.

This album and the preceding one, "Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror", really have to be taken together in the same listen. They both feature the same sparse piano melodies over a treated Eno-scape. These two albums are my favorites for relaxation, reading, painting - you name it, they're great for it. That's why it's called "Ambient" music - it is made to fit in with almost any atmosphere, blending with, as Erik Satie once said, "The sounds of the knives and forks at dinner".
My favorite time to listen to these records is in a rainstorm, especially with distant thunder in the background. The rain sounds seem to bring out subtleties in the music that can't be heard otherwise.
So if you like Eno's "Ambient 1" or "Discreet Music" or Steve Roach's "Structures from Silence", this is the album for you.

I've been listening to this CD for 15 years, and am still stunned by it. Each one of these soft pieces is a world unto itself. The closer one listens, the more one discovers there. The wonderfully precise programmatic song titles long ago led me into "visualizations" of the "mental places" the music conjures (this is one aspect of Eno's "ambient" ethic--these pieces of music are set in imaginary PLACES. The other part of the ethic is that these are meant to become a part of your space, like your furniture or paintings). Like "The Plateaux of Mirror," their previous collaboration, Budd seems to be the primary keyboard player, with Eno's chosen task being the setting of those aloof and cyclical compositions into very wide sonic environments. There are a few experiments, too--the last two tracks are re-recordings of tracks 4 & 1, slowed down and reprocessed into new forms. Simply wonderful!
This album completes a trio--the others being "Thursday Afternoon" and "Ambient 4: On Land"--of the most masterful use of electronic equipment ever recorded.

I love Brian Eno and Harold Budd's music. The drifting effect of ambient music is soothing yet interesting to the ear and it really does create an atmosphere in the space in which you are playing it.

The Pearl is mostly treated piano and has that distant, other-worldly sound of ambient music that tends to make one pensive. The first cut, Late October, has that sweet sadness of autumn sensibility and is my favorite on the album. Many people compare "The Pearl" to "Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors"-- the second of the four Ambient series that starts with the famous "Music for Airports." I think this is similar, but perhaps a touch more structured, though that could be a very subjective opinion. I think this is possibly one of his best albums, one I reach for as a kind of musical tranquilizer or just when I want to strike a mood and play something thoughtful. Highly recommended.

As with Eno and Budd's best ambient work (together and apart), The Pearl is a wash of atmospheres and colors that blends with its surroundings. Music for talking, reading, sleeping, working, meditating or just about anything else, it's as simple and minimalist as it can get yet never sounds weak or disposable.

This time, the basis is simply piano with some "treated" effects. That's it. The Pearl doesn't have quite the variety of sounds & positive tone of Apollo, the relaxing haziness of Ambient 1, or the pure soundscapes of Ambient 4. The mood is occasionally sad, but mostly just.. peaceful. The song titles give the impression of the melodies themselves; ethereal, barely there, as fleeting and beautiful as a sunbeam or a bright fish in a stream. Lovely and subdued. If you enjoy music that fills the room and wraps you in a quiet ambience, well.. you should probably have this album already. If you're only curious to start, I'll just suggest that The Pearl and Eno's Music for Airports are two of the finest to begin with.

Wow, I'm certainly not a journalist, so it will be harder for me to convey my impressions of the stunning beauty of this absolute masterpiece. Textures I never knew existed, sonic landscapes focusing crystal clear with eyes closed emerge with each listening. I've owned this album since it was issued and it has to be the most personal and quietly devastating work of musical art I have ever experienced. Frighteningly devastating...how can we ever thank you Harold Budd and Brian Eno...

Never before have I owned a CD such as this one that each time I listen to it I become blissed out.
Harold and Brian are both geniuses.
I only have about 4 of Harold's CD's but his gifted piano compositions affect me like no other...
I thoroughly recommend this music to take you into those places within yourself that are characteristic of the most serene and tranquil states ever imaginable.
Harold, you're brilliant.

I have all of Brian Eno's ambient CDs. This is the followup to the 1980 album "Ambient 2/Plateaux of Mirror" which is my favorite Eno album. But this CD is a very close second. This CD sounds like it came from the same session as its predecessor even though it was produced four years later. The dreamlike textures on this CD paint gauzy dreamlike worlds of filtered-light images. The piano used on this CD has haunting tonal qualities and sets the mood for the album. I use this CD as "wallpaper" while I work, for meditation, and to fall asleep to. Most of the ambient music I listen to is synthesizer-based (Steve Roach/Robert Rich) but the featured instrument on this CD is a piano. And it works beautifully. This CD is a flawless gem.

Even more than "Music for Airports" and "Plateaux of Mirror", this album is the definitive collaboration album from the Budd & Eno archives. A groundbreaking classic of the ambient genre, this disc just gets better with time, especially in an era when the New Age and ambient genres have been overrun with imitators and dilettantes.

Subtle, gorgeous piano and synthesizer work features throughout, with a richness and emotion that is hard to find on other ambient albums. When it comes to "relaxation" tunes, this one has the field beat, and I've spent many an evening, in bed, under the stars, with my wife or alone, letting the quiet, spare beauty of this disc spirit me away from the troubles of the everyday world.

Anyone seeking to find the roots of true ambient should look no further. Budd & Eno were doing it long, long before most others, and they were doing it with a style and a gentle grace that has come to typify their collaborative efforts.

In his time, jazz pianist Bill Evans was a master of understated elegance, and one of his famous compositions, a eulogy for his Father, was titled "Turn Out The Stars." Not only can those stars be added to the five alloted above, but the imagery is quite fitting to this album. "The Pearl" drifts in and out of one's consciousness, alighting and then slowing burning down like a candle. A remastered version should clarify this even further.

Enough with the metaphors; "The Pearl" has achieved the same exalted status in ambient music that Miles Davis' "Kind Of Blue" has rightly earned in jazz. "The Pearl" fits the defintion of ambient music perfectly; it is beautiful on careful listen, as sonic wallpaper, an accompaniment to work, or a mood setter for intimacy. The CD has just the right type of reverb, just the right amount of nature sounds, the perfect number and length of songs, and the tracks begin, end, and are sequenced to perfection.

This is not a rhythmic record, but melodically and harmonically it is stunning. From the opening piano figure played by Harold Budd on "Late October," and layered in sonic velvet by Brian Eno to the bookend "Still Return," "The Pearl" stands as one of the finest collaborations between two musically synergistic pioneers, and as an enduring testament to the power of restraint.