Harold Budd & Jane Maru :: Jane 1-11 / Harold Budd :: Jane 12-21 (Darla)

Seeds float on their fluff like a hot summertime snowfall, and Budd’s airy synthesizer bears them that much further afield. Our world and welcome to it. Isn’t it surprising from this angle?

It has generally been difficult for the undersigned to distinguish between Harold Budd‘s improvised and “composed” work, at least as far as the piano is concerned. I have never run across any Harold Budd sheet music. While he has stated that the album La Bella Vista, for example, was the result of spontaneous inspiration surreptitiously recorded by Daniel Lanois, much of his solo and collaborative work seems too fully-formed not to have been painstakingly wrought.

Characterizing his approach to Jane 1-11 as “a triangle of risk, improvisation and joy,” Budd at his humblest accompanies pieces by video artist Jane Maru. Still tingling with inspiration, he adds another set in her honor almost a year later.

Opening the first album, Budd’s saucepan-lids-on-a concrete-floor percussion doesn’t make much sense, until you hear it with Maru’s  boxcars rolling by. Maru films the small world with a static camera, cataloging the seamless intersection of man-made and God-made, of big sky, small waters and solid terrain. The train cutting through the countryside belongs to it as much as the moss on the bark of a tree seen from a caterpillar’s eye view. The exquisite, instinctively woven spiderweb is the ideal latticework upon which to hang raindrops, an empty room the perfect container for criss-crossing shafts of light. Seeds float on their fluff like a hot summertime snowfall, and Budd’s airy synthesizer bears them that much further afield. Our world and welcome to it. Isn’t it surprising from this angle?

The musician’s miniatures mirror Maru’s quotidian video, self-arranging themselves with elegant, self-similar logic. His palette is quiet but broad, piano of course but also synthesizers, harps, bells and somewhat uncharacteristically, a little electronic distortion. A piece scoring the breeze-choreographed dance of a skein of curtain is almost edgy, on the brink of atonal, compared to the almost lunar placidity of your typical Budd solo recording.

The CD & DVD set was issued half a year after the original album, but Budd was not quite finished with Maru yet. Is Jane 12-21 more intimate, the result of time and introspection after the immediate, eclectic response of the first set? The piano and the small bell are there, along with a very big bell and melodies woven out of synthetic sighs and sudden intakes of breath. And when Budd sits at the piano, seemingly alone in the middle of a vast, concrete space, playing “Jane 15,” the air itself is a second instrument and the result is stirring.

Jane 1-11 and Jane 12-21 are available on Darla.