Among Fields of Crystal Harold Bud & Brian Eno Critical Analysis by Mitchell Benham
Introduction In 1980, 'Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror' was released as the second instalment in what would grow to become the four-part Ambient series. Though it is credited to Harold Budd and Brian Eno, the title and categorisation of this album as one of Eno's can be seen as misleading. Budd's piano is the star here, the leading instrument and the musical focal point. Eno and Budd together create an artificial environment, and endeavour to display their creation to us. Context Ambient 1: Music for Airports, released two years earlier in 1978 began Eno's experiments in open-ended and self-generating music, something that he continues here, and on Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980) and Ambient 4: On Land (1982). Eno had produced Budd's first album The Pavilion of Dreams in 1978 and had also released the work on his Obscure Record label. This album continues Eno's collaboration habit, with Eno as producer directing a musician. Other collaborations that operated in this manor include Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting) and Jon Hassell (Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics). The desired outcome of these experiments was to create environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres (Weiner, 2004). Unlike Music for Airports, where the environment and mood are of a place that is familiar to many people, The Plateaux of Mirror instead invents new places. Leaving the listener to imagine the environment based only on its title and the recorded sound leaves the intended image to be somewhat ambiguous, but allows the Brian Eno has stated...that things don't come with intrinsic and timeless value. Where you place them in time, the context they fall in, is what charges them (Diliberto, 1993), implying that he thinks his albums are important for their time, he understands that their relevance and impact is reduced over time. Structure and Arrangement The song begins abruptly with a note of a piano, and the opening chord of the piece is played broken and out of time. Soon, the rhythmic anchor of the piece is introduced, Budd's incomplete 'left hand' chords falling rigidly on the beat until the end of the piece. Between the beats, (only very occasionally do the melodic notes fall directly onto the beat) the melody begins to appear. The melody is dis jointed, never really moving in any one direction before returning to where it began. The piano in this piece is more about playing notes not to form a beautiful melody, but more for the aesthetics of the notes as played. The notes appear to arrive randomly, almost spontaneously - sometimes close together, sometimes further apart. Illustration 1: The rhythm can be seen on the waveform, as the beats are evenly spaced from each other.
The attack of the piano notes are followed by long reverb tails, and it is in this space between the notes, played beautifully by Harold Budd, that Brian Eno appears. As the melodic lines are not made up of chords, but only of single notes, the reverb created from one note is the only way that it can interact with the notes that follow it. The longer the reverbs are, the longer that note can stay with the listener and influence the other notes of the melody. The song peaks, melodically and dynamically, less than half way through, before plateauing for quite some time before a final but less significant climax towards the ending. The piece ends as abruptly as it began, a piano chord (the same one that opened the piece) that leaves the whole thing unresolved. Like the melodies, we are taken away but brought back to were we began. It is thinking about where the melody has 'taken' the listener that the title of Among fields of Crystal becomes interesting. Beginning the song title with a preposition instead of a verb hints at inaction, and of remaining stationary. It might be imagined that this piece of music is designed to take the listener to a field of crystal (crystal is usually defined as a solid material, that is rigid and defined, but transparent) and leave them there. It is up to us to observe. Sound Sources and Recording The primary sound source on this recording is, of course, Harold Budd playing a piano. However, we must not assume that a man playing the piano as all that is happening. The rhythmic chords do sound as though there are different from the melodic notes. This sort of effect can be achieved by performing just one element of the piano part and recording it to a track on a multi-track recorder. As the other elements are also performed individually and recorded to their own tracks, the complete part will eventually appear. One downside is possible timing issues, but benefits include the ability to treat the elements with different effects later on, during the mix stage of It must also be recognised that artificial reverberation and delay effects are actual sound sources themselves. Much in the the same way that a sampler would be considered a sound source, even though they create no new sounds of their own. A reverb or delay effect is triggering a repeat of the original sound, as determined by the different settings of the effects processors themselves. In Among Fields of Crystal the reverb and delay effects are used as instruments, contributing to the recording as much as the piano does. (The natural reverberation of the room in which an instrument is recorded, if captured by the recording microphones, would be considered to be a part of the original instrument's sound, as affected by its natural environment at the time of the recording.)
Mix The mix of Among Fields of Crystal is quite simple. The piano is front and centre in the mix, and the reverbs to the work of filling out the space between the notes and creating the atmosphere of the imagined environment. The piano is recorded in stereo, as the lower notes appear slightly to the left of the sound field and the higher notes appear slightly to the right. This being a correct representation of how a piano sound when you sit at it and play, it implies to the listener that the notes are being played for them by the environment, but it also by them. The listener takes the place of Budd in the centre of the environment. As the melody evolves, the reverbs play a larger part in the piece, bringing back earlier notes, creating interesting chords when new notes are played. The reverberations are triggered increasingly as the piano keys are struck harder. This means that not only are some notes louder than others, but they stay in the created soundscape for longer than quieter notes. The lower, chordal notes dont stay around as long as the melodic notes, which are played more intensely and higher in pitch, do. The chords are able to change without affecting the following chords, whereas the melody does the opposite, taking quite some time for each note to disappear into the distance. The stereo image is quite wide, but it is mostly the background reverbs that fill this space. As a note is struck the initial attack appears first in its correct position in the stereo image, but then as the reverbs take hold of it, they spread it around the listener. As the piano part does not use the extremes of the instrument's range, most of the note attacks appear in a reasonably centred position. The mix, therefore, does engulf the listener, but not by using hard left or right panning, but by using the slow moving reverb effects to move the sounds in a natural, if undefined, manner around the imagined space. Eno states the listener requires about half of what you think you require when you are the creator (Tingen 2005, p36), it is understandable, then, that this mix is so sparse, but everything we need. Illustration 2: Waveform displaying the entire piece. Notice climaxes before half way and before the ending.
Technology and Processing One wonders how this song would have sounded played off an LP record. The current high standard of audio distribution in comparison to 1980 could have an effect on the experience created by the work. The hiss and crackle of the vinyl record surely must have affected the beauty of the soundscape created, as there are no percussive or even overly rhythmic elements with which the noise would blend (and be hidden). The higher noise level on vinyl could also explain why at no point during the piece is there ever silence. As soon as a sound appears at though it is going to disappear, a new note is played to re-excite the performance. Listening to high-quality FLAC transfers of this recording is almost perfection. There are no extraneous sounds save some small mechanical noises (sustain pedal movements, perhaps) and the music and the environment created have nothing to compete with. Arguments that vinyl is better sounding than compact disc are definitely not applicable here. Conclusion Among Fields of Crystal is one of Eno's imaginary spaces. Though the space is imaginary, created by somebody for the purpose of being shown to the listener musically, the experience of being in the space is easily understood. It is clear to the listener that though there is no real Fields of Crystal, we can be amongst them whenever with the help of the musical experiments of Brian Eno and Harold Budd.
References Dilliberto, J. 1993. Brian Eno: Music For Listeners. http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/audio93a.html Tingen, P. 2005. Brian Eno. Audio Technology issue 42, p36. Weiner, M. 2004. Brian Eno and the Ambient Series, 1978 1982 http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/brian-eno-and-the-ambientseries.htm