Harold Budd and Brian Eno: The Plateaux of Mirror

Some records are beautiful in a way that is difficult to account for. You can describe the elements — piano, reverb, space, silence — but the description does not capture the experience. The Plateaux of Mirror is one of those records.

Harold Budd and Brian Eno made it in 1980, and it has not aged. It sounds as fresh and as strange and as beautiful as it did when it was released, which is the mark of music that was not trying to be contemporary in the first place.

Harold Budd

Harold Budd came to ambient music from a background in experimental composition. He had studied with Pauline Oliveros and was part of the Los Angeles experimental music scene in the 1970s. His approach to the piano was already distinctive before he met Eno — he played with a light touch, using the sustain pedal to let notes blur and overlap, creating a texture that was more like weather than melody.

Budd was not interested in virtuosity. He was interested in the quality of sound — the way a piano note decays, the way reverb transforms a tone into something more diffuse and more mysterious. His solo work from this period, particularly The Pavilion of Dreams (1978), demonstrated an approach to the piano that had no real precedent.

Brian Eno

Eno had been developing his ambient music concept since the mid-1970s. The Ambient series — Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980), Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980), Ambient 4: On Land (1982) — was his attempt to create a new category of music: music that was as ignorable as it was interesting, music that could function as environment rather than foreground.

When Eno heard Budd's piano work, he recognized an approach that was perfectly suited to the ambient concept. Budd's notes were already dissolving into atmosphere. Eno's production could take that dissolution further.

The Recording

The sessions for The Plateaux of Mirror were conducted at Eno's studio in London. Budd played piano — his characteristic light touch, notes allowed to sustain and blur — and Eno processed the recordings in real time, adding reverb and delay, manipulating the sound as it was being made.

The result is music in which the boundary between the piano and the processing is impossible to locate. You cannot tell where Budd ends and Eno begins. The piano tones have been transformed into something that is simultaneously more and less than piano — more atmospheric, less specific, more like a quality of light than a musical instrument.

The Tracks

The album has no conventional songs. It has pieces — sustained explorations of a particular sonic territory, each one slightly different from the last. First Light opens the album with a tone that seems to come from nowhere and go nowhere, existing simply as a presence. Steal Away is more melodic, a sequence of notes that almost forms a tune before dissolving back into atmosphere. The Plateaux of Mirror itself is the most abstract piece on the album — pure texture, pure space, pure sound.

The sequencing is perfect. The album moves from the relatively accessible to the increasingly abstract, taking you deeper into its world with each track.

The Legacy

The Plateaux of Mirror influenced a generation of ambient musicians. Its approach — acoustic instrument processed into atmosphere, space used as a compositional element, beauty achieved through restraint — became a template that has been followed by countless artists in the decades since.

But the template is not the thing. The thing is the record itself, which remains irreplaceable. No one has made anything quite like it since, because the specific combination of Budd's touch and Eno's ear was unrepeatable.

At Noctua FM, we play The Plateaux of Mirror when we want to remind ourselves what ambient music can be at its most essential: not background, not foreground, but something that changes the quality of the air in the room.