10: HAROLD BUDD, BRIAN ENO & DANIEL LANOIS
THE PEARL
(EG, 1984)

Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant recently cited The Pearl as his favourite ever album, for the reason that it achieves exactly what it sets out to do, while John Foxx has on several occasions described it as “a real landmark”. One of several collaborations between Eno and pianist/composer Harold Budd, it was released in 1984, and if you compare it to the duo’s 1980 hook-up Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirrors, it’s startlingly evident how far studio technology and technique had advanced in the space of four years.

Whereas much ambient is characteristically foggy and indistinct, what’s striking about The Pearl is its intense clarity – for which we must credit co-producer Daniel Lanois, who seems to bring a supernatural brightness and cinematic sheen to all his work with Eno (Apollo and U2′s The Joshua Tree, for instance). It’s really a dub album – Budd’s minimalist but serene keyboard lines subjected to all manner of delay and reverb tactics by Eno and Lanois – but the addition of evocative field recordings, deployed with great care throughout, contrive to make you feel less like you’re listening to a record, and more like you’re observing an ecology. The Pearl is for me Eno’s most luminous masterpiece and it deserves to be far better known than it currently is. Beg, buy, steal or borrow a copy: it will change your life.

Kiran Sande

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