This release from the Avant-Garde/Ambient composer. Jane 1-11 is at least among Harold's very best work and may be his all-time best. Start to finish, this is Harold at his most inspired and most tapped in to his unique gift. There is no other Harold Budd record on which he so strongly expresses his singular avant sensibility. On the eleven sequentially titled pieces, Jane 1-11, we find minimal compositions of cozy, hushed and serene keys, droning pads, and sparse droplets of sound. The music flows, swells and ebbs through the plateaus and valleys of silence. The plucked strings, struck marimbas and various synthetic instruments often wonder around the main theme, which is less aimless and more contemplating in nature. There is plenty of reverb, but it is administered with care, like a thin layer of ointment on a slow healing wound. The rest is explored through ongoing resonance, harmony and meticulous stereo field placement. And although he seems to reject the prescribed categorization of styles, with most pieces [especially the gorgeous Jane 8], Budd seems to define what was once proclaimed by the ambient movement itself: music that is as ignorable as it is interesting.
