More ambient, to add to yesterday's and last week's. With hindsight I was a little overstated saying you can't go wrong with Budd and Eno, as their piece on this compilation outshines most of what's on The Pearl.
In general this two-and-a-half-hours is a good illustration of the variable quality of much of what passes for ambient.
And also another illustration of how foraging for new music has changed in the last decade and a bit. Back in 1994 or 1995 I parted with cash to try out the 30-40% of the artists it features whom I didn't already know. Finding such stuff was hard, and this was one of the most 'concentrated' mixtures of the genre you could find. But now the Last.fm ambient tag gives me a vastly wider reach of artists in the genre, and it's free, on demand whenever I want it (cf. previous experience with the dub tag).
No sleeve notes to speak of, but I see the CDs were compiled by Simon Hopkins. I wonder if that's the same Simon Hopkins who was head of BBC Music Online when I met him briefly three and a half years ago? I'll bet it was.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1, disc 2Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to bits of disc 1 at Last.fm, disc 2 |
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