The Pearl

The Pearl is brilliant and beautiful. This album is perfect for anyone who does not passionately despise ambient music. This album is truly flawless. I've nothing else to say.

It’s hard to imagine the modern music scene without Eno’s ambient influences. This album, along with a few other ambient CDs of his, Harold Budd’s and some great Jazz graced the ambience of my son’s life booth before and after his birth. I believe that such streaming light truly assists the growing mind. Eno & Budd, in their seminal experiments in ambient ‘space’ music truly created Music To Be Born To. Perhaps it will work as well when I shuffle off the mortal coil? In the true spirit of ambient space music this set of recordings, as well as Eno’s Plateaux of Mirror are truly landmark recording sessions. Like other artists who experimented with ambient forms (including psychedelic ambient rock like the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’) Eno (who arguably was the first to coin text term and experiment deeply with ambient forms) and Budd (whose textural landscapes like those of the Rooms recordings) have produced recordings that provide the Musical Set and Setting perfect for intense ego-reduction sessions, where music enhances for geometry to the point that is becomes revealed as the etheric media itself. These musical “psychedelic expressionist” forms are the perfect antidote for nervous system damage! This album is a classic, and it belongs in the collections of everyone who seeks to find within: manifests the quintessential 3-dimensional timbral landscape in the mind of a seeker. Music To Be Born To - Music to be Re-Born To!

I've been listening to this for nearly 30 years now (thank you KCRW for playing "Late October" one early fall evening in 1984!) and, amazingly, it never grows old or sounds stale. Rather, each play seems new and invigorating, offering heretofore undetected textures and moods. A true landmark and, without question, the single greatest ambient recording of all time.