Eraldo Bernocchi/Harold Budd:
Music for 'Fragments from the Inside'
Sub Rosa

Before hearing this collaboration, listeners unfamiliar with Milanese sound designer Eraldo Bernocchi might expect Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' to marry Budd's delicate piano ruminations with understated electronic atmospherics, somewhat in the manner of Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors, Budd's celebrated 1980 album with Eno. Well, Budd's indelible touch is present throughout the seventy-five minute album but, surprisingly, it's coupled with occasionally aggressive breakbeats and moody atmospheres by Bernocchi (also a collaborator with Bill Laswell, Toshinori Kondo, and James Plotkin among others). It's not an hermetic studio document, either, but a live recording subtly enhanced by the ambiance of the setting (though the eruptive applause at the performance's end might have been excised, given the degree to which it overshadows the closing part's meditative resolution). The performance occurred on the night of June 26, 2003 in the courtyard of the renaissance Palazzo Delle Papesse, Siena, Italy, the occasion an exhibition (Palazzo Delle Libertá) for the video installation Fragments from the Inside by Petulia Mattioli (PM Koma) with poems by Mara Bressi.

Audience chatter quickly quietens with the advent of Budd's quintessentially delicate ruminations in the lovely “Fragment One” (the sole composition authored by Budd alone), his touch so distinctive, it's identifiable by a single note. In fact, it's so pure, Bernocchi's electronics sound positively alien when they abruptly appear in the second section. It's jarring, at least initially, to hear Budd's sparse notes sprinkled over insistent hip-hop beats and tabla rhythms, though the idea of Budd wading into such waters isn't necessarily unwelcome; the atmospheric drift Bernocchi conjures in part three, for example, brings out a more extroverted and jazzier side of the pianist's playing. To his credit, Bernocchi doesn't overpower Budd with excessively dense arrangements, choosing instead to allow ample space for the pianist's inventions, and draws upon multiple genres (Arabic, dub, and ambient in addition to those already cited) to sculpt a polyglot mix of washes and beats (Bernocchi's five-year tenure as a tourism manager in the Far East no doubt an influencing factor). But it's not an always entirely successful combination, either; in part five, Budd's lush washes hardly mesh with Bernocchi's hip-hop-flavoured base; furthermore, the pianist infuses every note with so much personality, his collaborator's contributions sometimes sound generic by comparison. In truth, the very appearance of Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' is a surprise, given Budd's declaration that Avalon Sutra/As Long As I Can See My Breath (Samhadi Sound, 2004) would be his swan song; technically, perhaps, collaborations occupy a separate category from solo releases.

September 2005