Brian Eno/Harold Budd with Daniel Lanois - 'The Pearl' (Editions EG)

It's a summer day and my window is open while I revisit The Pearl, an album that I remember as being deceptively intangible, always slipping away from a centre. With the voices of children, playing in a nearby park, creeping in with the various wind, traffic and bird sounds, it's difficult to distinguish Eno's production techniques  on this album from what's drifting in. Drift it does, and I realise as soon as I pull this off my shelf that I should really file it under B for Budd (and that is in fact where it will be refiled) but I imagined that one day I would have The Plateaux of Mirrors to put alongside it, which never happened. Budd's piano is the constant, sometimes glowing with a harmonic resonance that is beautiful if a bit easy. It's not a thick sound, and when it really gets sparse, as on 'Against The Sky', allowing its minor key intervals to wire-frame a mood, it's an exceptional entry. Daniel Lanois gets a co-credit here and I'm not sure what he's done and what's Eno, but it's all so delicate that I'm sure the party sessions afterwards were legendary. If you haven't heard this record but know anything about these musicians, you can probably guess what it sounds like. "New age" is the term often thrown about and it's definitely a step closer to it than than, say, Music for Airports - in terms of how 'active' it is, and how much it follows musical conventions of melody/harmony. It's somber as it should be, and because this is such a pre-defined concept there's no chances to be taken. I like this album - I don't listen to it regularly, but at any volume it has the power to completely transform a situation, even if it's more felt than heard. My Eno trip ends here as I don't think his later work tends to appear on vinyl, so no Nerve Net for us.

J,J. Cale - 'Okie' (EMI)

The nightshade comes up and there's a bump-bump-bump across the sky. Okie has a lot of boogie-woogie but also some smooth sliding, and I think this is some sort of cornerstone of Cale's career, but I don't know really. J.J. Cale is a mystery to me. I'm not sure exactly where that mystery began - years of passing up his records, not really knowing much about him besides 'After Midnight', and just always assuming he's the predecessor to that whole genre of music that I heard a lot of when growing up. It was sort of rock, but for adult men in the 50s, and definitely not cool, and that's where stuff like Dire Straits and the Travelin' Wilburys get filed in my brain. But Okie was a 50p car boot sale find, in pretty great shape, so I thought I'd dive in to see what the fuss was about. If there is any fuss. There's a sunburst sheen on everything and the basslines are kinda, I dunno, electric. It's a fluid sound but there's too many shackles around everything. Shackles are okay sometimes, and these ones have a nice rust, but I can't help but shift about restlessly wishing there would either be some break-free or perhaps some quasi-romantic cynicism that I can immerse myself in. Cajun influence is there, or maybe just a song called 'Cajun Woman', cause Dr. John this is not. There's some nice vocal harmonies, a pretty instrumental title track, and not much else to get excited about. I guess I like the soft strum more than the boogie rock, though Molly Hatchet this is not, either. What the hell does 'boogie' actually mean anyway? Blues-rock with all the blues sucked out? I played this record twice when trying to write this and failed to get anywhere -- nothing left an impact, and nothing lasted, no memories, no tendencies I wanted to revisit. The weird thing is, I always thought I would fit well with this kind of music, but I guess I'm just basing that on how I love mellow adult-sounding indie rock, later Mekons records, etc. But still, it's so goddam inoffensive that I can't even get the passion to dislike it.