Abandoned Cities

Budd's title conjures Chernobyl or Detroit or Angkor Wat — places reclaimed by vines and silence — and his piano obliges with something that sounds like civic memory slowly liquefying. The harmonies are richer here than on some of his more ascetic work, the reverb so thick that individual notes become suggestions rather than events, their sustain bleeding into the next until the piece achieves a kind of harmonic fog. There is melancholy here but it is archaeological — the sadness of reconstruction rather than of witnessing. You feel less that you are experiencing loss and more that you are examining its aftermath in good light, turning over artifacts. The dynamic range is compressed almost to stillness, and the piece demands that the listener lean in, slow down, match its pace. This is music that rewards patience with a particular quality of spaciousness — the sensation of a large, empty building on a gray afternoon, the particular dignity that ruin confers on what remains.