Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror is a 1980 album by ambient musicians Harold Budd and Brian Eno. This is the second installment of Eno's Ambient series which began in 1978 with Ambient 1: Music for Airports, identifiable by its similar cover art which looks like it depicts rural terrain on a map.

Eno produced Budd's 1978 album The Pavilion of Dreams after British composer Gavin Bryars introduced the pair, which led to their collaboration on this album.

Eno said of Budd that he indulged in "live improvisation on The Plateaux Of Mirror ... I would set up a sound, he would improvise to it, and occasionally I would add something: but it was mainly him performing in a sound-world I had created".

Speaking about how Budd discovered new ways of playing on the album simply by bouncing ideas off each other, Eno has also commented "... with him I used to set up quite complicated treatments and then he would go out and play the piano. And you would hear him discovering, as he played, how to manipulate this treatment. How to make it ring and resonate. Which notes work particularly well on it. Which register of the piano. What speed to play at, of course, because some treatments just cloud out if they have too much information in them".

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (born 15 May 1948), commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno ( /ˈiːnoʊ/^{[citation needed]}), is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.

Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex, England, taking inspiration from minimalist painting. During his time on the art course at the Institute, he also gained experience in playing and making music through teaching sessions held in the adjacent music school.

He joined the band Roxy Music as keyboard and synthesiser player in the early 1970s. Roxy Music's success in the glam rock scene came quickly, but Eno soon tired of touring and of conflicts with lead singer Bryan Ferry.

Eno's solo music has explored more experimental musical styles and ambient music. It has also been extremely influential, pioneering ambient and generative music, innovating production techniques, and emphasising "theory over practice". He also introduced the concept of chance music to popular audiences, partially through collaborations with other musicians.

Harold Budd (born May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer and poet. Born in Los Angeles, he was raised in the Mojave Desert, and was inspired at an early age by the humming tone caused by wind blown across telephone wires.^{[citation needed]}

Budd's career as a composer began in 1962. In the following years, he gained a notable reputation in the local avant-garde community.^{[citation needed]} In 1966 he graduated from the University of Southern California (having studied under Ingolf Dahl) with a degree in musical composition. As he progressed, his compositions became increasingly minimal. Among his more experimental works were two drone music pieces, "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams". After composing a long-form gong solo titled "Lirio", he felt he had reached the limits of his experiments in minimalism and the avant-garde. He retired temporarily from composition in 1970 and began a teaching career at the California Institute of the Arts.^{[citation needed]}

"The road from my first colored graph piece in 1962 to my renunciation of composing in 1970 to my resurfacing as a composer in 1972 was a process of trying out an idea and when it was obviously successful abandoning it. The early graph piece was followed by the Rothko orchestra work, the pieces for Source Magazine, the Feldman-derived chamber works, the pieces typed out or written in longhand, the out-and-out conceptual works among other things, and the model drone works (which include the sax and organ "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams", the latter based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale which scale I used again 18 years later on "The Real Dream of Sails").^{[citation needed]}