Harold Budd 1936-2020

 

R.I.P. Harold Budd, 24 May 1936 - 8 December 2020

 

Harold Budd, ambient/modern classical musician and composer, has died at the age of 84 after decades of creating some of the world's most sublime music.

Posts at SGTG:

The Oak Of The Golden Dreams

The Plateaux Of Mirror

The Pearl

Music For Three Pianos

 

And here's another I never got around to posting before: The Serpent In Quicksilver/Abandoned Cities.  Usual password, sgtg.  It's a compilation of a typically gorgeous, languid EP and an LP of two darker ambient ventures.  Thanks Harold for so much wonderful music.

Richard Maxfield/Harold Budd - The Oak Of The Golden Dreams (1999 compi of LPs rel. 1969-71)

Great twofer reissue of a couple of rare LPs, which came out on the Advance label for new music in 1969 and 1971.  One by a composer who ought to be better known, as his slim discography contained intriguing experiments in sound before he tragically cut his own life short at the age of 42.  The other by a very well known composer, but captured here in his earliest recordings that bear no resemblance at all to the gentle ambient pianism that he'd become famous for, so well worth investigating from that angle.

The first composer was Richard Maxfield (1927-1969), a Seattle native whose only full LP in his lifetime was the 28-minute Electronic Music [a Dutch label, Slowscan, unearthed 2 double-LPs' worth of archival material in 2014-15].  The opening piece dated back to 1960, and although titled Pastoral Symphony is actually a heady stew of early electronic tones and pulses.  Bacchanale (1963) is a jazzy collage of violin, sax and clarinet with tapes of Korean folk music dropped in, and a Beat-style narration by New York poet Edward Field.  A 1964 prepared piano work, written for and performed by David Tudor, is next, before Maxfield's album ends with the tape loop piece Amazing Grace (1960).

Harold Budd's debut album takes up the remainder of the CD, and consists of just two spellbinding tracks dating from 1970.  First is The Oak Of The Golden Dreams, a monolithic Buchla drone in which the right channel contains an unwavering (until it detunes in closing moments) E flat whilst a Riley-like modal improvisation gradually gathers pace in the left channel.  The other piece is Coeur D'Orr, in which two tracks of electronic organ are overlaid by a saxophonist.  Both are miles away from even the late 70s music that Budd first became well known for, but are no less enjoyable and are utterly hypnotic in their transportive drones.

Original LP covers

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pw: sgtg

Harold Budd at SGTG:
The Plateaux Of Mirror (with Brian Eno)
The Pearl (with Brian Eno)
Music For Three Pianos (with Daniel Lentz & Ruben Garcia)

Various Artists - A Brief History Of Ambient, Volume 1 (1993 compilation)

First charity shop rummage of the new year turned up this double-CD mix released by Virgin Records, which as the title suggests ran to a short series.  I vaguely remember these coming out, but despite my curiosity they'd have been too heavy an investment for me at the time: this one that I've just paid two quid for still has its Tower Records price sticker of £15.49, and that's pretty reasonable for a double set of 70+ minute discs back then, IIRC!

Everything here is naturally from artists licensed to Virgin, which gives a handy reminder of what canny risk-takers Branson & co were back in the 70s through to mid-80s.  Even into the 90s to an extent - oddly, Hillage/System 7 are conspicuous by their absence for whatever reason (of course, the Point 3 albums hadn't been released yet in '93).  Just take a look at the artist list in the labels below - and I couldn't fit them all in, ran out of space.

Good track choices too (can never say no to a good chunk of Tangerine Dream's Phaedra); full tracklist is here, along with info on an early mispress that led to the mastering cues for Disc 1 being inadvertently used again for Disc 2, the latter ending up with its track divisions all over the shop.  The copy I've just bought is actually one of those - I've re-sequenced Disc 2 now.  So here's a brief history of (Virgin) ambient, with some inevitable classics, and a few (for me) new surprises: loved the remix of early Killing Joke that sounds like an update of the first two Neu! albums, to name just one.

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Disc 1
Disc 2
pw: sgtg


extra Phaedra...

As a postscript, for anyone who doesn't have Tangerine Dream's 1974 debut for Virgin that catapulted them to stardom with an interstellar, gaseous mix of Moog, Mellotron and flute - grab the full album below.  Was nice to see it featured in the recent Black Mirror episode, along with a faithful recreation of the WH Smith shopfronts that I remember from my childhood.

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Harold Budd & Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois - The Pearl (1984)

For their sequel to the eternally gorgeous Plateaux Of Mirror, Budd & Eno added Daniel Lanois as producer, and Plateaux's piano & sound treatments blueprint into a masterpiece.  The Pearl was very much cut from the same cloth, but also improved on the formula, and nudged it closer to pure ambient music.

Much of the joy of The Pearl is in the small details: the occasional environmental sounds in the mix, the closer blending of the piano and electronics, and the more pronounced production touches on Budd's simple melodies, for instance the echo delay on the sparse notes of Their Memories.  A beautiful album that suits background listening and close attention equally well.

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pw: sgtg

Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia, Daniel Lentz - Music For Three Pianos (1992)

In a classic case of great minds thinking alike... this same album went up on Opium Hum at the weekend.  Music For Three Pianos is simply too good not to share as widely as possible, so I'm keeping it in the schedule here.

This 1992 collaboration between Harold Budd and two fellow pianists might barely qualify as an album at all, lasting a scant 21 minutes; but it doesn't waste a single note.  After letting these six stunningly beautiful melodies wash over you , there's a definite feeling that a perfectly self-contained album experience has been packed into the brief running time, and that any lengthening would spoil the effect.  I actually experimented with running Music For Three Pianos at half-speed to see how a full-length LP might've sounded - it really didn't work!  Better to just start the whole thing again when it ends - I often do.

The sympathetic production, for which krautrock/Berlin-school legend Michael Hoenig was partly responsible, adds just enough reverb where it's needed; the echoing silences in the opening track Pulse-Pause-Repeat are just as important as the notes.  If I had to pick out a favourite track here - I guess to do so would be more like picking a favourite movement from a perfectly-integrated piano sonata - it would either be the achingingly gorgeous penultimate one, The Messenger, or the gently rolling arpeggios of closer La Casa Bruja, where just like on Plateaux Of Mirror, Budd's compositional economy shines brightest.

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Harold Budd/Brian Eno - Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980)

Ambient magister Eno was introduced to US pianist/composer Harold Budd when the former produced & released the latter's Pavilion Of Dreams in 1978.  This follow-up collaboration, Volume 2 in Eno's Ambient series (Volume 1 was the seminal Music For Airports) puts Budd's gentle, "soft pedal" pianism front and centre, with Eno supplying soundscapes from which to build on, and adding varying degrees of synth accompaniment.

From the first moments of First Light, it's clear what an inspired meeting this was.  The track titles are perfectly evocative of the sound worlds they create, none more so than this opener as dawn breaks on a misty, dewy autumnal countryside.  Budd is on acoustic piano for all but two tracks - Wind In Lonely Fences, and the title track - the latter another high point on an album full of them, with an echoing chime-like tone and a proto-Twin Peaks backdrop from Eno.
 
Things get only slightly more uptempo on An Arc Of Doves, with rolling notes from Budd (although he's still utilising as few as possible, as per his brilliantly effective modus operandi) and a warm blanket of Eno synth.  The only other instrument that makes an appearance on the album is a gosammer wall of wordless voices on Not Yet Remembered, cooing a melody that Budd played by transatlantic phonecall to Eno - who, true to form, promptly reversed it.  It should be obvious by now that this album is one of my most enduring desert-island favourites; as long as I can swap the desert island for a windswept Hebridean island to get the optimum environment for it.

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