Harold Budd

Harold Budd (born in Los Angeles in 1936 and initially initiated into jazz) conducted research for years on the graphic quality of music (a piece is judged by the beauty of its score), on the possibility of composing modular music (pieces that can be used in any order and combination) and on the most radical gestures (passages that simply consist of the sequence of actions that the performer must do). His first electronic experiments appeared on The Oak of The Golden Dreams (Advance, 1972), featuring Budd's minimalist suite The Oak of The Golden Dreams (1970) for synthesizer, based on the Balinese "slendro" scale.

Although he had been one of the principal researchers at the California Institute of Arts since 1969 - he found only in England - nine years later, at the court of Brian Eno, the opportunity to emerge.

The cartilage of Bismillahi Prahmani Brahim, released in the masterpiece Pavilion of Dreams (Obscure, 1978), - which collects music composed between 1972 and 1975, inspired by a motto of the Koran and orchestrated for Marion Brown's saxophone - is a dizziness in the void: a slow and faint whirlpool swallows the ecstatic notes of the saxophone, the tempera of the piano, the strokes of the harp, the whispers of the marimba. It is a mystical and crepuscular music, in some ways comparable to the Tibetan liturgy, but equally rooted in the more mystical free-jazz tradition ( John Coltrane , Pharoah Sanders). Dreams and mirrors are the elements of which the matter of his universe is made up.
In turn, the short aphorisms that sweeten his records are scrupulous notes for Eno's great "environmental" project, mystics and slow-moving introverts that cancel out any emotion. These are modern madrigals, as Budd himself defined them in the days of Madrigals Of The Rose Angel and Madrigals , both for mezzo-soprano, piano and harp, both slow and ineffable mental breaths.

Plateaux Of Mirror (Obscure, 1980) did not completely do justice to Budd's vision. The music-box piano sonata First Light, the reverb-filled slow-motion lounge jazz aria of The Plateaux Of Mirror, the warm breeze of the free-form fantasia An Arc Of Doves are pleasant background muzak but fail to truly capture the imagination. Not Yet Remembered experiments with vocals, but ends up sounding like an amateur imitating psychedelic-era Pink Floyd. The piano playing is generally too shallow (even for music that wants to be unremarkable) and the arrangement more often detract than augment. There is a poignant melody inside Among Fields Of Crystal but the piano doesn't quite know how to complete it.

The piano sonata of Children On The Hill on Serpent / Children Of The Hills (Cantil, 1981), will remain one of the masterpieces of the minimal and environmental avant-garde music, almost an estranged music box of the past, a soundtrack for sad autumn evenings. This tonal, melodic music is the secular version of LaMonte Young's minimalism.

A collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, Pearl (EG Records, 1984), yielded another gallery of ambient and oneiric watercolors. The limitations are the same of Plateaux Of Mirror: the piano playing is not only minimal in quantity but also in quality, so the melodies of Late October and The Pearl are not given a chance to flourish. The new-age electronic arrangement is misguided at best. The winners are the pieces that focus on oneiric and exotic soundscapes, like A Stream With Bright Fish and An Echo Of Night, or just impressionistic frescoes of cosmic landscapes, like Against The Sky.

In the electronic suite Dark Star for synth and guitar Budd abandons the epigrammatic and affected approach in favor of a dramatic, oppressive and gargantuan suite, resonating on the darkest and most threatening harmonics of his career, it�s a sort of uninterrupted mantric hum with the suspense of a thriller; doubled by the apocalyptic anguish of Abandoned Cities for piano and synth, a subsonic vibration that resembles the slow psalm of a pipe organ. Both were collected on Abandoned Cities / Dark Star (Cantil, 1984). These are passages in which the basic idea is extremely dilated, as if to tend towards the perpetual agreement that constitutes, according to various oriental peoples, the ultimate goal of its universe.

After recording with Elizabeth Frazer and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins the mediocre Moon And The Melodies (4AD, 1986), on which he unveils some of his ecstatic and crystalline atmospheres (Ghost Has No Home , Memory Gongs), Budd arrives on the album Lovely Thunder (EG Records, 1987) to a more gray and pessimistic sound with Flowered Knife Shadows (new version of Ghost), dark and deformed vertigo of diffracted pianism, and the 20-minute all-electronic Gypsy Violin, ecstatic and solemn, glacial and gloomy, requiem stopped on the most tragic note of the choir and perturbed by poignant and desolate violin melodies (a synthesized violin).

Budd's music, made of infinite reverberations and fleeting apparitions, now lyrical now gloomy, weaves an ineffable filigree of small elementary sounds. Budd discretizes minimalism to the point of making the process of gradual construction of sound vain, until he dissolves the alchemy of timbres in an amorphous flow of vibrations. Budd was virtually no longer able, however, to repeat the absolute tender rarefaction of Bismillahi Prahmani Brahim , nor the lyrical cantability of Children On The Hill, and gradually sank into the gray torpor of Dark Star , Abandoned Cities and Gypsy Violin , trying to humanize the huge wave of LaMonte Young.

The dreamlike, languid, glistening melodic wails that had become his trademark, have also now become the stereotype of "ambient" music. Little is left of Eno's original invention, and what little is left is the entirety of Budd's music.

Budd's delicate and feathery music evolved towards the majestic sound of electronic new-age music on White Arcades (Land, 1986 - Opal, 1988), notably the dense, choral, shimmering and tinkling stream of consciousness of White Arcades, the tiptoeing and galactic Balthus Bemused By Color, the exotic apotheosis for strings and marimba of The Real Dream Of Sails. The excursion into synth-pop of The Child With A Lion is less welcome. Pavilion and Pearl tried the same format (the short impressionistic vignette) but failed because they relied too much on the piano. White Arcades succeeds better where those fail because the arrangements lend more substance to the atmosphere. Nonetheless this one also boasts one of Budd's best piano fantasias: Algebra Of Darkness.

During the 1990s Budd retreated towards more and more elementary structures: She Is A Phantom (New Albion, 1994) added a chamber ensemble of clarinets, keyboards and percussions, but includes tedious spoken-word pieces. Music For 3 Pianos (All Saints, 1993) flirted with classical music, inspired by Morton Feldman's multi-piano pieces.

Through The Hill (All Saints, 1994) was arranged by Partridge of XTC.

The brief chamber compositions of By The Dawn's Early Light (Opal, 1992) sound like mere sketches, blueprints, for more extended compositions that never materialized. Adding an electric guitar is not the smartest of ideas to introduce novelty in Budd's sound. The guitar drones bestow an hare-krishna feeling on Down the Slopes to the Meadow (the longest composition at seven minutes). That's about as original as it gets. The strings try to create an adagio-like atmosphere (Boy About 10, The Photo of Santiago McKinn), but there is a dearth of memorable melodies. What is not ruined by the guitar, is ruined by the vocals (another really bad idea).

Walk Into My Voice (MaSo, 1996) is a collaboration with Daniel Lentz e Jessica Karraker. Budd and Lentz, two of contemporary music's most influential composers, who had already collaborated on 1993's Music For 3 Pianos (All Saints), write and perform the "soundtracks" for 33 short fragments of poetry recited by Karraker. The texts belong to poets of the so-called "beat generation" (Ferlinghetti, Patchen, Levertov, etc), who were trying to create the literary analogous of jazz improvisation. Budd's scores are light and sparse, leaving the voice in the foreground. They resemble some of Ashley's most colloquial operas. Buy the CD if you're interested in highly sophisticated spoken word. Budd's music is a minor detail.

Glyph (Mute, 1995), a collaboration with Hector Zazou, offers more spoken poetry, for those who can stand it.

Luxa (All Saints, 1996), Budd's first real album since 1991, containing vignettes for piano, synthesizer and ethnic instruments, struggles to find his original inspiration. Still under the influence of the Cocteau Twins, Budd settles into the somnolent A Sidelong Glance From My Round Nefertiti and Feral.

While less ambitious, Room (Atlantic, 2000) harks back to the lyrical melodies of his early compositions.

Avalon Sutra/As Long As I Can Hold My Breath (Samadhi Sound, 2005) was announced as Budd's final recording. The first disc is a cycle of Budd's ambient vignettes (some for solo piano, three Arabesques with John Gibson's sax, and sonatas with strings, including As Lond As I Can Hold My Breath). The second disc is a remix disc by Akira Rabelais.

Budd has also composed a String Quartet (2001) in four movements and a String Quartet (2003) in five movements.

Fragments from the Inside (2005) was a collaboration with guitarist Eraldo Bernocchi.

In The Mist (Darla, 2011) contains the five-movement The Whisper for solo piano, the three-movement Gunfighters for piano and glitch electronica, and the five-movement Shadows for string quartet. Here Budd merged neoclassical ambitions with his vintage majestic drift. He returned to mine his original postulate, that hushed hybrid of melancholy and bliss, as if those two moods were the same at very low volume and then split at higher volume in a case of spontaneous symmetry breaking as prescribed by Quantum Physics.

The live piano solo Perhaps (december 2006) was a memorial for composer James Tenney.

Budd died at the end of 2020 of covid-19.