REAL GONE
Californian ambient pioneer Harold Budd passed away on December 8 after suffering Covid-complications following a stroke.
Harold Budd, Leslie West, Gerry Marsden, Charley Pride, Howard Wales, Andrew White and others, goodnight.
“The prettiness of my music was very much a political statement.” HAROLD BUDD
THAT HAROLD Budd’s surname is found in ‘Buddhism’ seems entirely apt, given the Zen-like calm that defined his deeply contemplative, gossamer piano signature. Rather than being a monkish aesthete, however, the Los Angeleno was actually something of a bon viveur, with an appetite for art, wine, clothes and laughter.
Born on May 24, 1936, and raised on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Harold Montgomery Budd worked in a local aircraft factory before being drafted into the army, where he played drums in the regimental band alongside saxophonist Albert Ayler. His compositional career began in 1962, while studying music at the University of Southern California. His initial style was a dense, droning minimalism, inspired by Morton Feldman and the wind in desert telephone wires. His 1970 LP debut, The Oak Of The Golden Dreams, an unyielding étude for the capacious Buchla modular synthesizer housed at the California Institute for the Arts, gave little hint of the airy mellifluousness to come.
Disenchanted with modernist dissonance, however, Budd took up piano and, inspired by Renaissance music, began exploring melody.
“The prettiness of my music was very much a political statement at the time,” he later recalled, and when a live recording of his dolorous, harp-dappled 1972 composition Madrigals Of The Rose Angel found its way to Brian Eno, a future career trajectory materialised. Recorded in London, Budd’s album The Pavilion Of Dreams would appear in 1978 on Obscure, Eno’s boutique imprint, ushering the composer onto the high table of newly defined ambient music. “I had thought ’til then, in naïveté, that I was alone… It’s a treasure I will never forget,” Budd told me.
Collaborating with Eno on 1980’s Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror, as well as later ’80s benchmarks like The Pearl and The White Arcades, consolidated his reputation, while The Moon And The Melodies, his empyrean 1986 set with the Cocteau Twins, and collaborations with the likes of Bill Nelson, Andy Partridge and Hector Zazou, cemented Budd’s credentials with the art-pop cognoscenti. 1980s solo albums such as The Serpent (In Quicksilver) and Lovely Thunder further evinced his facility for music of minimalist, immersive consonance that skirted but never surrendered to the banality of new age – a label he abhorred.
Exquisitely polished gems like Luxa (1996) and The Room (2000) followed, but after 2005’s strings-embraced meditation Avalon Sutra, Budd announced his retirement. It didn’t last and further recordings slipped out, including a brace of albums in 2013/14 kindled by artist-muse-collaborator Jane Maru, on which he returned to the pared-toa-quintessence tropes of his ’80s output. A final album, Another Flower, a collaboration with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, appeared in December. “His last words to me were ‘adios amigo’… They always were,” Guthrie recalled. “He left a very large ‘Harold Budd’-shaped hole whichever way we turn.”