Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

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Electronic Sound JANUARY 2021 - by Staff Writers

HAROLD BUDD

MAY 24, 1936 - DECEMBER 8, 2020

With the death of Harold Budd, aged eighty-four, we lost a pivotal architect of ambient music, not that he would have thanked anyone for using the term.

He didn't hold much truck with labels, and had already shrugged off "minimalism" by the time he and Brian Eno first worked together in 1978. It was through Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror, the 1980 album he made with Eno, that most of us became aware of his beautiful music.

That record came a decade after his first commercially available work, The Oak Of The Golden Dreams, a Buchla piece, composed in 1970, just as he embarked on his first year of teaching at the California Institute of the Arts.

Born in Los Angeles, Budd began composing in 1962, and became a fixture on LA's avant-garde scene. In the late 1960s, he contributed pieces to the University of California's legendary Source magazine, but it wouldn't be until 1978, with the release of The Pavilion Of Dreams, a shimmering and ethereal concoction of harp, piano, voices and jazz instrumentation, produced by Eno, that the wider world first got to hear his work.

"I owe Brian everything," he said. "I couldn't get arrested in America, but as soon as I landed in Britain I was taken seriously as an artist."

After Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror, he collaborated with a raft of UK artists who shared his compositional sensibilities, including David Sylvian, Andy Partridge, Robin Guthrie, Fila Brazillia, Bill Nelson and John Foxx. He worked with Foxx in the mid-1990s, and the resulting sessions, the two-hour Translucence/Drift Music, was released in 2003.

His 2004 album, Avalon Sutra/As Long as I Can Hold My Breath, was touted at the time as his last. Fortunately there were to be many more, including several collaborations with Robin Guthrie, and the ravishing Nighthawks with John Foxx and Ruben Garcia in 2011.

Foxx posted his own tribute shortly after the news broke of Budd's passing.

"Shattered by the news," he wrote. "Harold was a real-life hero. Quietly resolute, always cheerful, out there on his own making a new kind of music that resonated and fascinated. Always will. He was top of the tree.

"Some of the most valuable and illuminating moments working with any musician came about when recording with Harold. Everyone fortunate enough to work with him will say the same. He brought the very best out of us. A great man and a great loss."

Harold Budd's final release was Another Flower, one last collaboration with Robin Guthrie, released just days before Budd's death. His own description of his music as "existential prettiness" is perhaps the most apt.