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Harold Budd (May 24, 1936) is an American ambient/avant-garde composer. Born in Los Angeles, California, 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. His music, a sparse and tonal wash of keyboard treatments, was inspired by a boyhood spent listening to the buzz of telephone wires near his home in the Mojave Desert town of Victorville, California (though he was born in nearby Los Angeles). Budd was 30, already married and with children of his own, by the time he graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Musical Composition in 1966.
He became a respected name in the circle of minimalist and avant-garde composers based in Southern California during the late '60s, premiering his works The Candy-Apple Revision and Unspecified D-Flat Major Chord around the area. As his career progressed, his compositions became increasingly minimal. Among his more experimental works were two drone pieces, "Coeur d'Orr" and "The Oak of the Golden Dreams". "The Oak of the Golden Dreams" was based on the Balinese "Slendro" scale. 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.
Two years later, while still retaining his teaching career, he resurfaced as a composer. Spanning from 1972-1975 he created four individual works under the collective title The Pavilion of Dreams. The style of these works was an unusual blend of popular jazz and the avant-garde. In 1976 he resigned from the institute and began recording his new compositions, produced by British ambient pioneer Brian Eno. Two years later Harold Budd's debut album The Pavilion of Dreams was released.Two years later, he collaborated with Eno on one of the landmark albums of the ambient style, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors. After recording two albums for Cantil in 1981 (The Serpent [In Quicksilver]) and 1984 (Abandoned Cities), Harold Budd again worked with Eno on 1984's The Pearl. A contract with Eno's Opal Records resulted in one of Budd's most glorious albums, The White Arcades, recorded in Edinburgh with Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins. Budd left Opal after 1991's By the Dawn's Early Light, and recorded two albums for Gyroscope: Music for Three Pianos (with Ruben Garcia and Daniel Lentz) and the lauded Through the Hill, a collaboration with Andy Partridge of XTC.
In the mid-'90s, Budd recorded albums for New Albion and All Saints before signing to Atlantic. His thematic 2000 release The Room saw a return to a more minimalist approach. Budd's album Avalon Sutra from 2004 was billed as "Harold Budd's Last Recorded Work" by the record label Samadhi Sound. Their press release continued: "Avalon Sutra brings to a conclusion thirty years of sustained musical activity. Asked for his reasons, Budd says only that he feels that he has said what he has to say. With characteristic humility, he concludes, “I don’t mind disappearing!” In spite of this, Budd's soundtrack to the film Mysterious Skin (a collaboration with Robin Guthrie) and Music for 'Fragments from the Inside' (with Eraldo Bernocchi) were both released in 2005. In February 2007, David Sylvian's label Samadhisound released Perhaps, a live recording of Budd's improvised performance in tribute to his late friend, James Tenney. Recorded at CalArts in December 6, the album is only available as a digital download. Darla Records released two CDs by Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd in June 2007, After The Night Falls and Before The Day Breaks. Recorded in Spring 2006, each features 9 tracks with linked titles, e.g. "How Distant Your Heart"/"How Close Your Soul" and "I Returned Her Glance"/"And Then I Turned Away".
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Harold Budd - The Pavilion Of Dreams (78 ^ 97mb)
Harold Budd creates a series of siren songs on The Pavilion of Dreams that shimmer like light reflected on the water's surface. Billed as "an extended cycle of works begun in 1972," Budd's debut apparently took a while to see the light of day itself, having been recorded in 1976, released on the aptly titled Obscure label in 1978, and re-released in 1981 on Editions EG. The minimalist composer had gained some attention in avant-garde circles with the piece "Madrigals of the Rose Angel"; featured here, it reveals the unhurried and unfolding nature of Budd's melodies as well as his penchant for clusters of bell-like notes. "Two Songs" was written in the years that followed, adapting works from Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane with arrangements that feature only mezzo-soprano Lynda Richardson and harpist Maggie Thomas. The opening "Bismillahi 'Rhahmani 'Rrahim" is the musical equivalent of a bubble bath; led by the soulful saxophone of Marion Brown, it's initially lovely, yet the circumspect arrangement saps the piece of its spellbinding effect before long. The last piece composed here, "Juno," is also the most passionate, foreshadowing the warmth and presence that would appear on subsequent works like "The Plateaux of Mirror." As with most minimalist works, The Pavilion of Dreams requires patience and open-mindedness on the part of the listener, only more so. Harold Budd achieved an evocative and succinct style on subsequent albums, and these songs are simply the rudimentary steps that led there.
01 - Bismillahi ´Rrahman ´Rrahim (18:15)
Two Songs (Voc.Lynda Richardson)
02 - Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord (3:09)
03 - Butterfly Sunday (3:00)
Madrigals Of The Rose Angel
04 - Rossetti Noise (5:33)
05 - The Crystal Garden And A Coda (8:29)
06 - Juno (7:34)
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Harold Budd & Brian Eno - Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror ( 80 ^ 94mb)
Note ! right file linked now.
The second in Brian Eno's ambient series, The Plateaux of Mirrors fuses the fragile piano melodies of Harold Budd and the atmospheric electronics of Eno to create a lovely, evocative work. In sharp contrast to the exaggerated pieces found on his debut, The Pavilion of Dreams, this record finds Budd delivering sharp shards of piano notes pregnant with meaning and minimal in the best sense of the word. Eno's unobtrusive electronics add a resonance and atmosphere that draw from the ambient textures found on Discreet Music, Music for Films, and Evening Star.
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".
The album's best moments evoke their subject matter efficaciously and effortlessly; "First Light" creates an audible early morning chill, "An Arc of Doves" employs flights of Frippertronics, "Not Yet Remembered" seesaws between sleep and consciousness, and so on. Although neither artist is a musician in the usual sense of the word -- Budd's piano playing is still somewhat limited here -- they excel as musical painters. The Plateaux of Mirrors remains a fascinating hybrid, reflecting the uniqueness of both composers in a most flattering light.
01 - First Light (6:58)
02 - Steal Away (1:25)
03 - The Plateaux Of Mirror (4:09)
04 - Above Chiangmai (2:44)
05 - An Arc Of Doves (6:22)
06 - Not Yet Remembered (3:48)
07 - The Chill Air (2:09)
08 - Among Fields Of Crystal (3:24)
09 - Wind In Lonely Fences (3:50)
10 - Failing Light (4:32)
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Harold Budd & Brian Eno - The Pearl ( 84 ^ 91mb)
In some respects the counterpart to Ambient 2, with the same sense of hushed, ethereal beauty the Budd / Eno partnership brought forth on that album, The Pearl is so ridiculously good it instantly shows up much of the mainstream new age as the gloopy schlock that it often is. The merest hints of synth and whisper play around Budd's performances, ensuring the latter takes center stage. Eno and Daniel Lanois handle the production side of things, their teamwork once again overseeing a winner. Part of the distinct charm of the album is how the song titles perfectly capture what the music sounds like -- "A Stream With Bright Fish" is almost self-defining. Another key point is how Budd truly captures what ambience in general can and does mean. "Against the Sky" is a strong example -- it can be totally concentrated upon or left to play as atmospherics and is also at once both truly beautiful and not a little haunting in a disturbing sense.
01 - Late October (4:38)
02 - A Stream With Bright Fish (3:5o)
03 - The Silver Ball (3:21)
04 - Against The Sky (4:45)
05 - Lost In The Humming Air (3:53)
06 - Dark-Eyed Sister (4:36)
07 - Their Memories (2:51)
08 - The Pearl (3:07)
09 - Foreshadowed (3:46)
10 - An Echo Of Night (2:24)
11 - Still Return (4:00)
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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !
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