Harold Budd

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Harold Budd was a drummer before he became known for his piano music. As a teenager in Los Angeles he played drums in a jazz band, and after being drafted into the US Army he played in a regimental band alongside saxophonist Albert Ayler.

Harold Budd's route into experimental music began with a music theory course at Los Angeles City College. He encountered composers including Charles Ives, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg, and later studied composition at California State University and the University of Southern California.

Budd encountered John Cage while studying at what was then San Fernando Valley State College. Cage came to speak at the college during Budd's first semester, helping expose him to a radically different way of thinking about music.

Harold Budd was teaching at the California Institute of the Arts when a student sent one of his compositions to Gavin Bryars. Bryars passed it to Brian Eno, who called Budd unexpectedly and asked if this was the kind of music he always wrote. Budd said yes. Eno then invited him to London to record.

Harold Budd had never heard of Brian Eno when Eno first contacted him. Budd later recalled that he had never even heard of Roxy Music at the time.

When Harold Budd recorded The Pearl with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in Canada, the initial recording sessions lasted only about two weeks. But the finished album took another eight to twelve months to shape, edit and select.

“Lost in the Humming Air” began with Brian Eno humming through a Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer. Harold Budd improvised the piano part against it, and the performance was recorded in a single take.

Harold Budd disliked the idea of his music being treated as background music. He said he felt completely divorced from music intended simply to sit behind other activities, despite his work later becoming associated with ambient and New Age music.

Budd said working with Brian Eno changed his attitude towards making music. He particularly valued Eno's willingness to take risks and go in unexpected directions, describing that attitude as something he owed Eno for.

John Foxx first became fascinated with Harold Budd after hearing The Pearl. Foxx said the 1984 album had a profound effect on him and saw Budd as someone who had achieved something comparable to the atmosphere of Erik Satie's music.

When John Foxx eventually approached Harold Budd, he didn't arrive with conventional electronic music. Foxx said his aim was to take Budd's piano and extend its harmonics, resonance and decay using reverberation and echo.

Translucence was built around the piano as its central — effectively its only — sound source. Foxx specifically said there were no synthesizers on the album; the unusual textures came from processing the piano with reverberation and echo.

The sessions for Translucence took place in Yorkshire, at the home of Foxx's artist friends Judy and Gordon Cain. Foxx placed the piano in a room overlooking their garden and arranged effects around it for Budd to play against.

John Foxx described himself as Harold Budd's “apprentice” when discussing their collaboration. He said Budd, along with Satie, had taught him almost everything he knew about this kind of music.

Foxx later singled out “Spoken Roses” as a particularly important moment from the sessions. He recalled hearing Budd play and feeling that his role was essentially to capture what was happening rather than impose something on it.

John Foxx had originally imagined Translucence as a continuation of the musical territory opened up by The Pearl, but with the piano itself becoming the focus rather than part of a larger electronic soundscape.

Harold Budd and John Foxx didn't stop with Translucence. The same collaboration produced Drift Music, and the two albums were eventually released together in 2003 as the double album Translucence/Drift Music.

Harold Budd initially knew almost nothing about the Cocteau Twins. When they first approached him, he had heard of them but hadn't actually heard their music.

The collaboration began partly because Simon Raymonde wanted the Cocteau Twins to cover “Not Yet Remembered”, from Harold Budd and Brian Eno's The Plateaux of Mirror. The idea eventually turned into an entirely new album.

The Moon and the Melodies wasn't originally intended to be a Cocteau Twins album. The project began with a proposed television documentary about musicians from different musical backgrounds, but the funding fell through. Budd and the Cocteau Twins decided to continue with the idea anyway.

The album was recorded remarkably quickly. Robin Guthrie later recalled that Harold Budd came to their studio and they worked for only two or three weeks before he left.

Robin Guthrie said the finished album ended up sounding like four pieces by the Cocteau Twins and four pieces by Harold Budd. He said that wasn't the original plan.

Harold Budd was accustomed to working alone, but he said working with the Cocteau Twins was particularly satisfying because he could get into the studio with other musicians and “pick each other's brains”.

The album was deliberately not credited to the Cocteau Twins. Instead, it was released under the individual names Harold Budd, Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde.

Harold Budd's piano wasn't simply sitting underneath the Cocteau Twins' sound. Robin Guthrie described the finished record as an almost equal division between the Cocteau Twins' approach and Budd's own instrumental style.

Harold Budd's Avalon Sutra had already been recorded when Atlantic Records dropped him. Budd said he had a finished album but couldn't find anyone willing to release it.

David Sylvian first heard Avalon Sutra in 2001, when he was trying to help Harold Budd find a record deal. Sylvian said that everyone he approached turned the album down.

Harold Budd had effectively decided to leave music behind when he met David Sylvian by chance in Los Angeles. Over lunch, Sylvian asked whether Budd would consider releasing Avalon Sutra on his new label, Samadhisound. Budd accepted immediately.

Avalon Sutra was released as Samadhisound's fourth release in 2005. It was followed on the same two-CD set by As Long as I Can Hold My Breath, a 69-minute remix by Akira Rabelais.

The second disc of Avalon Sutra wasn't simply a conventional remix. Akira Rabelais constructed it from material taken from Budd's recordings, creating a long-form piece that was then augmented with additional piano recorded by Budd.

Harold Budd described Avalon Sutra as his last album at the time of its release, but later admitted that his decision to quit music had been “very rash and very silly”. He said he had been living alone in the Mojave desert and felt that nothing was happening with his career.

“It's Steeper Near the Roses” from Avalon Sutra was dedicated to David Sylvian, but its title came from a dream Budd had about his late mother, Dorothy. In the dream, they encountered a fence while walking up a hill, and Budd remarked that the route was steeper near the roses.

Despite their mutual admiration, Harold Budd and David Sylvian never made a conventional album together. Budd later said there was a very good reason: he felt that combining two things that were already good did not necessarily make them twice as good — it could be a disaster.

Harold Budd's first album, The Oak of the Golden Dreams / Coeur D'Orr, sounds highly deliberate — but Budd later revealed that he composed it partly according to the running time of an LP. He asked how long an album was, was told about 20 minutes, and simply used that to determine the form.

Harold Budd once went into a recording studio with almost nothing prepared. For White Arcades, he said he arrived with a list of titles — and that was all. The Cocteau Twins had recommended a small studio in Edinburgh, and Budd ended up making the album there.

Budd described the recording studio as a kind of compositional instrument. When he made The Plateaux of Mirror with Brian Eno, he said this was the first time he had experienced the studio itself being used as a primary compositional tool.

Budd said that when he played piano on The Plateaux of Mirror, he listened to the atmosphere around the instrument while he played. The treatment wasn't simply added afterwards — the sound of the recording influenced what he played.

Harold Budd deliberately moved away from academic modernism. He said that although he admired composers such as Terry Riley, he consciously decided that he didn't want to become a minimalist and wanted to leave the academic world of modern music behind.

Budd's attitude to collaboration was surprisingly relaxed. He said that working with musicians such as Brian Eno, John Foxx and the Cocteau Twins appealed to him partly because they were people whose music he loved — and because they became some of his closest friends.

Harold Budd hated being filed under “New Age”. He said the label infuriated him, particularly when he encountered his records in the New Age sections of Tower Records and Virgin Megastore.

Budd once described his studio method as being like an assemblage artist working with found objects. On one album he used an inexpensive autoharp normally sold for schoolteachers, along with an Indian tom-tom that happened to be lying around the studio.