Brian Eno & Harold Budd

Piano and treatments

Harold Budd was born on May 24, 1936 in Los Angeles and began composing in 1962. He taught at CalArts from 1969, and his early synthesizer piece The Oak of the Golden Dreams (1970) was followed by a pause before he resumed in 1972. A student passed his piece "Madrigals of the Rose Angel" to Gavin Bryars, who sent it to Eno; Eno phoned Budd out of the blue and said I want to bring you to London to record. The Pavilion of Dreams was recorded in November 1976 at Basing Street Studios in London, with Eno producing, and released in 1978. Budd resigned from CalArts in 1976 and moved to London at Eno's urging. He rejected the word ambient for his music and said he felt kidnapped into it.

Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror was recorded in 1979 at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario, and released in April 1980 on E.G. as the second record of Eno's Ambient series. Eno began it after a four-month trip to Thailand. Budd improvised on acoustic and electric piano while Eno shaped the sound, treating the piano electronically so that Budd heard the processed sound as he played; Budd said it came so quickly and so easily he thought he could make thirty more. The Pearl followed in August 1984, recorded at Grant Avenue with Daniel Lanois co-producing; Budd told Electronic Soundmaker that it could be viewed as a definite refinement of Plateaux.

Budd later worked with the Cocteau Twins on The Moon and the Melodies (4AD, 1986), which reached 46 in the UK, and said the Cocteau Twins first wanted to cover one of his pieces from the Eno collaboration. He told The Audiophile Man that he owed Eno everything, who gave him courage and an introduction to my own language. Budd died on December 8, 2020, aged 84. Eno described him as a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician. The Guardian, in a 2014 interview relayed by Wikipedia, said the two albums earned them the title godfathers of ambient.