Harold Budd

Desert and conservatory

Harold Budd was born in Los Angeles on 24 May 1936 and grew up largely in Victorville, on the southwestern edge of the Mojave Desert. His first music was Protestant hymns, mariachi and his mother's harmonium. His father died when he was 13, and the family lost its middle-class footing. As a teenager he loved bebop and played drums in bars and jazz clubs in South Central Los Angeles. Drafted into the army, he drummed in the regimental band at the Presidio of Monterey alongside the saxophonist Albert Ayler. At 21 he enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where he said he heard harmony, counterpoint and Renaissance music properly for the first time.

He went on to study with Gerald Strang and Aurelio de la Vega at Cal State Northridge, then with Ingolf Dahl at USC on a full scholarship, graduating in 1966. His orchestral piece Rothko earned him a master's in composition, and he corresponded with the painter himself. A John Cage lecture turned his early work toward chance procedures. Teaching at CalArts, he made The Oak of the Golden Dreams in 1970, an 18-minute drone on a Buchla synthesizer. That same year, tired of what he saw as the academic pyrotechnics of the avant-garde, he gave up composing.

Eno and the soft pedal

He came back in 1972 with Madrigals of the Rose Angel, which he counted as the start of his mature work. Gavin Bryars passed it to Brian Eno, who invited him to record in Britain. Budd quit teaching in 1976 to take a chance, and that November recorded The Pavilion of Dreams in London; Eno released it on his Obscure label in 1978. Budd called it the birth of himself as a serious artist. He had only learned the piano in his late thirties, and played it in a slow, sustained way he called soft pedal.

With Eno he made Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980), improvising at the piano at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario, while Eno treated the sound live. On his own Cantil label he issued The Serpent (In Quicksilver) in 1981 and Abandoned Cities in 1984, records his official biography says explored darker textures and desert and Los Angeles imagery. The solo piano piece Children on the Hill, first heard on a Belgian sampler in 1980, opens the second side of Serpent. Then in 1984 came The Pearl, made with Eno and Daniel Lanois back at Grant Avenue; Simon Reynolds called it another peak in all three men's careers. The Guardian later said the two records with Eno made them the godfathers of ambient, but Budd disliked the label and said he had been kidnapped into it.

I owe Eno everything.

Harold Budd

England and Guthrie

From 1986 to 1991 Budd lived in England and toured Europe. Lovely Thunder appeared in 1986, and that November 4AD released The Moon and the Melodies, made with Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie and Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins, which reached 46 in the UK. Guthrie produced The White Arcades in Edinburgh in 1988, and the two worked together on and off for decades afterwards. By the Dawn's Early Light (1991) marked his return to the United States, and the 1990s brought records with Andy Partridge and Hector Zazou, then Luxa and The Room.

The retirement that wasn't

In 2004 he announced his retirement with Avalon Sutra, a double album on David Sylvian's Samadhi Sound that held his first string quartets in more than thirty years, and moved to Joshua Tree with his wife. A Brighton Dome show in May 2005 was billed as his final concert, which he later called complete nonsense. He kept working: scores with Guthrie for Gregg Araki's films Mysterious Skin and White Bird in a Blizzard, a 2006 CalArts concert released as Perhaps, Candylion with Clive Wright, and Bandits of Stature (2012), written in memory of his second wife, Ellen Wirth, who died that year. He headlined Big Ears in Knoxville in 2019 and scored the HBO series I Know This Much Is True in 2020.

Budd had a stroke in November 2020 and died on 8 December, aged 84, of complications of COVID-19. Another Flower, recorded with Guthrie in 2013, had come out four days earlier, and he had just finished 19 new string quartets. Eno called him a great abstract painter trapped in a musician's body. Budd described his own aim as an ethic of loveliness, and said that choosing it was a political act.