Harold Budd & Brian Eno

From Los Angeles to London

Harold Budd was born on May 24, 1936 in Los Angeles and grew up in Victorville on the edge of the Mojave. He drummed in Los Angeles bars and jazz clubs, played in an Army regimental band at the Presidio of Monterey, where he worked with Albert Ayler, studied at Los Angeles City College, Cal State Northridge and USC, and joined the CalArts faculty in 1969. He resigned in 1976 to record with Eno as producer. Brian Eno was born Brian Peter George Eno on May 15, 1948 in Melton, Suffolk, and coined the term ambient music.

uDiscover reports that Budd's piece "Madrigals of the Rose Angel" reached Gavin Bryars by way of a Budd student, Bryars forwarded it to Eno, and Eno phoned Budd and invited him to London. The Pavilion of Dreams, released on Obscure in 1978 with Eno producing, was the first result, and Budd said Eno changed my life in a way that was extraordinary. Eno described him as a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician.

Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror

The first duo album was recorded in 1979 at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, Ontario, after Eno's four-month trip to Thailand, and released in April 1980 on E.G. Records as the second in Eno's Ambient series, after Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Budd improvised on piano while Eno managed the sound, treating the piano with electronics, with Budd hearing the processed sound as he played. Budd used chorus and delay in ways not intended, hearing them as the sound itself, and it was his first experience of the studio as a compositional tool. He later called it naive and felt The Pearl was more focused, and told Electronics and Music Maker in 1986 that it came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom.

AllMusic's Dave Connolly gave it four stars and called it lovely and evocative, and Pitchfork's Liam Singer gave it 8.4. The NME's Ian Penman dismissed it as escapist, in a 2008 biography's account, and PopMatters called it intentionally banal.

The Pearl

The Pearl, released in August 1984 by Editions EG, was produced by Eno and Daniel Lanois at Grant Avenue Studio. The music was recorded over about two weeks, and production took eight to twelve months; Budd, Eno and Lanois shared a house and worked seven days a week. "Lost in the Humming Air" was improvised by Budd over Eno's humming sounds on a Yamaha CS-80, in one take, and Budd recorded "Dark-Eyed Sister" at a small studio beforehand and sent it to Eno to develop. The gear included acoustic piano, Yamaha and Rhodes electric pianos, a Yamaha DX7, a CS-80, Casio keyboards, an AMS digital delay, an Eventide Harmonizer and an EMT 250 plate reverb. The cover is by Russell Mills.

Budd said it was a definite refinement of Plateaux and probably the best piece of work he had been involved in. AllMusic's Ned Raggett gave it four and a half stars, saying it was so ridiculously good it instantly shows up much of the mainstream new age; Robert Christgau gave it an A-minus. Uncut thought it overly tasteful abstraction that eventually proves tedious. The Guardian said in 2014 that the two albums earned the duo the title godfathers of ambient. No joint concerts have been found.

Budd rejected the ambient label, saying he felt kidnapped into it. He worked on with the Cocteau Twins on The Moon and the Melodies (4AD, 1986), and in 2020 released Another Flower with Robin Guthrie four days before he died on December 8, 2020, aged 84.