Harold Budd RIP

 Here's my NPR tribute to the wondrous and wise music of Harold Budd.

Who lived in South Pasadena and who I ran into on the street briefly a few years ago when I was out walking with Geeta Dayal (who knows everybody). By all accounts, he was as lovely a person as his music.

(See bottom of post for choice quotes by Budd and about Budd)

                                            

I reviewed the Cocteaus collab The Moon and the Melodies in  '86 - I'm not sure I had a very clear idea who Harold Budd was then.  The LP was the spur for some very flowery imagery. Maybe I'll dig it out later if it's not too embarrassing.... 

Cheeky Harold put out the same piece twice under different names, in the same year. You can see why though, what a beauty. 

Another Moon + Melodies lovely.

Cocteau Twins "Eyes Are Mosaic ft. Harold Budd", as if this was a modern rap'n'B record! YouTube is pretty darn lax as an archive - of course it should be credited to Harold Budd. Elizabeth Fraser. Robin Guthrie. Simon Raymonde. 

Eternity... 

His music lends itself to the infinitely extended remix 

Facts I wish I had known so that I could have included in the piece

That he taught himself to play the piano in his late thirties, in order to be able the music he wished to compose. 

Things Harold said

"Being immediately pretty is the most important component."

"I really like to find as much life as possible in the smallest amount of material. A very simple scale, a relationship of note against note, especially a sustained note; I milk everything for all it's worth."

"One of the things was I got profoundly upset and bored to death with the avant-garde music that was being practiced around the world—the Western world—at that time. It seemed self-congratulatory, and for a small cadre of snobs, and I refused to go on with it."

"I really minimalised myself out of a career"

 I cannot play the piano. I can play what I play, I can play me, but I have a dyslexia when reading music. I’m not a professional musician. I hack away at it and the piano is convenient. By no means would a proper pianist consider me one.”

"I slipped back into discovering something that no-one else was doing, or was likely to do in the very near future. I divorced myself from modern music in a sense, and began to develop a language which I thought was honest to God me, and totally outside of competition with my fellow composers.”

"I admire painters very much and I secretly wish that I were doing that"

"“Brilliant blasts of colour that simply engulfed you” - on Mark Rothko, Ellesworth Kelly, and other painters he admired. 

"It's curious about The Plateaux of Mirror. It came so quickly and so easily that it was kind of a phantom"

"This whole 'new age' business is very distasteful to me. I don't like being even considered in that “category and I have almost no respect for it at all... It's very lightweight and very bothersome to me. .. I don't think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music”

"That one frosted my balls so much. I was just enraged every time I’d walk into a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore or something like that. There I was in the new age category and I just thought ‘Jesus Christ, how can I escape from these mindless bastards?"

"When I did the White Arcades album, I went to the studio with a list of titles and that's all."

 "I've never worked with musicians who know how to read music. So that's always swell for me,

"A mature artist ought to be able to make a good record from the contents of a cutlery drawer."

"The one collaboration that never occurred and never would occur would be David Sylvian, whose work I admire above all others. I just love everything he does. There is a really good reason, it’s because although one thing is good and another thing is good, putting them together doesn’t make it twice as good. In fact it could be a disaster, and I’ve never wanted that to happen."

Things people said about Harold 

"A great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician" - Brian Eno.

"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”  - Eno, on The Plateaux of Mirror.

“Harold Budd's intention was to make what he called "eternally pretty music", and his way of composing was to write a piece of music, then take out all the notes you didn't like! - Eno

"He was really down to earth, a ham 'n' eggs kind of guy" - Cocteau Twins, via David Toop.

dream a garden

I had a lot of fun with the researching- which among other things involved spending time in three different LA gardens - and writing of this survey-of-the-2010s feature on Ambient and New Age for Resident Advisor. It's part of a swathe of looking-back-at-the-past-decade coverage they're doing this week.

Big up to the interviewees: Spencer Doran (Visible Cloaks / Kankyō Ongaku), India Jordan (New Atlantis), Matthewdavid (Leaving Records), William Thomas (Sounds of the Dawn), and Droid (No Place Like Drone / Dissensus).



One thing I didn't get to explore is the ambient quality of certain genres that on the face of it would seem to be about as politically and philosophically distant from ambient / new age values as imaginable. Such as  trap. Lyrically it's all triumphalism and machismo - the opposite of ego-melting surrender and androgny. But the production drapes glistening wooze over the hard beats-and-bass. Wistful melody-riffs loop endlessly in a way that recalls the more idyllic kinds of Nineties IDM. 



In many ways, trap is one of the last bastions of minimalism on the radio. Achieving its effects through accumulative sameness, trap - like UK drill - is designed for immersive and inattentive listening: it’s purpose-built to slip back into being background music, the soundtrack to driving or chilling. 

You could call it Ambien Music, after the sedative-hypnotic prescription drug, given the way that trap MCs so frequently reference pain-killing, anxiety-deadening drugs like Percocet and Xanax.  The result is the characteristic affect of this music: glazed, numb, insulated, oddly passive.  Auto-Tune etherializes rappers like Quavo, Rich the Kid, Playboi Carti (with his famous “baby” voice) and Young Thug to the point where they sometimes seem barely-there - angelic boy-men whose vocal texture contradicts the overt meaning of the text.  

So pretty, so hypnotic, so chill - the chiming glistening glide of the backing track to "Motorsport" sounds like nothing so much as systems-music. Except that it rolls out at a  calm steady pace, almost screwed tempo, rather than the typically highly-strung, frantic, fidgety feel of a Michael Nyman or Philip Glass movie score.  

WHEN MATES MAKE SOUNDSCAPES

                                                  

Late mate Mark Fisher's audio-essay On Vanishing Land - a collaboration with Justin Barton - has been given enduring material form by Hyperdub as a vinyl release through its new imprint Flatlines, which is dedicated to spoken word and text-sound projects.

You can find out more about the original release (ir)rationale for this project, and its makers, over here.  Here's  a snippet:

"OVL evokes a walk along the Suffolk coastline in 2006, from Felixstowe container port... to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. A walk under immense skies, through zones of deep time and within sunlit, liminal terrains, into the eerie. Everywhere there are charged atmospheres, shadowy incursions, enigmatic departures. A derelict radar base, coastal heathland, drifting thistledown, towers of overgrown shipping containers - music haunted by wider levels of reality, narrations about rarely visited zones and potentials, voices of dreams and stories. Newly composed tracks by John Foxx, Gazelle Twin, Baron Mordant, Raime, Pete Wiseman, Farmers of Vega, Skjolbrot, Eerie Anglia, Ekoplekz and Dolly Dolly; and, alongside these, views toward M.R. James’s Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1904), Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), and Brian Eno’s On Land (1982). Beyond the surface of the day something becomes visible, a way forward, an escape-path from capitalist reality. On Vanishing Land is about following the lines of terrains and dreams. It is about a micropolitics of escape, of disappearance."

2013 interview with Justin Barton about the project.

Frieze's Charlie Fox reviews it.

A blog - largely photography based - about On Vanishing Land done at the time of its making.

And Mark & Justin's first collaboration, LondonunderLondon