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.

mouth music news

Mega-expanded 2 CD reissue of the LP Hekura - Yanomamo Shamanism From Southern Venezuela originally released on Quartz Publications in 1980!!!

"Recordings from 1978 by David Toop of Yanomami ritual songs, shamanistic ceremonies, and rainforest sounds. The voices of spirits and animal familiars, ventriloquial illusions of sound in dark spaces, secret spirit languages, the clap of thunder that links shamanic trance with the sleep language of Finnegans Wake... Out of these passages of the everyday, intensity flares like flames caught by a gust of wind. Skin burns or oozes blood, the wind blows up havoc as the spirits move about. Both double CD and LP include 40-page booklet with text and pictures telling the full story of Toop's fascinating journey in 1978 through the Amazon jungle to meet and record the last Yanomami shamans. CD presented in six-page digipak. LP version. Mixed by Lawrence English."



More on David Toop as ethnological explorer and exotica fiend...

A reader kindly sent me a couple of vintage music magazines. They came via the publisher, so I'm not 100% sure who my benefactor  is (although I have an idea). But I commend his example to you all!

(Seriously, if you've got some music mags you're thinking of chucking out, there's a home waiting for them in South Pasadena. Pretty much anything pre-1990 is of interest).

One of the fascinating things about old music papers is the adverts. Partly because of how naff or clumsy the sales pitch usually was, but also because of all the bands, once hot enough to be signed by major labels and given a big marketing push, that subsequently and often really rapidly got wiped from the collective memory bank.
        
                                                        


Like this bunch The Pleasers, from one of the mags that came through the post, a copy of Record Mirror from March 1978, when Power Pop was the megahype of the season.  Figureheads of the ill-fated Thames Beat movement (as Power Pop's UK Division was also known, in a play on Merseybeat) they here proffer a cover of The Who song, produced by Tommy Boyce (as in Boyce & Hart, songwriters for the Monkees).

And the rest isn't history.

Actually I had heard of The Pleasers (indeed they make the briefest of appearances in Retromania).
But I never heard of either of these groups (both from the same issue of Record Mirror).

The same syndrome -- not just ads for, but feature articles, even the occasional cover story -- on bands that have left barely a wrinkle on posterity -- applies with style magazines like iD and The Face. If anything, they seem to have been even more prone than the inky weeklies to falling for hype.  I remember at the time how (to those of us living in non-metropolitan areas and whose sensibility was inkie)  the stylies seemed cool and on top of everything in a way that was both intimidating and off-putting.

But looking at them now (as with the issue of The Face from October 1986 that my benefactor sent with the RM), you can see the stab-in-the-dark randomness of the coverage, the seat of pants dash to fill the space every month...  how much it was all about bluff. 

Take this lead featurette: 


                                            


At the time the design and typography and the fashion  spreads seemed like the ultimate in chic and sleek. But now it's easier to see how the style magazines were shoestring operations (I got a little bit of a sense of that first-hand in the late Eighties, when I did a bit of writing for iD and visited the offices).

Looking through this old Face, I was surprised how much the advertising (and the clothes in vogue) were retro-y or couched in an appeal to notions of timeless quality. But then that was the vibe in the UK's post-postpunk music culture of the mid-to-late Eighties (before acid house came long, basically). That time-approved seal-of-quality applied whether you were a soulboy or a Creationist:  you were basically genuflecting to something or other (Marvin Gaye or Velvet Underground, bebop or Sixties psych....)   

Two tiny things that caught my eye: a letter from Steve Walsh of Manicured Noise staking claim to have been the first punks to go funk (and amusingly derisive about A Certain Ratio's claims to same, although to fair to ACR, I think they admit they were into things like Hawkwind at the start, until the Damascene moment of seeing the Pop Group).

 And David Toop talking about how he never ever could have dreamed that his old Camden neighbour Mr Messthetics would eight years on be working with Miles Davis.

The pub referenced is the Engineer, where the London Musicians Collective and the Scritti group-mind drank and, on one semi-legendary occasion, had a fierce ideological squabble.

David Toop's tribute to and personal recollections of Lol Coxhill

the Guardian's mysterious Maggoty Lamb interviews David Toop... about my article on him

FEBRUARY TOUR

starting February 16th I’m on tour, with events in Norway (Bergen Kunsthall; Oslo’s By:Larm festival), England (Critical Beats in London; Off the Page festival in Whitstable) and Paris (launch of the French edition of Retromania)


NORWAY


February 16: BERGEN

Talk on retromania + recreativity

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: BERGEN KUNSTHALL, Bergens Kunstforening, Rasmus Meyers allé 5

more information



February 17: OSLO By: Larm Festival

Conversation about Retromania with Audun Vinger + Q/A

Time: 3 pm

Location: Ragnarock conference room, ground floor, HOTEL ROYAL CHRISTIANIA, Biskop Gunnerusgate 3 PB-768 Sentrum, Oslo

More information



FRANCE

February 20–22: PARIS

February 20: Soirée Rétromania, a/k/a RETROMANIA ! Réflexions sur la pop culture à l’heure digitale. A presentation to celebrate the launch of the French edition by Le Mot et le Reste. Discussion with Etienne Menu (journaliste musical), Jean-François Caro ( traducteur) and Guillaume Kosmicki (musicologue et dj).

Time: 6-30 PM

Location: POINT ÉPHÉMÈRE, 200 quai de Valmy 75010 Paris (telephone: 01 40 34 02 48)

Cost: entrée libre

More information



U.K.


February 23: LONDON

Critical Beats #3: Innovation and Tradition
I’ll be joining Tony Herrington, Lisa Blanning and Steve Goodman for the third in a series of panel discussions co-hosted by The Wire and the University of East London and looking at aspects of electronic dance music and club culture as they manifest in East London and beyond. Mark Fisher was scheduled to participate but had to withdraw owing to circumstances beyond his control, so Lisa B has stepped in to replace.

Time: 7.30 pm

Location: Circus 1 at STRATFORD CIRCUS, Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15

Cost: £5/£3

Information and tickets: 0844 357 2625 or
here



February 24 to February 26: WHITSTABLE

The second annual Off the Page Festival: a weekend of panel discussions, screenings, talks, and debates on sound, music, and music criticism co-hosted by The Wire and Sound And Music, with contributions from Linder Sterling, Dave Tompkins, Jonny Trunk, Rob Young, Chris Cutler, Vicki Bennett, Gavin Bryars, Evan Parker, Kiran Sande, and others.

Saturday February 25: I’ll be giving a talk about the work of David Toop.

Time: early afternoon (details TK)

Location: THE PLAYHOUSE THEATRE, 104 High Street, Whitstable, Kent.

Cost: £40 for a weekend three-day pass; £20 Saturday pass.

More information on tickets and the full schedule of events