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.

cornucopious

Here's my 4Columns review of the Super Deluxe Edition of Sign O' The Times and ever-so-slightly ambivalent paean to the uncontrollable copiousness of Prince. 

Listening to the Super Deluxe Sign in a single sitting did remind me of the episode of Louie where now-disgraced Louis C.K. and an equally greedy comedian buddy do a “Bang Bang”: eat two slap-up meals in quick succession at different restaurants. As gross and health-endangering as this was, at least the sad-sack duo gorged on different cuisines.  Listening to the new supersized Sign all the way through is like eating at the best Italian restaurant in town (the original Sign, which takes up the first two discs) and then immediately repairing to a mediocre Italian restaurant for rounds two, three, four…  Not only has the edge been taken off your appetite, but you have the fresh memory of something superior and delicious with which to compare. 

Too-muchness is Prince's essence. He seemed afflicted with a sort of erotomania of sound. Just couldn't stop playing - with himself (literally, in the studio - playing nearly all the instruments, multitracking his own voice), with others.  The compulsive, almost involuntary creativity caused him to record while on tour, both before the concert using a mobile studio  truck or after the gig at a local studio.

Where did he get the energy from? Especially as these concerts were bloody long. In August 1988, I saw Prince twice in a single night: first at Wembley Arena, where he and his band blazed through 41 songs over the course of a couple of hours (there were three sets of encores!), and then again at a smaller venue a couple of hours later, where the Purple One’s idea of post-show relaxation was to play another lengthy concert to a more intimate  audience.  Don’t stop ‘till you get enough, as Michael Jackson -  the only Black American artist of the Eighties to eclipse Prince in popular impact – put it. But also "enough" is as a good as a feast, as the old maxim goes –once you’re replete, even the sight of a banquet brings on nausea. 

Talking of maxims... Prince's music turns around the contrast of maximalism and minimalism. Across whole albums, but also within individual tracks sometimes. 

I always dug the maximalist tendencies, and certainly "approved" of the excess, then and now. Harped on about it at a time (late Eighties) when me and my Melody Make crew were calling for an unpunking of the discourse...  when we were rejecting the truism "less is more" and proposing that more might actually be MORE. (The sheer obesity of the Buttholes sound -  spare tyres of sound flopping free from the girdle of postpunk inhibition and restraint)

But in practice the minimal Prince holds me more as a listener. 

The nubile perfection of Dirty Mind, a sound that is barely there (those translucent keyboards), all suggestion and implication. His only truly flawless statement, as an album? 

"Kiss", worn out by over-exposure, but so fleet and fresh to hear after the baroque folly Around the World In A Day

(Although the sublime loping simplicity of "Pop Life" ...)

And on Sign itself, the tracks that are faraway my faves are the most mechanistic and monolithic  - "Hot Thing", "It." 
 

Well, there's also "The Ballad of Dorothy Parker" - ripe, humid, detuned. 

And "If I Was Your Girlfriend" 

"I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man" is a particularly striking example of the minimal / maximal tension.

The first half is this perfect pearl of power pop.

But then it goes off into a completely different direction / aesthetic universe, that barely seems connected to the first part - more to do with Santana than the Bangles. And which I like even more...

That unexpected detour / split-song structure always reminded me of what happens in the Stones's "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" - the shift from taut raunch to jazzy meander

The bluesy funk of "Sign O' The Times" the title track / lead single reminds me a tiny bit of the biting blues-funk and bitter “hard times” lyrics of Johnny Guitar Watson songs like “Ain’t That A Bitch” and "A Real Mutha For Ya" -  updated with a late Eighties drum machine feel. 

This is my favorite thing on the Supersize Deluxe and it turns very much around the minimal-maximal contrast - stark, almost Mantronix like drum machine versus florid multi-tracked vocals 

At one minute long, more a splinter than a song, “Colors” is an exquisite fragment of jazzed guitar chords that could be off an ECM album by Bill Frisell or John Abercrombie.

On the disc B-sides and extended mixes of singles off the original dubble, I enjoyed  “La, La, La, He, He, Hee,”  which mimics George Clinton’s cartoon heterosex allegory in “Atomic Dog” of canines chasing felines, and pivots around an astonishingly funky vocal lick like a hound yowling (plus  wonderfully horny horns).  

And there's other delights but boy do you have to pick through a lot of lesser material

There isn’t a neat parallel with other art forms, because pop albums rarely have a narrative structure, but let’s imagine the ‘super deluxe edition" template applied to film. You might dream of seeing the original director’s edit of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons before the studio butchered it (and lost forever the offcuts). But sensibly you might flinch at a 9-hour version of Citizen Kane. 

In this case, Sign doesn’t restore what Prince originally intended, it’s more like a series of extensions to a house that partially obscure the original construction without actually rebuilding it. The pristine thing is still in there but there’s all this stuff in the way now.

In one sense, the Deluxe Edition is beautifully curated – the sound is fabulous, the packaging exquisite, right down to the peace symbol stencil on the cardboard box that arrives at your front door. Yet in another sense, it’s a feat of anti-curation that overrides the original curation of the artist (and the record company, who held in check Prince's own more-IS-more impulses). 

In some ways, it would have been more intriguing to reconstruct the original planned but abandoned albums – Dream Factory, Camille and Crystal Ball – that preceded Sign and supplied much of its originally released content.  Like all those music nerd bloggers out there who create counterfactual albums - sometimes records that were planned and put on the schedule but withdrawn, or that were started but abandoned, and in other cases, were never conceived by the artist but fit alternate-history timelines (Beatles albums if they didn't split in 1970 but pooled songs from what in our world went into the solo albums).