(Harold Budd Retrospective)

PGM Note: a retrospective of the dean of ambient keyboard composers
First Broadcast: 08.04.05
Info: PGM 727
Size: 58 MB
Format: MP3 160 kbps
Who would have believed, when it was written in 1972, that the delicate chamber music that begins this show was actually an act of defiance. "When I told people" says HAROLD BUDD. "that my idea was to make music that was as devastingly pretty as possible, it was out-and-out politics."
In fact, the California-born composer and ambient music pioneer has always been something of a contrarian. He got a late start in music, getting his degree in composition at the age of 36 at USC in Los Angeles. In the late 1960s he was loosely involved with a circle of Southern California minimalist and avant garde composers, absorbing influences from JOHN CAGE and MORTON FELDMAN, but also from jazz giants like PHAROAH SANDERS and JOHN COLTANE. He even wrote a piece for piano, harp, celeste, and topless female choir. Ah, yes. Those were the days.

In 1970 he began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts. He left 6 years later after meeting someone who would change his life: English producer, musician and theorist BRIAN ENO. Years later Budd told me with his typical sly wit: "The problem with teaching was that you had to listen to so much bad music."

Eno signed BUDD to his new OBSCURE RECORDS label in 1976. Budd and Eno went on to create several influential and widely enjoyed albums — foundation stones of the ambient genre, including THE PLATEAUX OF MIRROR and THE PEARL.

Budd's early works had neo-classical titles, like Madrigals of the Rose Angel and The Pavilion of Dreams. In addition to his musical gifts, he had an ear for language and the sensibility of a poet, able to work with ambiguous images and squeeze emotion out of them. He didn't just do pretty, either. As you'll hear, he explored darker, stranger landscapes: melancholy, forlorn, and highly evocative.