Budd, Harold

Artist: Brian Eno
P: 1980 / 2009
By 1980, Brian Eno had found his own voice and had his technique firmly in grasp. Having spent the better part of the '70s developing looping mechanisms and then laying the groundwork for ambient music with historic recordings such as "No Pussyfooting" (a collaboration with Robert Fripp), "Discreet Music", and "Music For Airports" and fusing these ideas with David Bowie's paranoid idiom (on Bowie's Berlin trilogy, amongst the most powerful music Bowie has ever done), Eno was at the height of his powers. It is into this regard that "The Plateaux of Mirror" was recorded. A collaboration with minimalist composer and pianist Harold Budd, this record is quite different from the rest.
What Budd provides is a stronger sense of evocative composition than Eno does-- this frees Eno to focus on technical details and technique. The result: a melancholy sort of record filled with moody interludes and tracks. Its far more theme-driven and less loop-driven than Eno's previous or contemporary work. This lends itself well to listeners who aren't really overly enamored with the idea of loop-based music. The work is particularly superb on the melancholy "First Light", the dark "Not Yet Remembered", and the noisy and mysterious "Wind in Lonely Places".
If there's a fault with this record, its that it has a bit of a sameness to it that prevents it from really shining, but its some beautiful music, and a great entry point into the catalogs of either Eno or the lesser known (but often equally brilliant) Budd.

Artist: Brian Eno
P: 1988
A collection of tracks by Brian Eno and musicians associated with him over for use in soundtracks,  or as atmospheres in movies.

Artist: Harald Budd / Brian Eno
P: 1984
This sublime, tranquil recording features 11 haunting ambient tone poems for treated piano. They are crafted from simple chords, arpeggios, or melodies that are frequently trailed by delicate electronic whispers to produce dreamy results. Even though Budd and Eno chose to compose and record in a minimalist style, their gorgeous, moody music evokes so much more, for the reverberating spaces between the notes are just as important as the notes themselves. In an interesting experiment, both "Against the Sky" and "An Echo of Night" explore the same melancholic musical theme in different settings--the former is a sparse piano piece with gentle electronic treatments, the latter is a murky synth work set against a nocturnal outdoor backdrop. (Budd later explored the theme again as the ethereal elegy "Olancha Farewell" on his 1986 solo album, Lovely Thunder.) Beautifully understated, the slow-motion ballet of The Pearl is a piece of striking ambient impressionism that was highly original in its day, well before the myriads of New Age imitators its composers spawned, and it remains fresh and vital two decades later.

Artist: Harold Budd
P: 2010
Little Windows completes the trilogy begun with A Song for Lost Blossoms and carried through their previous album Candylion. Little Windows was recorded especially for John Diliberto's popular, syndicated Ambient music radio show, Echoes Radio. These recordings were first heard on Echoes Radio in Fall 2009. Little Windows showcases these artist's individual talents more so than their two previous albums. Only two of the nine tracks are collaborative Budd/Wright works. Four tracks are fully fleshed out Clive Wright solo compositions recorded at his Desert Sky Studio. Three tracks are Harold Budd solo at the piano -- just Harold with a beautiful sounding piano in a beautiful sounding room at Knobworld Studios, Silverlake. This CD does not offer a true collaboration, but rather separte songs from each artist. All the performances are solid and have Budd's characteristic syle of ambient piano. Wright displays interesting compostions with electric guitar with ebow, and electronic distortions similar to the styling of Robin Guthrie who has also collaborated with Budd in the past. Overall a solid and enjoyable production.

Artist: Harold Budd + Eraldo Bernocchi
P: 2005
Recorded live 26.06.03 at Palazzo Delle Papesse Centro D’Arte Contemporanea on the occasion of the exhibition “Palazzo Delle Liberta” for the video installation "Fragments from the inside" by Petulia Mattioli aka PM Koma and original poems by Mara Bressi.
Digipack.

Artist: Harold Budd + Ruben Garcia + Daniel Lentz
P: 1992
Music for Three Pianos' is a very calming and relaxing CD. I don't really consider it an 'ambient' CD in the Brian Eno & Harold Budd tradition; the tracks have more of a modern, classical music feel to me. The CD cover indicates that the performers are Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia and Daniel Lentz and the inside cover indicates that all compositions and performances are by these 3 same individuals.

Artist: Harold Budd
P: 2009
Glyph is unquestionably a must have, along with Luxa, Plateaux and White Arcades, those being the top five HB discs so far.
 

Artist: Harold Budd
P: 1991
Always an outlier, Harold Budd enjoys confounding conventional wisdom about ambient music, new age, what have you. Hence his decision in the early '90s to record an album, for Brian Eno's Opal label, devoted to the American landscape--an album of often vaporous melodies intent on figuring the land's geography and history. Budd's a self-admitted devotee of soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone, and his titles alone help conjure the mythical west ("Distant Lights of Olancha Recede," "Place of Dead Roads"), as well as its odd, modern developments ("Aztec Hotel"). Occasional spoken material, a kind of existential cowboy poetry read by Budd, benefits from guitarist Bill Nelson and pedal-steel player B. J. Cole, not to mention viola, harp, and the composer's own array of keyboards. --Marc Weidenbaum

Artist: Harold Budd
P: 2013
This release from the Avant-Garde/Ambient composer. Jane 1-11 is at least among Harold's very best work and may be his all-time best. Start to finish, this is Harold at his most inspired and most tapped in to his unique gift. There is no other Harold Budd record on which he so strongly expresses his singular avant sensibility.
On the eleven sequentially titled pieces, Jane 1-11, we find minimal compositions of cozy, hushed and serene keys, droning pads, and sparse droplets of sound. The music flows, swells and ebbs through the plateaus and valleys of silence. The plucked strings, struck marimbas and various synthetic instruments often wonder around the main theme, which is less aimless and more contemplating in nature. There is plenty of reverb, but it is administered with care, like a thin layer of ointment on a slow healing wound. The rest is explored through ongoing resonance, harmony and meticulous stereo field placement. And although he seems to reject the prescribed categorization of styles, with most pieces [especially the gorgeous Jane 8], Budd seems to define what was once proclaimed by the ambient movement itself: music that is as ignorable as it is interesting.

Artist: Harold Budd
P: 1996
Harold Budd is not going to set the world on fire with his piano technique, but then again he would be the first to admit to that. He has a very minimalistic way of of playing the piano, a very much soft pedaled approach. When he performs you have feel within that time stands very much still.