[RIP] Harold Budd – The Pavilion Of Dreams, 1978

I wrote about this record in 2015, very briefly, and while I’m delighted by the opportunity to revisit it at greater length, I wish it was under different circumstances. Musician, composer, and poet Harold Budd passed away yesterday at the age of 84 from complications caused by COVID-19, and with him we have lost a giant.

It was jazz that first inspired musicianship in Budd, or, as he put it, it was “…Black culture that freed me from the stigmata of going nowhere in a hopeless culture.” He was drafted into the US army where he drummed in a regimental band alongside the highly influential free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler. Budd repeatedly credited Ayler with granting him the freedom to abandon time signatures, a freedom which stayed with him throughout his career.

Budd was notoriously resistant to genre classifications, so much so that I feel a bit sheepish using genre tags on this post: “The word ‘ambient’ doesn’t ring a bell with me. It’s meant to mean something, but is, in fact, meaningless. My style is the only thing I can do well,” “When I hear the words New Age, I reach for my gun,” and, at greater length in this excellent 1986 interview:

I’ll tell you very frankly that 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. To me it’s a kind of arrogant philosophical point of view where music has a metaphysical or biological function. I agree that music has a metaphysical function but when that’s your whole point of view, when it isn’t just a thing that happens out of the normal course of events, I think it becomes arrogant and rather precious. It smacks to me very much of science fiction religion and that’s not me. It’s very lightweight and very bothersome to me. ‘New age music’ is a marketing ploy and I don’t think it has anything to do with the actual truth about the meaning of the music. The only thing that rings my bell is serious music and music is that way when it’s impossible to analyse: ‘new age music’ is easily analysed.

But new age or not, Budd’s music has a consistent quality of brushing up against an experience of the divine.

Harold Budd with Hiroshi Yoshimura, 1983

Perhaps part of his resistance to being labeled as “ambient”–a term which, by definition, suggests something incidental and negligible–is that much of his music isn’t actually optimal background music. (I would argue that the category of “music to fall asleep to,” which Budd is frequently cited as–presumably to his chagrin–is also not necessarily background music.) I’ll go ahead and plagiarize my 2014 post about The Moon and the Melodies, which Budd made in collaboration with Cocteau Twins and which began his decades-long collaboration with Robin Guthrie. While not all of these observations apply to Pavilion, there is most certainly a slipperiness and synergy that the two records share, as do many of Budd’s other works:

It’s an uncategorizable work, one which far exceeds the sum of its parts. It’s egoless. It’s a fluid, restless record, moody and aloof–it peaks several times, ecstatically, only to retreat back into itself. Startling synergy between these masterminds means that ambient and new age fans will find a lot to love here–it’s Harold Budd, after all, and there are long stretches of huge, hulking instrumental tracks. But the record is darker than typical new age–it feels like climbing through a cavernous skeleton, and the instrumental tracks (like “Memory Gongs”) are echoing and sometimes sinister. It’s not as effusive as Cocteau Twins, and perhaps not as immediately gratifying–many tracks fade out right when you want more the most. It’s not daytime music, and it’s not background music. Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, it’s a perfect on-repeat record, folding in on itself like water.

Harold Budd with Satoshi Ashikawa, 1982

Budd began Pavilion in 1972 after returning from his “retirement from composing” with “Madrigals of the Rose Angel,” of which he said, “The entire aesthetic was an existential prettiness; not the Platonic τόκαλόν, but simply pretty: mindless, shallow, and utterly devastating.” Though the piece’s debut was at a Franciscan church in California conducted by Daniel Lentz (!), it was the piece’s subsequent live botching that led Budd to take up the piano in earnest in his mid-thirties:

Madrigals of the Rose Angel…was sent off for a public performance back East somewhere. I wasn’t there, but I got the tape and I was absolutely appalled at how they missed the whole idea. I told myself, ‘This is never going to happen again. From now on, I take full charge of any piano playing.’ That settled that.

Here’s what I wrote about The Pavilion of Dreams back in 2015:

Twinkling, lazy jazz-scapes for new agers. A dripping, humid, reactionary piece of anti-avant-garde. Budd refers to this as his magna carta. Gavin Bryars on the glockenspiel and celesta, Michael Nyman on the marimba, Brian Eno production.

To this I’d like to add that I can think of few records which can so immediately shift the feeling of the room in which they are played in the way that Pavilion does, literally within seconds. It’s the sonic equivalent of taking a few deep, elongated breaths: the pulse slows, the jaw unclenches. It’s an opiated smoke drift in which, once again, everything Budd touches feels weighted with spiritual potency. The worldless, meandering glissandos sung by Lynda Richardson, though clearly delivered in a Western classical style, start to suggest Eastern devotional drone and chant traditions. The occasional chime from the glockenspiel begins to resemble bells used in meditation. And most thrillingly, at times you can hear the creak of the harp against the floor, the crack of a knee, the scrape of a chair. When music is this willfully shapeless, rolling through space like a liquid, it becomes that much more consequential to be reminded of solid objects, human bodies in a room. Everything becomes sacred. Perhaps this is what Budd was after with his commitment to “existential prettiness” at the deliberate expense of meaning. Perhaps this is why critics and listeners still can’t help but try to pin him down with a label: it’s difficult to hear this much reverence without trying to name it in service of something.

Goodnight Harold, and thank you for everything.

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Satoshi Ashikawa – Still Way, 1982

The only available recordings from Satoshi Ashikawa, who passed away shortly after making this record. This was the second in a three record series called Wave Notation, which also included Hiroshi Yoshimura‘s Music for Nine Postcards and a collection of Erik Satie songs played by Satsuki Shibano–fittingly, fans of Yoshimura and Satie will find a lot to love here. Perfectly bare bones minimalism–just harp, piano, flute, and vibraphone. Crystalline, pastoral, picnic-ready. Midori Takada on both harp and vibraphone. Long out of print.

From the liner notes written by Ashikawa himself:

“Sound design” doesn’t just mean simply decorating with sounds. The creation of non-sound, in other words silence, as in a design, if possible, would be wonderful. There’s no question that our age — in which we are inundated with sound – is historically unprecedented. The Canadian sound environmentalist and researcher Murray Schafer warns of this state of affairs in the following: “The ear, unlike some other sense organs, is exposed and vulnerable. The eye can be closed at will; the ear is always open. The eye can be focused and pointed at will; the ear picks up all sound right back to the acoustic horizon in all directions. Its only protection is an elaborate psychological system of filtering out undesirable sounds in order to concentrate on what is desirable. The eye points outward; the ear draws inward. It would seem reasonable to suppose that as sound sources in the acoustic environment multiply – and they are certainty multiplying today —the ear will become blunted to them and will fail to exercise its individualistic right to demand that insouciant and distracting sounds should be stopped in order that it may concentrate totally on those which truly matter.”

We should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. Background music, which is supposed to create “atmosphere,” is far too excessive. In our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. It is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. In any case, the Wave Notation series has begun. I hope it will be used and judged for what I had in mind as “sound design,” but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. However, I would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present.


Tim Buckley – Blue Afternoon, 1969

I don’t have much sense for how people feel about Tim Buckley these days, other than a widespread unending fascination with “Song to the Siren,” which could very well be a perfect song. I get the sense, though, that Happy/Sad is typically treated as Buckley’s magnum opus, and that not much attention is given to Blue Afternoon, which he recorded in a month at the same time as Lorca and Starsailor. Some people think Buckley considered Blue Afternoon a throwaway record made to fulfill a contractual obligation to Frank Zappa and Herb Cohen’s label, Straight. It’s also a lot more approachable than some of his more avant-garde works, which might be off-putting to hardcore fans. I would love to hear that I’m way off and that this record is loved by many, because it’s dreamy, in the more honest sense of the word.

I’m especially excited to share it today, on what feels like the first day of spring. Blue Afternoon is so lazy and honeyed that it feels like having too much wine at the picnic and drifting in and out of consciousness in the shade. Hazed in twelve-string guitar and vibraphone shimmer. Taking a jazz approach to folk, Buckley is moody, blissful, and deeply expressive. If this is in fact a throwaway album, all the more reason to stand in awe of his ability.

Carlos Maria Trindade / Nuno Canavarro – Mr. Wollogallu, 1991

Not really sure how to write about this one. Mr. Wollogallu is pretty slippery and there’s very little information available about it online. It’s split into two sections, with side A made up of songs written by Carlos Maria Trindade and side B of songs written by Nuno Canavarro, both Portuguese musicians, and both of whom contribute instrumentals through both sides. Songs range from the churning, Sakamoto-esque opener “The Truth” (which includes a sample from Network) to fourth-world, densely percussive “Blu Terra” with silvery sparse mood pieces in between, punctuated by spoken word samples. Somebody should make a movie just to have this as the score. Singular, transportive–this feels magical, in the truest sense of the word. Definitely an on-repeat record.

Dorothy Ashby – The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby, 1970

Singular! Alongside the likes of Alice Coltrane, Dorothy Ashby was one of the first to bring the harp to the jazz scene. Most of her work is generous, harp-centric, free-flowing soul jazz, sans vocals (totally enamored of her take on “The Windmills of Your Mind“); the kind of music to make any social gathering feel like a movie, and any poolside feel like the swankiest lounge.

Rubáiyát was a radical departure from all of that, and not just because she sings throughout (a shame she didn’t sing on more records; her vocal delivery is terrifically elegant and ghostly). Ashby composed Rubáiyát around the poetry of Omar Khayyám, a twelfth century Persian philosopher, and the resulting sound is a sweeping, psychedelic global mash-up, only occasionally veering into kitschy territory. Koto, mbira, flute, timpani, vibraphone, a few searing streaks of guitar, and of course, heavy harp throughout. Swirling, heady, and expansive. Good speakers a must. Also a personal favorite album cover.

Harold Budd – The Pavilion of Dreams, 1978

A classic and a favorite. Twinkling, lazy jazz-scapes for new agers. A dripping, humid, reactionary piece of anti-avant-garde. Budd refers to this as his magna carta. Gavin Bryars on the glockenspiel and celesta, Michael Nyman on the marimba, Brian Eno production. Enjoy!

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