Harold Budd, pioneering ambient composer, RIP

Harold Budd, the minimalist and avant-garde musician who helped pioneer the genre of ambient music, has died. He was 87. Budd's solo compositions and collaborations with Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and the Cocteau Twins inspired a generation of electronic and experimental musicians. From The Guardian:

Born in 1936 to a poor family in Los Angeles, Budd's first musical love was jazz – "black culture that freed me from the stigmata of going nowhere in a hopeless culture", he later said – and after being drafted into the US army he played as a drummer in a regimental band alongside the saxophonist Albert Ayler, who would also go on to become an icon of avant-garde American music.

After leaving the army, Budd studied music at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1966, when he was already married with children. He composed minimalist drone works in this period partly influenced by John Cage and Morton Feldman as well as abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko; one piece in this period, Lirio, is simply notated: "Under a blue light, roll very lightly on a large gong for a long duration." He continued composing alongside teaching but suddenly became disenchanted and quit composition in 1970, having "minimalized myself out of existence".

In 1972, he "resurfaced", in his words, working on a body of music that would eventually become the 1978 album The Pavilion of Dreams, produced by Brian Eno and featuring calmly beautiful compositions with piano and choral vocals. Budd described it as "the birth of myself as a serious artist" in a 2014 interview with the Guardian, saying Eno had given him "absolute bravery to go in any direction".

The pair composed together on 1980's Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror, which continued the "ambient" series that Eno had started with the landmark album Music for Airports, and 1984's The Pearl, with Eno producing further Budd works thereafter. Budd became associated with the term "ambient" but frequently rejected it: "Being called something – anything – annoys the hell out of me," he said in 2014.

top image: crop of original photo by Masao Nakagami (CC BY-SA 2.0)