Harold Budd | Pavilion of Dreams

Harold Budd

Pavilion of Dreams

London, UK: Obscure Records, 1978

12” vinyl LP

Edition size unknown

In Michael Winterbottom’s film 24 Hour Party People (now over twenty years old, jeez), Factory Records head Anthony Wilson describes the debut Manchester performance by The Sex Pistols as only having forty or so audience members, but influencing the music scene in the city for decades.1 Brian Eno once remarked that only a few hundred people bought the Velvet Underground’s debut LP, “but they all formed bands”. 

The concerts and lectures of John Cage (Obscure #5) seem to have had a similar effect. 

Harold Budd was in the army at the time he first saw a John Cage performative lecture, something he would later cite as one of the two most important moments in his life. 

“I went to a concert by Cage and David Tudor called Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?2” he told journalist Geeta Dayal in 2008. “I thought, Jesus Christ, I wanted to go in that direction. It seemed heavy with the art part, if you know what I mean. It was heavy anti-academic, anti-Germanic, anti-European modernism . . . Cage was not an antidote to that, but just a different monetary value altogether.”

After leaving the army, Budd studied music at the University of Southern California, graduating in 1966. He composed minimalist drone works in this period partly influenced by Cage and Morton Feldman3 as well as abstract expressionist painters, such as Mark Rothko4. He began teaching at the California Institute of the Arts, then operational for less than a decade. 

In 1972, he wrote "Madrigals of the Rose Angel”, which caught the attention of both Michael Nyman and Gavin Bryars, who passed copies of a poorly recorded cassette on to Eno. 

According to biographer David Sheppard, Eno was instantly beguiled. 

"Brian called me one evening at my home in California and asked me if this was the sort of music I always do," Budd remembers. The pianist and composer replied yes, and soon found himself flown to London, to record in the Basing Street studio where all previous Obscure Records had been produced. 

"I remember Brian playing for me the Fripp and Eno records, late in the evening, in his living room. For me it was a parallel universe – I had thought till then, in naıvete ́, that I was alone . . . It’s a treasure I’ll never forget."

Alongside Budd and Marion Brown (the alto saxophone player who accompanied him on his trip from California) other players from the Obscure releases also contributed to the recording. These included 

Richard Bernas on celeste, Gavin Bryars on glockenspiel and vocals, Michael Nyman on vocals and marimba, John White on marimba and percussion, and Richard Bernas on piano. Eno contributed his voice to the final of the four tracks, the eight and a half minute “Juno."

Budd describes his peers in the Obscure roster as like part of a “brotherhood of agreeable, like-minded artists”.

The resulting album would become the tenth and final release from Eno’s Obscure Records label (compiled in the recent box set). But The Pavilion of Dreams would have to wait a full eighteen months before being released, following a series of delays owing to Eno’s ever-expanding other commitments. 

 

The record was a critical hit and also managed to find a reasonable sized audience. 

"Harold Budd creates a series of siren songs on The Pavilion of Dreams that shimmer like light reflected on the water's surface,” wrote AllMusic. The Guardian called the reworking of the track first sent to Eno, "Madrigals of the Rose Angel” a 14-minute opus: "Melding harp, piano and celeste with choral vocals, the latter is a feat of melancholia that feels like a template for Radiohead at their best. Guiding it all was Budd’s intuitive grasp of economy and making every gossamer phrase count. As he traversed vast oceans of feeling, each passing depth seemed worthy of special consideration."

Two years later, Eno and Budd released the collaborative record Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and another four years after, The Pearl. Two years after The Pearl, Budd released The Moon and the Melodies. This 1986 collaboration with the Cocteau Twins would further raise his profile and kickstart a collaboration with guitarist Robin Guthrie that would continue for the rest of Budd’s life.5 He would also collaborate with Andy Partridge of XTC, David Sylvian and Jan Wobble. 

Budd attributed his work with these British musicians as a direct result of the Eno’s invitation to record in London. 

"I couldn't get arrested in America," he said. "But as soon as I landed in Britain, I was taken seriously as an artist. What a change from just a few hours earlier!"

In interviews he would often summarize the impact of the record on his career with the line “I owe Eno everything”:

"I owe Eno everything, OK? That's the end of that... I was plucked from the tree, and suddenly I had flowered. I was just waiting. I couldn't do it on my own. I didn't know anything."

"I owe Brian everything. But the primary thing was attitude. Absolute bravery to go in any direction."

“I just want to say one thing again clearly right now: I owe Eno everything. [Recording with him] opened up another world for me that I didn’t know existed, and suddenly I was a part of it.” 

Budd suffered a stroke on November 11th, 2020. While undergoing therapy at a short-term rehabilitation facility, he contracted Covid 19. Less than a month later, on December 8th, he died of complications from Covid, at the age of 84. 

"That’s how I met Brian Eno. A student of mine sent Gavin Bryars a piece of mine, “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.” Gavin sent it immediately to Brian Eno and Eno called me up out of the clear blue sky. One of the things he asked was, “Is this the sort of music you always write?” I said, “Well, yes.” He said, “I want to bring you to London to record.” I said, “Well, OK.” That was it.

I had just given a concert with Marion Brown. Marion was on the road with an academic avant-garde composer of really dull music. A very sweet man but really not happening. Marion said to me, “You played with Albert Ayler,” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’ve read about that, are you still there?” I said, “Oh no, no. I left that ages ago.” He said, “Well, what do you do,” and I played him “Madrigals of the Rose Angel.”

At the end, he said, “Would you please write a piece for my horn?” I promised I would and, by God, I did. After he had heard a performance of that piece at Wesleyan University, Eno said, “We have a saxophonist who is really good,” and I said, “Well, I’m sorry. I wrote this for Marion and it really belongs to him.” He said, “Oh yes, OK, I understand. We’ll bring Marion.” That was it. We showed up and recorded for three or four days in Basing Street Studio in London. Full ensemble, six female singers, and cellist, and percussion and harp. It was amazing. I was so jazzed with London that I eventually moved there. Not only could I not make a living in America, I couldn’t get any performances. I couldn’t get any respect. I was happy to get the hell out of there.”

- Harold Budd

1. The legendary concert took place on June 4th, 1976 at the the Lesser Free Trade Hall. David Nolan, the author of I Swear I Was There: Sex Pistols, Manchester And The Gig That Changed The World states "Without that 4 June gig – and the Pistols return visit six weeks later - there would be no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, no ‘indie’ scene, no The Fall, The Smiths, Hacienda [nightclub], Madchester [scene], Happy Mondays or Oasis.”

2. Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing? consists of four lectures from Cage’s book Silence presented by a single performer but heard simultaneously. One of the lectures is read live, to a backing track of the other three. “Sometimes there’s nothing to listen to, and sometimes there’s more than you can possibly take in,” Cage explained. “And my reason for doing all that is to make an imitation of what our daily experience is.”

3. Budd: "Before I graduated from that college I heard Morton Feldman for the first time and saw his scores and that was revelatory to me. The scores didn’t have music paper, same with John Cage. I was just enthralled with those two guys.” 

4. Brian Eno has called Budd "a great abstract painter trapped in the body of a musician".

5. Budd: “I met Robin Guthrie through Ivo Watts Russell, the founder of 4AD. We went to a Cocteau Twins gig, Elizabeth Fraser’s voice was remarkable, then went backstage to meet them. They initially wanted to only cover one of my pieces, from the Eno collaboration, The Plateaux Of Mirror, but we eventually decided on recording an album of new work together. I developed my friendship with Robin Guthrie there and then. It took about a month of daily work in the studios to do Moon…. There was a very good pub nearby, in White City, I remember, which I took scandalous advantage of, I must say.”