Freezing cold.
                    -- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices.

Glacially slow, and haunting.  Frequently sad and nostalgic, often quietly menacing.  The music is precise and perfect.

I know little about Harold Budd, other than the fact that he is an American, plays the piano, and has collaborated with both Brian Eno and the Cocteau Twins.  He also fills out his music with synthesizers and filtered sounds.

Once I was playing "The Algebra Of Darkness," from Budd's album The White Arcades, and my friend Ryan begged me to turn it off because it sounded too much like one of his nightmares.

Budd makes a few notes resonate, and then the notes become filled with meaning and emotion.  Even if that emotion is often icy and distant.

Harold Budd sounds like winter.  He sounds like falling leaves after a rainy day in mid-autumn.

Despite the fact that his music is almost always found in the New Age section of music stores, Harold Budd is not a New Age musician.  He is closer to a minimalist classical tradition, perhaps like Arvo Part, except without all the religion.

In an interview, Harold Budd once said the problem with New Age music is that there's no room for evil in it.  This is a paraphrase.  The interview is long lost.

Sometimes Harold Budd's music sounds like flakes of silver on an infinite sea of black.

"Algebra of Darkness."  The title is a reference / tribute to William S. Burroughs.

One Christmas I got a cd of The Pearl.  The music sounded like streams and rivers, like being in a peaceful forest all alone, after every other living thing has vanished from the world.

I don't remember how I first heard of Harold Budd, but I'm sure it was because of my fascination with Brian Eno.  I do know the first Harold Budd cd I heard was The Pearl, but I think I knew about him before I got The Pearl.  I probably knew about Budd due to the fact that I had been spending weeks my scouring the microfiche records of libraries, going through hundreds of miniaturized reproductions of old music magazines, looking for information on Brian Eno.  After The Pearl, I found The White Arcades.  Both contain Eno.  The Pearl is a collaboration with Eno, and The White Arcades is produced by Eno.  After that, I picked up Abandoned Cities/The Serpent (In Quicksilver).  And so on.

I remember spring 1990, walking to my Creative Writing class, listening to a tape of Budd on my Walkman, looking at the trees and homes, thinking about slowness and infinity.

Harold Budd is also a Beat poet.  He reads his poems, occasionally, over his music.  I'm not a big fan of Beat poetry, but Budd at least has a calm, slow, slightly menacing sounding voice.  Sometimes the effect works, sometimes not.

Budd is the master of the deep sound.  The bass that rumbles into range from the distance, making a relaxing piano melody suddenly seem brooding, haunted, evil.

Nights spent in my early 20s, my parents out of town, the warm summer air blowing through the open windows.  Me: tapping away on my computer until the sun comes up, the slow music coming out of my speakers making me think of abandoned libraries.

In the distance, underneath the main melodies of "Balthus Bemused by Color," a slow motion, soft explosion, like someone has set off an enormous bomb a hundred miles away.

"Dark Star" drones for 20 minutes.  The sun is now dead and black, an enormous cinder.  Now and then, bits of it flicker into red life, only to crackle and die like a burned-out log.  Space is cold and closer, now.

Music For Three Pianos sounds like it could have been played on one piano.  This is part of its beauty.

Four brief scenarios inspired by Harold Budd:

1.
Walking in an abandoned underground parking garage.  The garage is huge, all concrete and flickering lights.  There are no cars.  You are alone.
        You run your hands along the pillars, feel their could roughness.  You feel vaguely sad, vaguely scared, and somehow excited.
        The sounds your feet make are the only sounds you can hear.  The sound of your shoes echoes off the walls.
        There are huge machines, and pipes behind metal cages.
        There is a security booth made of glass, and it is empty.  The lights in the booth are off.
        You walk, here, for what feel like forever.
        A soft explosion.

2.
There is an old wooden chair in a room.  The chair is empty.
        Other than the chair, the room is empty.
        The walls of the room are gray.
        There is a window, behind the chair, to the right of the chair.
        Outside, you can see it is night.  But there is something else:
        A thin beam of silver light is shining into the room.  Something is outside, shining, but you cannot see it.
        The light illuminates swirling dust.
        And you cannot move.  You cannot speak.  All you can do is stand and look at the chair, and the thin beam of light, and the swirling dust.
        You feel as if you have been here forever.

3.
An abandoned city.  All the buildings are made of wood and concrete.  And they are crumbling.
        It is autumn.  The trees are all dying.
        There are no cars.  The lamp posts are all corroded.
        Nothing has lived here for hundreds of years.
        All the shops are boarded up.  All the houses are empty.
        And you walk down the street, smelling the smell of wet leaves.  And you look in the cracks between boards, you peep into the windows of shops.  And all the rooms are empty.
        You find deserted houses with unlocked doors.  You open the doors and walk through the houses.
        Some of the houses still have furniture in them.  Other houses are empty.  Everything is covered with dust.
        The air is still and smells very old.
        And you know that dead things somehow live in this house.
        You leave, and outside, the wind blows, and the air it brings smells fresh.
        And you close your eyes and will yourself to stay here forever.

4.
Trees, a river.  Fish in the river.  Clouds in the sky.  This is all that is left.

Listening to The Pearl, right now:
        I remember one winter, ten years ago at least, now.  It was cold outside.  And, I was going to University.  University was a fresh experience, then.  And there was that night I was in my room, drinking tea and listening to The White Arcades, and then later The Pearl.  And I was reading The Iliad for my Greek Classics class.
        There was a girl, she worked in a drugstore blocks away, and I had a huge crush on her.
        So I put the book down, and turned off the cd player.
        I put on my parka and told my Mom I was going to the store.
        And I walked all the way to that store, breathing the freezing air.
        The night was still.  Particles of ice floated around me.  It was so cold outside it didn't even feel cold.  Sometimes Canadian winters get like that.
        And my feet crushed snow as I walked.  It sounded like styrofoam bending and snapping.
        And when I got to the store, she was there.  She had brown hair and glasses, brown eyes and a beautiful mouth.
        We talked about things for about an hour, and then I walked back home.
        When I got back home, I went inside.  The air in the house was so warm, it burned the skin on my cheeks.  I watched tv with Mom and Dad for a while, and then I went back to my room.
        I put The Pearl back on.
        I felt like a fool, but I still felt happy.

Next: Final mouse....
 

Epilogue 64.
Epilogue 62.
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