Harold Budd La Belle Vista
Released: October 07, 2003 Origination Year: 2003 Time: N/A Tracks: 10 Produced by: Daniel Lanois Style: Studio Format: CD Enhancement: None Label:Shout! Factory Records
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Harold Budd Harold Budd: Piano

Harold Budd’s legacy runs the length of several decades extending as far back as the 60s. He’s run with the influential, most notably Brian Eno. He has recorded with some of those decades’ best including not only Eno but the Cocteau Twins as well. His skill with the keyboards has put Harold Budd into the short list of whom to record with for many avant garde artists and therefore a darling of that same audience.

With a career that started as a multi instrumentalist for the various ventures that he found himself involved with, Budd soon gravitated toward the piano. His music, often brooding but always improvisational, shaped throughout the years to become a signature style, one that is recognizable by fans.

Roger Eno created a hypnotic work that centred on the piano with simple melodies and captivating arrangements. The album, his first, was called Voices. With that album, Eno placed himself into a select group whose classicism helped to form the ambient structure of the avant garde styles so welcomed by the audience that appreciated the merge of beautiful melodies and who favoured rock music. Harold Budd helped to pioneer this movement with a string of chameleonic albums that ranged from minimalistic to improvisational in nature. Where Roger Eno used treated piano, Budd created pure tones. After all, Budd has been called “the poet of the piano.”

Harold Budd offers his 23rd album, a pallet of notes that combine to create a mind wash of soothing tones. This set of 10 original Budd compositions was created over two sessions, one with tape rolling without his knowledge and which showcases his serene approach in a purity of flow.

Each track is piano only. There are no added musical textures. What you get is a fierce zone of focus, a singularity of time where only the piano and its notes are in existence, gently birthed from the emotion of Budd’s soul. Neo-classicism at its epochal best.

This work doesn’t produce anything of structure other than being ‘raindrops in time’. Beautiful for it’s flow and spontaneity, you know that you have heard something; you just can’t remember the melodies. But it doesn’t stop them from resonating in your soul, which is enough to bring you back for a time of therapeutic relaxation again and again. Reclining and closing your eyes, letting the lone, forlorn piano wash over you, achieve the best results. There isn’t a frenzy of overlapping piano notes. Each key owns its own space in time, alive for the second that it decays only to give way to another soft tone.

World famous producer, Daniel Lanois, produced this work. As a matter of fact, it was Lanois’ Steinway that is used by Harold Budd in the recording of this delicate collection of music.

This music is for the lover of piano, no doubt. But more than that, it’s for the lover of music that understands the merge of soul and the timeless notes that emerge from the softly touched strings of the piano. It’s for that one singularity of moment where both the listener and the music become the one tick of the clock.