Harold Budd died today

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As an avant garde composer since the early 1960s, Budd spent six decades as a master of marrying the majestic with the meticulous. Alongside the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Steve Roach and Brian Eno – with whom he teamed up on several releases including 1980’s sublime Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror – his music mined empty space to reveal vast scenes of grandeur. Like pacing through a city at rush hour listening to William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, or settling into Eno’s Music for Airports as you take a seat at a boarding gate, his music invites solipsism: viewing the world through your own private joys and anxieties.

The core Budd sound of yearning piano motifs and reverb-laden impressionism is often called minimalism. But compared with the cyclical craft of Steve Reich and early Philip Glass, his low-key, expansive forays felt deftly maximalist. This has made Budd’s craft synonymous with the dreamworld. An heir to Satie and Debussy, his music was treated and poetic, never kneejerk nor incautious. The disembodied mantras of 1986’s Lovely Thunder, for instance, have guided countless listeners through the nebulous no man’s land between consciousness and sleep.

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