Ocean of Sound by David Toop

Author:David Toop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

Harold Budd was born in Los Angeles in 1936, and as children he and his brother absorbed their father’s romantic infatuation with the western frontier. Subsequently, they were brought up by another family in a tiny Mojave Desert town named Victorville; a “dogwater town” is the way Budd describes it. “You could walk in any direction as long as you wanted, forever”, he says. “It isn’t like there aren’t people around, but you’re alone enough, and it’s quiet enough, where you can stand and hear the sound of utterly nothing at all.” What fugitive sounds existed came from a gust of wind or a radio picking up The Sons of the Pioneers from signals transmitted across the Mexican border. Some of this desertbound silence, spooked by shrieks and crosstalk from other worlds, was later bottled and resold in albums such as Lovely Thunder (1986) and By the Dawn’s Early Light (1991). This was music for a saloon abandoned save for beatnik gunslingers; William Burroughs waving a Colt 45 at the ghost of Geronimo from a table in the corner; Gregory Corso shuffling cards, delivering drunken monologues at the bar; the faint echo from outside of Allen Ginsberg’s harmonium drifting with the tumble weeds. The music is saturated with memories of place, but with its myths, also. “I admit that’s there”, says Harold. “I get the same feeling with the music that I do in that geographical situation. But one doesn’t express the other. It’s not a one-to-one relationship.”

Budd’s landscapes were not necessarily Arcadian. Pieces like Dark Star and Abandoned Cities (both 1984), for example, were cold slabs of opaque colour: Rothko paintings as reworked by Ad Reinhardt; an ominous drift. Yet his 1978 album for Brian Eno’s Obscure label, The Pavilion of Dreams, conjures a gorgeous, translucent mirage. Featuring Marion Brown’s alto saxophone, and including compositions inspired by Pharoah Sanders’s “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” and John Coltrane’s “After the Rain”, this collection of five pieces reminds us of a forgotten dimension of free jazz, the meditational point of temporary rest where sorrow, battered optimism, devotion and spiritual ecstasy melted together. Listen to John Coltrane’s “Expression”, Albert Ayler’s “Going Home” from his 1964 album of spirituals, “Venus” by Pharoah Sanders, or a much later example, the spectral cry of Ornette Coleman’s alto saxophone, floating over Prime Time’s strange tunings and decomposing drum machines, along with his own slithering violin, on “Virgin Beauty”. Another source for the post-minimalist improvising composer.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Budd performed duets with tenorist Ayler when both of them served in the same army unit in Fort Ord, California. Describing himself as a jazz snob who tracked down Charles Ives or Hindemith recordings only if jazz musicians mentioned them in interview, Budd played with Ayler in the marching band, giving weekly radio broadcasts from the base. “It seemed better to me than shooting guns”, he says. Two strangers in a strange land, they would make forays into the hipper clubs of Monterey and Oakland.

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