Harold Budd Tribute

The OKTAF RECORDS label is putting out what looks to be a very promising tribute album to Harold Budd with people like Biosphere, Marsen Jules,  and several artists I’m less familiar with.

Here’s the Press Release:

With “Lost In The Humming Air – Music inspired by Harold Budd” oktaf records announces an amazing collection of thirteen exclusive tracks made by a selection of some of todays best known ambient music producers giving their tribute to the outstanding piano legend Harold Budd.

The playlists features names as: Deaf Center, Loscil, Martin Fuhs, Biosphere, Xela, Marsen Jules, Andrew Thomas, Mokira, Christopher Willits, Taylor Deupree, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Porn Sword Tobacco and bvdub feat. Criss Van Wey.

Well known for his spaceful piano playing and his early cooperations with Brian Eno, Harold Budd has inspired a whole generation of modern protagonists of ambient, jazz and especially the so called modern classical genre. With his recent releases on David Sylvians Samadhi Sound label as well as on Darla, he is still showing his outstanding musical genius to the world.

“Lost in the Humming Air (Music inspired by Harold Budd)” will be released on April 9th (March 26th digital) on oktaf records. Exclusively distributed by Kompakt.

~© 2012 John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

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New Eno Produced Track from Seun Kuti & Egypt 80

Brian Eno in London Studio

Brian Eno is apparently out producing African music again.  He did a great job with Geoffrey Oreyema and Baaba Maal many years ago. This time he’s paired with Seun Kuti & Egypt 80.  I can’t say I hear much of an Eno-effect here and you’re unlikely to hear it on Echoes, but it’s a pretty good political chant in the mode of Fela Kuti, which makes sense since he’s the youngest son of the late-Nigerian icon.  Here’s the video.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Brian Eno’s Poetronica

Brian Eno has a new album coming out called Drums Between the Bells cut with poet Ric Holland.  Scheduled for a July 4 release, it’s a longtime project Eno has been incubating and a little of it came out on Another Day On Earth in 2005.  Echoes listeners may also recall hearing some of this music when we interviewed Eno in 2003.  Here’s a piece in it’s early stages that I think was called “Click.”

Now they’ve put up a track from the fruition of this project called “Glitch.”

Generally, poetry and music projects fall flat in the land of academic pretense and artful earnestness, but there is an energy to Eno’s work in this zone that I find compelling.  Maybe it’s Eno’s manic rhythm fragmentation with his KAOS Pads.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Jon Hopkins-Eno & Coldplay Collaborator

Jon Hopkins’ Quaint Electronica

You can hear an audio version of this interview with Jon Hopkins’ music.

Jon Hopkins Live on Echoes

You may not know Jon Hopkins, but you’ve heard him on albums by Coldplay, Massive Attack,  Imogen Heap and Brian Eno. On Coldplay’s Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, one of his tracks, “Light Through the Veins”  was transformed on  into the albums lead cut, “Life in Technicolor.”

Jon Hopkins: This track ended up becoming the intro and the outro to the album. I wrote it about a year before I met them, actually.  I think I was in the studio with them and I just played it to the band, and they just seemed to be really into it.  And I worked out a version with Chris [Martin] where there weren’t any drums, and it was kind of — it felt like an intro to something you know, and it just — that’s how it came about really.

Jon Hopkins seems like the most plugged in musician you could imagine, but he says much of his music begins on piano.

Jon Hopkins: A lot of this album was written on the piano, as almost every track has piano in it.

And not just any piano.

Jon Hopkins:  This is a piano I’ve had since I was about six, actually.  My parents got a piano for me.  And on It’s a small upright and on this album . this album, it’s all about this piano and the certain creaks.  Every time you press the left pedal, it creaks.

The debut album by Jon Hopkins, Opalescent, was beautifully melodic, but on his third CD, Insides, he goes for glitchy, angular lines and stuttering rhythms. He gets a lot of these effects using an electronic instrument called a KAOS Pad.  It allows you to manipulate sounds and sequences in real time by sweeping and tapping a touch pad with your fingers.  In our studio, Hopkins starts up a groove and instantly mutates it.

Jon Hopkins: So like I’m trapping that bit of sound and you can change the speed in which you trap it and how much you trap. Every time you let go it adds a new bit of sound. And then if you take it down to the right quadrant it reverses like that.  You kind of play it like a drum machine, but that’s only one effect, there’s a 100 different things you could do.

Jon Hopkins incorporates these moves into a composition like “Vessel.”

Jon Hopkins mixes poignantly beautiful melodies with head-snapping glitches, a sense of quaint nostalgia with post-most modern angst.  His latest album is Insides on Domino Records and he also has a very avant-garde download EP called Seven Gulps of Air.  Jon Hopkins plugs in and plays live on Echoes this Monday, including a new, unreleased track.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Harold Budd-Avatar of Ambient Chamber Music

Harold Budd’s Quiet World

You can hear an audio version of this blog with Harold Budd’s music.

When Daniel Lanois, the producer of U2, Bob Dylan and Peter Gabriel first heard Harold Budd, he hadn’t yet met him.

Daniel Lanois:  For The Plateax of Mirror , I never even met him (laughter), cause he did recordings, like two track piano recordings.  Some with Brian [Eno].  Some on his own. And then Brian would take these tapes and come up to Canada and we would proceed to treat them, manipulate them, and transform them the best we could.  And all I ever knew about Harold was the little bit of talking that he would do preceding takes.  And I always imagined this big, burley American with a strong voice.  Cause he talks like, “Well Brian, I think I’ll do another one now.”  And sort of like a radio announcer from the 50′s, you know talks like this and plays bongos by night.  So (laughter) I had this image of a very strange, big Paul Bunyan guy who played like feathers on the piano.

Daniel Lanois, along with Brian Eno, produced Harold Budd’s early albums, The Plateax of Mirror and The Pearl, making the pianist a legend in the ambient world.  Yet he started out as a jazz drummer in the 1950s, then became a student of Schoenberg style serialism.  Against that backdrop, Harold Budd revolted the only way he could, by making that he called, “pretty music.”

Harold Budd:  I will tell you at the time to use the word pretty music was kind of a political statement.  It was against the received wisdom of what avant guard music was at the time which was confrontational and purposely without….ugly is what I call it. I just wanted candy.  I was not expressing my inner being.  I was just not doing anything except trying to make it as devastatingly pretty as I possibly could.

He’s done that on a series of albums, including The White Arcades, The Room and Lovely Thunder.  Harold Budd takes an unassuming, intuitive approach to a music that’s about the space between the notes.  Sitting at a piano in a studio, he plays a chord.

Harold Budd: If I play a chord, let’s say this one. [Plays]  Okay you have this sort of unstable thing happening down here and I let that have a life of it’s own and where does it got from there [plays] Perfectly nice sound on it’s own.  Has no relationship to the one before it and my job as a performer is to make sure they occur at the right time.

I’ve been in many of Harold Budd’s homes over the last 25 years, but I only saw a piano once, covered with books and papers.

Harold Budd: The piano is aesthetically awful.  It is an ugly thing. Form follows function perfectly and it is just awful.

Yet he plays it so beautifully. In the new millennium, Harold Budd, now aged 73, continues composing.  He’s released recent collaborations with Robin Guthrie and Clive Wright, and authored a few solo piano albums, most recently, a download release called Perhaps.  Harold Budd will be playing solo piano live on Echoes on Tuesday, December 15.  This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Brian Eno: #1 Icon of Echoes

FIVE CDS FOR AN ICON OF ECHOES: BRIAN ENO

Listeners recently voted for the 20 Icons of Echoes and topping the poll by a wide margin was Brian Eno.

Brian Eno In Studio

A few years ago I did a blog called 3 Degrees of Separation from Brian Eno.  Actually, for most musicians, that’s usually one or two degrees at most.  Brian Eno seems to have been everywhere, and if he’s not, his immediate collaborators are.  Roxy Music, Fripp & Eno, Ambient music, Obscure Records, John Cale, David Bowie, Cluster & Eno, No New York, Harold Budd & Brian Eno, Jon Hassell & Brian Eno, U2, Coldplay, Paul Simon, Baaba Maal, Geoffrey Oryema, 801, and the list goes on.  They are all projects Eno has engaged in or artists he’s recorded with, produced, and championed over the last four decades.  It seems that many of the most interesting music movements of the last 40 years have had a little of Brian Eno in them.   But he’s also produced seminal works, which, years after their release, are still beloved.  That’s why he was on top of my personal list and I suspect why he topped our 20 Anniversary Listener Poll for 20 Icons of Echoes.  For essential Eno reading, I suggest On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times fo Brian Eno by David Sheppard.  Or listen to our profile of Eno tonight 10/26 and this weekend on Echoes.

You can see the complete list of 20 Icons of Echoes here.

You can also download a podcast of our Brian Eno Profile/Interview.

To accompany our broadcast of Brian Eno: #1 Icon of Echoes tonight, here’s a list to get you in that Eno state of mind.

5 Essential Brian Eno Albums.

ONE
Another Green World
This is the album where Brian Eno began using his Oblique Strategy cards, conceived with artist Peter Schmidt.  When a creative impasse was reached, Eno would pull out a card and follow its instructions or philosophy, even if the card said “Emphasize the flaws” or “Do nothing for as long as possible.” He relates a  story about Oblique Strategies and “Spirits Drifting” in the Eno interview that runs tonight.  But despite the John Cagian aspect of Oblique Strategies, Eno arrived at an album that brought the worlds of song and ambience together. Instrumental tracks like “Zawinul/Lava” (named for Weather Report keyboardist Joe Zawinul) and “Becalmed” are haunting mood pieces with slow-drip atmospheres.  His songs range from the raging crosscut guitar of “Skysaw” to another one of his oddly affecting exercises in unsentimental nostalgia, “Golden Hours.”  If you have only one Eno album, Another Green World is it.  It has the seeds of virtually everything he’s done since.

TWO

Music for Airports
The blueprint for ambient music, Music for Airports is built out of layered loops of melodic fragments played on acoustic and electric piano, synthesizer and voice.  Deceptively simple in concept, it yields incredible depths of sound with a surprising melancholy for such a “functional” concept.  When Bang on a Can recorded an acoustic version of this album in its entirety, they cast a light on the complex relationships and tantalizing sound design of Eno’s original work.  Listening back to this, it also made me appreciate Discreet Music more, especially the title track.

TWO

Apollo-Atmospheres & Soundtracks
This is arguably the most perfect album that Brian Eno has made.  And since Eno isn’t a musician who strives for perfection, it’s a real rarity.  Written for a documentary about the Apollo space missions, Eno, along with his brother Roger and producer Daniel Lanois, crafted a set of melodically charged mood pieces, that weren’t ambient, but had that yearning, never-ending melancholy of works like the Pachelbel “Canon.”  Using synthesizers, piano and lap steel, each piece is a sublime gift that holds together better than any other Eno album besides Music for Airports, which, after all, only had four pieces.  In 12 tracks, Eno and company leave you breathless, from “An Ending (Ascent), the most haunting of Eno works to “Always Returning.”  I hadn’t thought of it until now, but in using Lanois playing lap steel guitar, Eno may also be responsible for creating the Ambient Americana subgenre.  “Deep Blue Day” was used in Trainspotting when Ewan MacGregor dives into the filthy toilet.

FOUR

Fripp & Eno-No Pussyfooting
We forget that this album actually preceded Eno’s better known ambient works.  I could make an argument for the follow-up, Evening Star, as equally essential, but I’m going with No Pussyfooting for the innocence and purity of it’s concept and the accent on Robert Fripp‘s endlessly undulating sustained guitar leads.  It’s just two tracks, “The Heavenly Music Corporation” and “Swastika Girls,” played live, the former just with guitar and the later with guitar and synthesizer.  Using a tape-loop system similar to Terry Riley‘s in “A Rainbow in Curved Air,” Fripp and Eno would play, their signal recorded on one tape machine which then looped to a second machine which played those notes back into the first deck accompanied by further improvs from the musicians which proceeded to get layered up.  While Fripp has captured the magic of this technique, now updated to digital looping systems, on several albums and performances, subsequent Fripp & Eno recordings after Evening Star always sounded like sketches and outtakes.    Recently released, the new edition of No Pussyfooting contacts additional half-speed versions of “The Heavenly Music Corporation,” and reverse versions of both tracks

FIVE

Here Come the Warm Jets
Brian Eno’s solo debut was somewhat calculated to play off the reputation he’d build with Roxy Music so it was based around songs with something like a pop structure.  But Eno was already bending and twisting those structures into new forms.  “Baby’s On Fire” revealed his lacerating lyric sensibilities and one of Robert Fripp’s most shredded guitar solos.  But Eno was also revealing a more introspective, almost nostalgic side with the affecting bittersweet “Some of Them Are Old” and the reverie of “Some Faraway Beach.”  But then there’s the hallucinogenic sprawl of “Driving Me Backwards” that puts the angst that’s always in Eno’s music smack in your face.

These are only five albums out of around 30 that Brian Eno has made, not including his productions.  But they are the ones that continue to resonate, many of them some 37 years after they were produced.
John Diliberto
((( echoes )))