Harold Budd, victim of covid-19, dies at 84.

The American composer Harold Budd, one of the most influential in the field of ambient music, has died at the age of 84 as a result of covid-19.

Harold Montgomery Budd was born in Los Angeles on 24 May 1936 and grew up in Victorville, California. While in the army, he played drums and made music with free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler. His real musical career began in the early 1960s when he decided to enter the world of composition and graduated in 1966 with Ingolf Dahl from the University of Southern California. Inspired by Morton Feldman and a speech by the American composer John Cage, he turned to minimalist compositions. Since the 1980s he has been considered one of the most important representatives of ambient music.

His first recorded work, The Oak Of The Golden Dreams, was released in 1970, but his breakthrough came eight years later, when he released the album The Pavillion Of Dreams, produced by Brian Eno. It was the first of several collaborations between the two. Eno was also involved as producer on the albums Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (1980) and The Pearl (1984). His most fruitful and prolonged collaboration over time has been with the British composer and producer Robin Guthrie, a member of The Cocteau Twins in the eighties, with whom he released several albums, such as the soundtrack to Gregg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin (2004) and the recently released album Another Flower. Over the years, Budd has collaborated with many other musicians, including Ultravox singer John Foxx and Public Image Ltd. bassist Jah Wobble.