Budd-ahh

Listening to "The Pavilion of Dreams", by Harold Budd -- while trying to relax and let the mountains fall into the sea, the room dark around me, my wife curled up against my chest sleeping softly and ever more softly against the madrigal's song enclouding us -- I realized something weirdly simple, yet aesthetically profound, so much so it feels like I've stumbled upon an open sourced kernel of worldly truth whose value is located in the following epiphanic API: Harold Budd has devoted himself almost exclusively to producing sounds of utter beauty and perfect consonance, that his music is a expression of the shining sea or the forest in the distance of the sea, of a beautiful smile or the face on which the smile's beauty beholds an even greater beauty. His music is the path of wisdom sounded out through the wisdom of what sounds beautiful.

Strange that I never thought of this before, since I've been listening to Budd's music for 25 years now. But partly (or maybe totally) it's because when I listen to things, I listen to everything I think might be there within the sound, including superimposing what I would think would make me make that sound. But that's the thing with Harold Budd -- like his name, the music is humbly there, almost infinitely invisible, but not because it shouldn't be any more visible than it is. There's nothing to see, almost, there is the wind and the fog and the sky and a tree in a field. There's the loss of your breath when everything, for a moment, is as stark as everything really is. I imagine that Harold Budd sees the world as it may be with the heartbreaking nature of each second running through him, the sea behind the sea, the flower behind the flower, which flows towards itself, and towards you, me, him, too.

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But everything does not sound the same, either. The track listed above -- Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim -- is a lush pool of deep beauty, some sacred ground found in the middle of an even lusher forest, with still air and the coolness of knowing that everything around you lives and is safe in living where it lives. But these images seem to reduce the music to something seen, rather than something heard whose hearing is also the richness of seeing and knowing through seeing that what you see is what you are. The music is the beauty, too, deep inside you, but it isn't there to make you feel better about yourself. You don't have the right to even exploit the beauty for that purpose. Marion Brown's saxophone lilts across a tidal shimmering of Rhodes, and there are a billion chiming bells you can't have ever heard but which you could only have already known were there, where the world is smiling at nothing, at space, simulating space without the darkness of space. It's weird, because describing the beauty of Budd's music seems to remove the self from everything I'm describing, yet the self seems to be what is experiencing this same beauty. (I write "seems" because we are getting into a precarious place here, with self and other, with "who" knows "what" and "who" is "what is known"...). But, then, check out these other examples of beauty that is the eternal recurrence of the same, the difference that is everything recreated....

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...The Aperture, from 1995's "Glyph", a collaboration with Hector Zazou, is a more "known" affair, with the signature elements of what we call "downtempo" (or something like that -- I don't get the word even when I know what it is intended to signify) -- a "light" beat, reverberating snare, open space, a repetitive fake bass track, sultry trumpet, and so forth. I hate thinking about it this way, though, because it reduces the music to a style, and the style, while completely present in this track, is very sneaky, and, in fact, the same beauty that is in Bismillahi can be -- actually, is -- found here. It's as if Budd is saying, hey, look man, the Buddha finds the beauty at the heart of everything, whether at the top of the mountain or at the edges of a cocktail bar. And The Aperture is just that -- a cocktail bar that extends into the night, all sleek red lights and flashy glowing tiny gadgets lighting up the pockets of slacks and clutch purses costumed as radio phones for the end of the technological age. Or its new beginning....

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...Not Yet Remembered, from 1980's collaboration with Brian Eno, "Plateaux of Mirror", shows another side of this beauty, or maybe the same beauty seen from in a new light, the light of the repressed past whose repression is known, meaning what exists within it is something to become unknown. The piano trembles like someone terrified of what lies beneath, but who is being held gently in a space such that their terror, too, is warm and dry. And when, in the bridge, a voice wordlessly rings out over higher chords a melody curled around the edges of fall(ing?) (en?) leaves, -- "ahhhhhhhhhh; ahhhhhh-ahhhhhh" -- we know the light of the new day is the light of the afternoon fading from view and into a colder night, a night that we must know, a night we may have always had to have known through our fogged forgetting. I wonder, too, if what is hidden from us is always in plain view as in Poe's "Purloined Letter",  and the game we play with ourselves (or that our mind plays on our brain) is the game of swimming to the surface and taking a breath of that deliciously cool air we need in order to become ready to dive more deeply beneath the earth. This sound of our breath hitting the air is the sound of the voice at the center of Not Yet Remembered, which is always remembered when sung, and always not yet when listened to again.

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....As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, from "Avalon Sutra", Budd's (almost) final album from 2004 (he stopped and then started again after publicly declaring he was over, how perfect, as if he knew exactly how his music making was to the world outside of him while staying inside of himself) -- which, on the double disc set, is given a 73 minute remix, the same gorgeous phrase, repeating over and over, although the repetition is hardly known, you feel when you listen to it that you keep remembering you've heard this slowly ascending violin repeating itself before, that within the 73 minutes you are remembering something -- seems to hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle...But on what does it settle? Does a feather -- or bit of dust, for that matter -- settle upon anything at all, or merely air itself? A feather seems only to have already settled, that its process is an end result that results in nothing but the result you can't observe anything from, since the position of the result is situated in time before everything else happens. To observe things would mean to slow down time to infinity, would be to stretch each note out into an everlasting phrase that wraps around the earth and ties it up that is the beautiful eternity of every moment.

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...Fragment 2, from "Music for Fragments from the Inside", a 2005 collaboration with Eraldo Bernocchi, a meandering melancholia piano fragmenting and rolling over a snapping snare drum. In a way, that's all that happens, for 8:35, although, really, it's all that happens for the 70 minutes of the record. Budd improvises his lushness, spinning webs of empty space, piano notes sparking the darkness with the light that is inside us all. I imagine Bernocchi creating electronics around all of this, while unable to perforate the bubble of Budd's winding world, which seems to move right through the heart of the wicked machine and collapse it in a pile of wind swept stardust, whatever that all is.

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I know nothing of the Buddha. I may know the exact nothing of the Buddha needed to know what I hear when Harold Budd's music plays. My mind is empty, my heart cries out for the emptiness to continue, my mind empties itself even further when the beauty around me is completely, complacently, extant.