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Behind the dialogue
We re in a mess.
There’s a future essay to be written about COVID-19 culture – the artefacts that emerged from our plague year and what they say about where we were as a society: celebrities Zoom duets, the veneration of Sir Tom, our weekly clap for the NHS. These things were born of an instinct to find a unifying sense of positivity. Now, with a few months’ distance, it looks more like escapism, all of it masking a terror writhing beneath.
At the time there seemed to be little alternative, culturally speaking. But last year, amid what we would come to know as the UK’s first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself instead listening obsessively to an album which seemed to capture the public mood perfectly. That album was
Harold Budd - Master Of Ambient Music Dies Published 11/12/20
Harold Budd at Bill Nelson’s 70th Birthday concert, Leeds 2018.Photo: Martin Bostock Photography
Tributes have been paid by the music community around the world to American composer and pianist Harold Budd, often cited as one of the founding fathers of ambient, who died from complications of Covid-19 following an earlier stroke in November.
Graduating from the University of Southern California, in 1966, he wrote a number of minimalist pieces before taking a teaching position at the California Institute of Arts in 1970 and released his first studio album,
The Oak Of The Golden Dreams / Coeur D’Orr, that same year.