Translucence / Drift Music

The American ambient/neo-classical composer who has most closely allied himself with the increasingly sympathetic independent rock underground — through his collaborations with the Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie — Harold Budd is also one of the very few who can very rightly be called an ambient composer. His music, a sparse and tonal wash of keyboard treatments, was inspired by a boyhood spent listening to the buzz of telephone wires near his home in the Mojave Desert town of Victorville,...