The room › Artists › Harold Budd

Where to start with Harold Budd

Start with A Stream With Bright Fish — The Pearl (with Brian Eno), 1984. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 35 Harold Budd tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 14,971 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.

This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 35 Harold Budd tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 35 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.

The mood knob swings 53 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.

Three ways in

The one track, if you only play one

A Stream With Bright Fish — The Pearl (with Brian Eno), 1984. Of the 35 Harold Budd tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.

If you want the melancholy end

Bismillahi 'Rrahmani 'Rrahim — The Pavilion Of Dreams, 1978. The lowest mood reading of any Harold Budd track in the room (3 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.

If you want the euphoric end

Wind In Lonely Fences — Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (with Brian Eno), 1980. The highest, at 48. Same artist, opposite corner — a 53-point swing from the track above.

Where Harold Budd sits in the room

Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Harold Budd's average coordinates and the range they cover.

All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.

What is here, record by record

Every Harold Budd track in the room

Near neighbours in this room

These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Harold Budd's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.

• Where to start with Broadcast — dream pop, 19 tracks
• Where to start with Ryuichi Sakamoto — japanese classical, 24 tracks
• Where to start with Wayne Shorter — bebop, 36 tracks

What the open databases say

MusicBrainz lists Harold Budd as a solo artist, from Los Angeles, the United States and born in 1936. Its contributors tag the artist ambient, minimalism and avant-garde. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.

Questions

How many Harold Budd tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?

There are 35, across 6 albums. 32 of them carry a date, running from 1978 to 2013. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.

Is this a best-of, or a ranking?

No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.

Where do the knob numbers come from?

They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. 34 of these 35 tracks carry an individually placed coordinate rather than the room's default.

Can I listen to these here?

Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 35 of these 35 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.