Harold Budd is one of the very few artists who can correctly be referred to as 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, California (though he was born in nearby Los Angeles). Though interested in music from an early age, Budd was 36, already married and with children of his own, by the time he graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Musical Composition in 1966.

He became a respected name in the circle of minimalist and avant-garde composers based in Southern California during the late '60s, premiering his works The Candy-Apple Revision and Unspecified D-Flat Major Chord and Lirio around the area. In 1970, he began a teaching career at the California Institute of Arts, but continued to compose while there, writing Madrigals of the Rose Angel in 1972.

In 1976, Budd gained a recording contract with the Brian Eno affiliated EG Records, and released his debut album, The Pavilion of Dreams, in 1978. Two years later, he collaborated with Eno on one of the landmark albums of the ambient style, Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirrors.

Budd again worked with Eno on 1984's The Pearl. A contract with Eno's Opal Records resulted in one of Budd's most glorious albums, The White Arcades, recorded in Edinburgh with Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins.

Budd left Opal after 1991's By the Dawn's Early Light, and recorded two albums for Gyroscope: Music for Three Pianos (with Ruben Garcia and Daniel Lentz) and the lauded Through the Hill, a collaboration with Andy Partridge of XTC. Through the mid-'90s, he recorded albums for New Albion and All Saints before signing to Atlantic for the release of The Room in mid-2000.

In 2004 Budd decided to retire, claiming he had said all he wanted to, and that he "didn't mind disappearing." His final outing, Avalon Sutra/As Long As I Can See My Breath, appeared on David Sylvian's Samhadi Sound imprint as a double disc.

Eraldo Bernocchi, around 1977, at the age of 14, started playing with independent punk bands but, rapidly finding the medium too limited, he moved towards electronic experimental music. In 1985, together with Paolo Bandera and Luca Di Giorgio, he created the audio conceptual project Sigillum S. Between '87 and '92, he worked as a general manager for tourism in the Far East for a leading wholesaler company. This job enabled him to travel most of the time, bringing him in contact with other musical expressions as well with eastern shamanic traditions. This had a deep influence on his future work. During this period Sigillum S also became an international cult act and Bernocchi began other musical ventures, such as his solo project Ashes.

In 1993, together with the visual artist Petulia Mattioli, he created the cultural project Verba Corrige Productions. It's aim to provide different artistic forms a permanent laboratory where interaction could be total. In this year collaborations with international artists Bill Laswell, Mick Harris/Scorn and Jim Plotkin were also begun... Proving to be fruitful and long lasting relationships.

In '94, with Mattioli and Laswell, Eraldo created SOMMA, an ideal meeting of shamanic rituals processed by electronic technology and dub cycles. By '98, he had started working and recording with Toshinori Kondo, with whom he played at the Hamburg Jazz festival and in 2000 the Oscar winner Gabriele Salvatores called on him to score his new motion picture, Denti.

2004 saw Bernocchi work on advert music in Italy and composes music for national television for the Europlis, Telecamere and Elisir features.

2005 - an album with the NYC metal band Crisis is in progress, recordings took place in California early 2005. A new album with Laswell and Kondo as Charged is planned, as is a new album with Laswell and indian drummer/producer Karsh Kale.

(Biography Last updated 18 July 2005)