Curious Music is pleased to announce the release of Luxa by Harold Budd on limited-edition double 180-gram vinyl and FLAC DL.

Luxa was composed and performed entirely by Budd, recorded with engineer Michael Coleman in 11 days in June 1996 at the tiny Orangewood Studio near Mesa, Arizona. The album was originally released on CD only by All Saints Records in 1996.

Luxa contains Budd’s distinctive piano signature while maintaining the balance between pretty ambient music and an evocative, starker use of space and silence. A number of the album’s 16 tracks are ornamented with a variety of African and Indian rattles, shakers, gourds and bells, creating a contrast of depth and rhythm. “Chet,” the longest album track, uses silence as a kind of languid loop. While “Paul McCarthy” balances piano and bells in a strident, elliptical lope. The album concludes with a duo of covers - “Sweet Earth Flying” by Marion Brown, a sweeter rendition of the jazz musician’s solo organ piece, and “Pleasure” from Steven Brown (ex-Tuxedomoon), ending the album on a somewhat cacophonous note. In all, Luxa offers up the very best of Budd, a record that is at once both idiosyncratic and inviting.

This first-ever vinyl release of Luxa has been painstakingly remastered by Tim Story and comes in a high-quality limited edition of 500 copies on 2LP 180-gram black vinyl pressed at 45 rpm. The gatefold sleeve is printed in a deluxe matte finish and includes a beautiful high-resolution, numbered art print. 100 artist proof copies of the art print are individually available as well.

The 2018 remaster is also available in resplendent digital sound as a lossless FLAC DL.

Luxa was pressed at Memphis Record Pressing in Memphis, Tennessee.

100 artist proof copies of the art print are individually available as well.

“Titles are very important to me. From them come the music ideas. A good piece can be ruined by an awful title. I think of Luxa more as a decorative thing. An art term. From there, the music insinuated itself.”

-        Harold Budd

"Luxa is a minor masterpiece that demonstrates that there’s still life in ambient music, and that it’s still possible to make a meditative musical work that’s neither New Age kitsch, nor weighed down by the numbing repetitiveness and sterile conceptualism that’s hampered the minimalist and ambient genres for so long."

-        Paul Tingen, Sound on Sound, January 1997

“Relaxing, warm music, like sun on a red tile floor.”

-        Ted Mills, AllMusic