Rainy Day, Dream Away

The title to a favorite Jimi Hendrix song, off of Electric Ladyland (1968). It rains right now outside, a doomed to forever failure sky. These sounds float up to and evermore remain, distant to everlasting, at the surface, a causeway to thought far beyond clouds and sky, past wind over water.

(Are there any other Hendrix tracks where he solos without any distorted edges, where he's plugged modestly into the amp without anything but the trickle that streams from it? His playing here is sand-glass worn down by salt across time, through deep clear blue space, landing on a clay-caked shipwrecked planet.)

He duels/duals with a saxophone, the track beginning with a cough and a snort, finishing with the triumphant whimper of a new night fading in from the background, a damp empty street flanked by shimmering streetlights. The air clears, a tunnel opens to sweet black mist; a miniature flood of echo, an underground passage where musical goldfishes swim and glide and gild themselves round.

Other rains seep, slip, in. Pharoah's Dance, the sleepy-eyed opener from Miles Davis' Bitches Brew (1969). Layered water upon rain over drops atop dewlets, multiplied echo of chorused Rhodes and deep set-eyed tango guitar, the bass bursting its subterranean bubble to further christen the crisp air. The track is the swiftly flowing river across pebbled beds of soaked sand, whose dulled surfaces are the images of inevitably frozen movement. The drums, far off, at great length, give specific emphasis to each separated beat, each pulse happening changeless, perfect static repetition, are like those clouds, there, that won't move anywhere, the blanketed and immovable sky. (The sky owes us nothing, of course, except for our efforts to remember ourselves beneath it...)

The intro (perhaps the entirety of everything that is the intro, which is the whole song, an intro to nothing but itself, strangely) to Talk Talk's Myrrhman, from 1991's Laughing Stock. (How is it possible that this song exists in a time frame? Does this signify the timelessness, too of this rain, of that one?) It is rolling clouds, but no thunder. It is rain, but nothing pours down, out, or around. The forecast hurricanes are empty sets of unknown things, weirded-out chasm wide voids where the threat of something other has already been dispersed into space. (When I was a kid, we had a hurricane that lasted for 3 days. The wind blew, the sky turned sideways out with a flash of white ambience, and the power came and went and returned. I'm still awaiting that tender hurricane.) Myrrhman is the tender wound of the rain that leaves us without ever having ever arrived.

Do Make Say Think's When Day Chokes the Night, from 2000's Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead, is the sprinkle and splinter of drops, its initial form is a guitar immersed and submerged into night, each note a dripping monument to the night's further acceleration. By the time the drums crash in and cut off everything but themselves, the car has almost swerved off the road, the windshield filled with the flooded sky, the night air the careening sea.

Al Di Meola's rain dream is tracked by Traces of a Tear, from 1985's Cielo e Terra. How I love the lush gardens of your broken eyes, the deep trope of your darkness anchors me to the ache of love, the landscape of ever vanishing desire. But only vanished in as much as a trace can never have been fully erased. Your disappeared tears are the passing of the sky, out of sight, behind the rain, behind the moon, behind these eyes that are some other one's sun.

Jon Hassell and Brian Eno examine their very own Delta Rain Dream on 1980's Fourth World Vol. 1 Possible Musics -- delta being the ground zero of the dream, the rain not a rain cloud but a hovering presence over the terra firma that is the sliding sound beneath it. There is a buzz in the air of a world now unhidden, like the moment you realize when you step out the door that the rain was invisible from the window, that it is hitting you everywhere, that it is a cloud of liquid locusts here to cast doubt on what you see of things, of what you think is right everywhere. Because you never see all of the rain, even when, through the windshield, you see the sky yonder, over miles and miles, and something hovers influx above flooded earth, which flutters helpless like crisped leaves, now ground down under wet heels into graves of mud.

Tomasz Stanko's Soul of Things (2001) is the perfected hush of the world sprinkled with mystic rhythmic sky. The dynamic piano is of particular prescience, time's rain -- or the reign of its passage over the spirit of all-too-human.

Uriah Heep's Rain, from 1973's The Magician's Birthday, makes further use of a piano sea, doubled by flowing vibraphone, to further introduce the inner experience of silent rain, the storm within that has already broke, that leaves me broken and shattered with more than traces, with the hollow howl that is all of my losses at this very moment -- "Look what you've done / to my life" -- the "you" being the rain, the "my" being every surface that you have rippled, stormed, disrupted, destroyed, torn asunder with your thunderous effort to know me.

Of course, on Parto Forte, from After the Big Rain (2007), as Avishai Cohen reminds us, there is an end to our suffering, we are known to the world through the epic opening of the sky, the epilogue of our ancient days. The brightness is an interval meant for our astonishment, and we circle ever more intensely beneath the red sun in order to catch ourselves shouting everything ever over again.