....Like Sand Under Glass....

Eberhard Weber's 1975 album (is this jazz?) Yellow Fields contains the 15:34 track "Sand-Glass". The instrumentation, and the actual things the instruments play, begin in straightforward, nearly overly simplistic fashion, mimicking the form of the music, its undulation, the curved pulse, a slowly motioning wave of forward thought, aiming what appears to be nothing, (or perhaps this all sounds like it aims at nothing) -- fretless electric bass, drums, electric piano, soprano saxophone -- the song (usually instrumental pieces are called "tunes", but this track crosses over into "song" territory, capturing the flag of genre overseen by the guardians of musical categorization, there is nothing to "tune" here, only a singing to be sung through the frozen object of petrified time) barely moves, it's a drone, a repetition of each moment (which is sort of what every object is, isn't it, a thing that appears and reappears only as what it always only is), an ostinato, things that appear and disappear and reappear and elongate and contract and that are altered over time but whose basic shape and scope and intent remain as they always were.

Intent in music is a curious object -- not on the level of the "player", but on the level of the musical "idea" or "phrase". Where does this phrase mean to go based on the form it has taken? How is the form the expression of its own direction?

The song is hushed and appears fragile, it crawls slowly across some perilous surface -- a feeling of floating, or drifting, as though the thing this song is, in its fragility, is terrified to be seen, to be destroyed, it is only to exist under glass. The movement is more water than air, since it doesn't seem that at any point in time all movement would cease if the object moving suddenly accelerated and hurtled through space and crashed into a surface...

It doesn't seem that the disappearance of what holds it up will change the velocity of the world, what separates it from where it currently is and where it may be if everything beneath it ceased to have ever existed.

At the beginning of the piece, behind the ever-repetitive bass pattern and Rhodes chords cloaked in dusk air, there's a sound of a synthesizer, but it's not recognized as a sound that is "produced" through an artifice, a form of sound meant to represent the source of yet another sound. You think of an alien animal at the bottom of a quarry or bog that has, for the moment, awoken into the world, to walk the black earth in the black night. As though it wasn't in the world when it was sleeping, that was simply the image of space that had dreamed it, just then. I think of the giant sand worms that emerge in David Lynch's Dune -- the worms are made of the same substance of the planet in which they bury themselves, and they exist to consume everything that lives on the planet in order that these things become part of the planet.

The synth in "Sand-Glass" hides behind the other music in the song, its mutilated motif that of a melody sleeping, but that of a melody that has awoken the sleeping giant beneath the earth. The synth reappears at the end of the Rhodes solo, which has the feel of something close at hand, something imminent, to elongate a new distance between the sound of an amplified piano (one world) and the sound of a slithering depth that slips past us and pulls us away from ourselves (a subterranean future).

At a certain point in the song (you can see where if you watch the time go by, but the time seems to stay exactly where you are when you are listenining), the horn sound changes from that of a soprano saxophone to either a shenai or a nagaswaram. What you hear when this change occurs is an increase in melodic intensity, although what happens is not a "melody". The horn until this part in the music has hovered above everything else that is hovering, committed to nothing, lilting and treading even more lightly than that. But the change in timbre is like the change from surface to face, from what lies underneath to what is buried at the bottom of the world.

Everything has passed into an immediacy that can't be tracked through thought, just then (and then, then, too). It is a cry of the buried thing unburied, the hidden world unburdened, repression freed from the unconscious, the night made into the night it has always been.

Of course, the song continues, so there's time allowed to track things, to think them, to trace your thinking amongst them. Fifteen minutes for a song is quite a while, but in life, it's hardly anything. A drive across town, a walk to the grocery store, ten pages of a book, a paragraph of written words, a phone call to tell her or him how you feel. In the 70's progressive rock and jazz fusion records were generally filled with 15 minute, 16 minute, 20 minute tracks. It was a way for a band to say something longer than a song, more than simply make a song that you could simply come to know in the time it took to listen to it. Parts dissipated and dissolved, motifs established themselves and recapitulated after 12 minutes of departure....in pseudo-70's fashion, "Sand-Glass" develops, but I'm not sure it has parts -- or even departures, for that matter -- similar to its instrumentation and overall sound, which are of its time, but which seem to be from no time, or a time that knows itself and that is also unknown to itself. Like the sand worms from Dune, who can't know themselves, who can't know anything but themselves, it's a large structure made up of completely identical structures. It rises and falls, eventually, like the creatures who burst through the surface of the earth to announce themselves in space and time, but it's reason to be is simply that it is and that it won't disappear.

After the foreign horn fades, there's a Rhodes/bass/drums swollen sea interlude, only to be followed by a return to the beginning of the song...except with a double-tracked staccato horn melody that indicates some dramatic developments are taking place, at the level of structure, at the level of what the structure contains. And then what might be a "solo", although it's hard to tell if the fretless bass or the Rhodes is doing more of the soloing. But everything is controlled, is inside the container of the song, even when the drummer accelerates and is crashing a massive cymbal (his missive from beyond?) and the synthesizer draws down the moon, and you are too soon staring into the mute face of the moon, reflected in the dark, idle pool before you.

And then there is only the moon, strange as it is above us, as if it, too, is behind glass, perfectly framed, inanimately white, made of nothing but bleached sand, filled with the anticipation of an even clearer, darker, night -- one in which nothing can be seen, and everything is to be heard.