Budd-ahh

Listening to "The Pavilion of Dreams", by Harold Budd -- while trying to relax and let the mountains fall into the sea, the room dark around me, my wife curled up against my chest sleeping softly and ever more softly against the madrigal's song enclouding us -- I realized something weirdly simple, yet aesthetically profound, so much so it feels like I've stumbled upon an open sourced kernel of worldly truth whose value is located in the following epiphanic API: Harold Budd has devoted himself almost exclusively to producing sounds of utter beauty and perfect consonance, that his music is a expression of the shining sea or the forest in the distance of the sea, of a beautiful smile or the face on which the smile's beauty beholds an even greater beauty. His music is the path of wisdom sounded out through the wisdom of what sounds beautiful.

Strange that I never thought of this before, since I've been listening to Budd's music for 25 years now. But partly (or maybe totally) it's because when I listen to things, I listen to everything I think might be there within the sound, including superimposing what I would think would make me make that sound. But that's the thing with Harold Budd -- like his name, the music is humbly there, almost infinitely invisible, but not because it shouldn't be any more visible than it is. There's nothing to see, almost, there is the wind and the fog and the sky and a tree in a field. There's the loss of your breath when everything, for a moment, is as stark as everything really is. I imagine that Harold Budd sees the world as it may be with the heartbreaking nature of each second running through him, the sea behind the sea, the flower behind the flower, which flows towards itself, and towards you, me, him, too.

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But everything does not sound the same, either. The track listed above -- Bismillahi 'Rrahman 'Rrahim -- is a lush pool of deep beauty, some sacred ground found in the middle of an even lusher forest, with still air and the coolness of knowing that everything around you lives and is safe in living where it lives. But these images seem to reduce the music to something seen, rather than something heard whose hearing is also the richness of seeing and knowing through seeing that what you see is what you are. The music is the beauty, too, deep inside you, but it isn't there to make you feel better about yourself. You don't have the right to even exploit the beauty for that purpose. Marion Brown's saxophone lilts across a tidal shimmering of Rhodes, and there are a billion chiming bells you can't have ever heard but which you could only have already known were there, where the world is smiling at nothing, at space, simulating space without the darkness of space. It's weird, because describing the beauty of Budd's music seems to remove the self from everything I'm describing, yet the self seems to be what is experiencing this same beauty. (I write "seems" because we are getting into a precarious place here, with self and other, with "who" knows "what" and "who" is "what is known"...). But, then, check out these other examples of beauty that is the eternal recurrence of the same, the difference that is everything recreated....

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...The Aperture, from 1995's "Glyph", a collaboration with Hector Zazou, is a more "known" affair, with the signature elements of what we call "downtempo" (or something like that -- I don't get the word even when I know what it is intended to signify) -- a "light" beat, reverberating snare, open space, a repetitive fake bass track, sultry trumpet, and so forth. I hate thinking about it this way, though, because it reduces the music to a style, and the style, while completely present in this track, is very sneaky, and, in fact, the same beauty that is in Bismillahi can be -- actually, is -- found here. It's as if Budd is saying, hey, look man, the Buddha finds the beauty at the heart of everything, whether at the top of the mountain or at the edges of a cocktail bar. And The Aperture is just that -- a cocktail bar that extends into the night, all sleek red lights and flashy glowing tiny gadgets lighting up the pockets of slacks and clutch purses costumed as radio phones for the end of the technological age. Or its new beginning....

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...Not Yet Remembered, from 1980's collaboration with Brian Eno, "Plateaux of Mirror", shows another side of this beauty, or maybe the same beauty seen from in a new light, the light of the repressed past whose repression is known, meaning what exists within it is something to become unknown. The piano trembles like someone terrified of what lies beneath, but who is being held gently in a space such that their terror, too, is warm and dry. And when, in the bridge, a voice wordlessly rings out over higher chords a melody curled around the edges of fall(ing?) (en?) leaves, -- "ahhhhhhhhhh; ahhhhhh-ahhhhhh" -- we know the light of the new day is the light of the afternoon fading from view and into a colder night, a night that we must know, a night we may have always had to have known through our fogged forgetting. I wonder, too, if what is hidden from us is always in plain view as in Poe's "Purloined Letter",  and the game we play with ourselves (or that our mind plays on our brain) is the game of swimming to the surface and taking a breath of that deliciously cool air we need in order to become ready to dive more deeply beneath the earth. This sound of our breath hitting the air is the sound of the voice at the center of Not Yet Remembered, which is always remembered when sung, and always not yet when listened to again.

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....As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, from "Avalon Sutra", Budd's (almost) final album from 2004 (he stopped and then started again after publicly declaring he was over, how perfect, as if he knew exactly how his music making was to the world outside of him while staying inside of himself) -- which, on the double disc set, is given a 73 minute remix, the same gorgeous phrase, repeating over and over, although the repetition is hardly known, you feel when you listen to it that you keep remembering you've heard this slowly ascending violin repeating itself before, that within the 73 minutes you are remembering something -- seems to hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle, then realign itself with the air around it, then float away, then hover and settle...But on what does it settle? Does a feather -- or bit of dust, for that matter -- settle upon anything at all, or merely air itself? A feather seems only to have already settled, that its process is an end result that results in nothing but the result you can't observe anything from, since the position of the result is situated in time before everything else happens. To observe things would mean to slow down time to infinity, would be to stretch each note out into an everlasting phrase that wraps around the earth and ties it up that is the beautiful eternity of every moment.

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...Fragment 2, from "Music for Fragments from the Inside", a 2005 collaboration with Eraldo Bernocchi, a meandering melancholia piano fragmenting and rolling over a snapping snare drum. In a way, that's all that happens, for 8:35, although, really, it's all that happens for the 70 minutes of the record. Budd improvises his lushness, spinning webs of empty space, piano notes sparking the darkness with the light that is inside us all. I imagine Bernocchi creating electronics around all of this, while unable to perforate the bubble of Budd's winding world, which seems to move right through the heart of the wicked machine and collapse it in a pile of wind swept stardust, whatever that all is.

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I know nothing of the Buddha. I may know the exact nothing of the Buddha needed to know what I hear when Harold Budd's music plays. My mind is empty, my heart cries out for the emptiness to continue, my mind empties itself even further when the beauty around me is completely, complacently, extant.

Desert Marauders

I will readily, yet reluctantly, confess, I didn't come up with that name. But, well, ain't it just the coolest? "Desert Marauders"? Even cooler, the group who decided their record should be called this (although I don't know who decided what, nor even what decision was made, only that there is this thing named "Desert Marauders", and this thing named this is a thing of music, the sound of music, the object that contains the sound, the object that is a record, the record that records what happened, once, many times) is Art Lande and Rubisa Patrol. I mean, they sound like a bunch of guys in a sandblasted space jeep who roam the edges of the desert and ensure that that which must be safe is safe, that attack that which must be attacked. I imagine bearded faces plastered with black sand, with white earth, with space between them and the edge of the world, the only thing behind them the blinding horizon.

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Like any good group that knows you can never overname something perfectly named (for example, Night Ranger and, also, Iron Maiden, amongst others), the first track from "Desert Marauders" is perfectly named "Rubisa Patrol", because the group that Marauds also Patrols, the desert is also somewhere we are not and will only have tried to have been.  When Ozzy Osbourne sings "Please God Help Me!!!" on "Black Sabbath", from Black Sabbath's "Black Sabbath", he's also enacting the remaining name, the public and the political, that lies outside the personal out of which he sings. The name that is the sign, the sign that makes the name of the world. Desert Marauders maps a world that the musicians patrol, inhabit, dominate, deploy, duplicate in sound from word. There is nothing left to say, nothing less to say, than what they wordlessly leave behind them.

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All good music seems to be plagued by the failure of description. It exceeds all description, but, also, the description of the music exceeds the effort made to know it in words. Yet, there's never a reason not to try; as James Brown crooned, "Nothing beats a try but a fail". The try here is the excellence of the raucous midnight that is the 16 minute opening track, where the piano plants a staccato palm tree in the midst of a sea of sand, and what arises are the cool pool of southpaw trumpet, bass bouncing and then bobbing along the imaginary waves on an imaginary sea, the drums the thunderhead in the distance, the war planes and dreamtime drama of the new day. All of this is the failure to describe itself, only to mimic and homage Miles Davis' best years, from 1967-1975 all in a brief whisper of progressive distancing, de-stancing..

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You can't really find "Desert Marauders" on cd, I don't think. If you buy a turntable and hunt down some used records, you can pick it up on album, which is kind of cool, although probably more obscure than is necessary, because you join yourself to the legion that are their own desert marauders. those fast flipping fingered men who mine the faded cardboarded past of smudged black plastic. But then, this is necessary, so the obscurity is worth everything, even if it means you become someone you thought you'd never mean to be. The record starts, also, in a kind of obscurity, the sound of a banging piano on a simple chord, rhythmic and near, immediate and suggestive of some infinite distance beyond it. A drum trots out, silently rolling in like wind to kick up sand in the face of the blazing sky, the piano standing firm with its mechanical rhythm, one chord, full and round and stern and stoic. A horn whines, it's a trumpet but you might not know it, it might not matter what the horn whining is, it may only mean that what matters is that it whines and whimpers and breathes and burns into space. Of course, this happens for a little bit, there's a drama to building what is to come, cities are not the result of one or many days, but of every day that it takes to take what is empty and forge walls and caves and what links these two forms in the beyond of the world, above ground, reaching all arms up towards the sky.

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The thing, then, that happens, is that the piano changes and swells and advances into a rhythmic romp, a riff open to the new world -- dah-dah-dahhhhh-da-da da-da-dah-dah-dahhhhhhhh -- in a strange time signature and signalling a strange time of the world just then. Just then because of the immediacy of the change and the intensity of the tone and the open ended nature of everything that comes forth, the drums skipping down the side of the mountain and jumping into the sea, the trumpet jabbing out into space as if to knock down the danger at the edge of the desert with its pointed fists and knife-edged knuckles, the bass burrowing deep into the sand and hiding amongst the beetles and worms that sleep in the cool earth. The quiet night of the earth that arises with the cacophonic polyphony that rolls out of the record, of the circle, of the system that is theirs, that is there for us to hear.

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There's more to this record than just the opening track -- and all of it is to be known, to be heard, to feed the mind with the sound that lies inside the mind. But all of it comes after the announcement that the landscape of the moon is the empty desert the patrol will ride and protect. Protect yourself, I say, from what is out there, by venturing into the white empty distance, the black open evening. Everything is there for us all, even when we close our eyes and our eyes become the ears through which we see the dark sky, the open book of the dark sky.

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Interesting, then, that the second track on side one is called "Livre (Near The Sky)" -- a book that lies in proximity, then, to the open air that yawns over us. But what an odd juxtaposition, an impossible imposition that -- that anything is ever "near" the sky -- the sky is up there, always over us, and the only thing anything can be is "in" it. But then, when you mine the desert -- when you ride along the edge of the cursed earth, the crest of the morning and the deep crusted sand that curdles against the sea -- perhaps what you are is only where you are: near the sky, pages upturned towards the yawning night, the wordless dawn of man and of the battle for the end of time.

Sabotaged by Tomorrow's Dream

It's funny to think of Sabbath now -- not "funny ha-ha", but "funny strange", maybe even "funny wistful", or "funny sad" -- after all that's happened in rock music, heavy music, popular culture and with every parody of what rock music is. It's tough to remember that there was no such thing as "self-consciousness" when rock began as we know it to now be, no empty reflection on the lack of meaning or absurdity of intended meaning, which we now have and by which we will always be plagued. I don't mean an "innocence" here, though  -- there is nothing like that anywhere on this earth, which is unearthed with the sound of what has always lain beneath. Nothing is innocent there, because there is no guilt where no one has ever been.

What earth, anyway? And whose? As "Hole in the Sky" from 1975's Sabotage shrieks, (please) "Take Me to Heaven". Which heaven, nohow? It's the heaven of space, of non-planet Pluto, of a future where there is nothing but the future that promises us the future. Black Sabbath had, since their second record, Paranoid (1970), authored a sound of doom they then enrobed in a bucket of glorified sludge, but, weirdly enough, they held this sound at enough of a distance to give you a space into which you could crawl and hide and safely wait, en-wombed, for the sun to crash into the sea. This sound continued down its dark path through each subsequent record -- the pope-on-a-rope-hopelessness of Master of Reality, the cocained-emotion-freeze of Vol 4, the morning-after-Bloody-'ell-Mary of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath -- until the high voltage hero came across the other side of the world to the depressed pill popper, they commingled translucences, and they effervesced a sacred problem child: the complete annihilation of everything, Sabotage, which seems to believe less in nothing than in what is the "less than nothing". "The food of love became the greed of our time / and now we're living on the profits of crime" - these lines aren't even sung, they are smiled over a riff that evokes the electricity of any abandoned power station on any planet not yet learned of in any science fiction novel. What I always thought, when I dropped the needle down on this track, was that the windows over my stereo would implode in a fit of static recognition, since the song wasn't angry as much as it was scolding, explaining to each earthling, with each rabid and overamplified sound, that the narrator's gaze through the heart of the sunrise, beyond the purity of space, was a wish to start everything over again, was to rebel against everything that had driven us all into depravity. This was heaviness in the name of clearing everything and replacing every piece upon the board, cleansing us all in a mud bath of delectable regret.

Of course, after we have catapulted through the sky to the end of things, and we interlude with fluttering butterflies of acoustic guitar layered across the path of the nevermore, we come upon a universe that we won't ever understand. Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAH naht - Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAHT NAH naht-- the riff of "Symptom of the Universe" breaks open the typical Sabbath heavier-than-thou-lead-doom and spills the blood of punks into the black space, punks who have not yet invented themselves, but whose DNA blueprints the end of history so long as we decide to critique it. As a kid, I longed to know how this riff -- simple to the point of blank absurdity, creating the raw deal that one can only have always lived beneath -- could shake the world to bits and leave behind this trail of dust that one could follow beyond the sun and the yoke of its setting. But the song is stranger than the riff, Sabbath was always stranger than doom and more ambiguous than this metal genre they helped to make into a gorgeous dark joke.

The massive cymballic flash on "Symptom of the Universe" -- it's as if the cymbals create a blankened space for the "A" part of the riff, the guitar and bass a raft hurtling down a desolately endangering river, the cymbals the smooth rock canyon walls on either side. But when part "B" of the riff comes, the guitar and bass stop short and the drums are the raft thrown over the rapids, cymbals fading behind the sound of the falling sticks hucked in panic at the drumskins. This being Sabbath, this song has too many parts for a song to have; they shoved too much music into a small space in order to crack the space open, in order to explode space into a blackness for the world to believe in. "Symptom of the Universe" literally explodes after a series of multiply interchanging parts, --verses, choruses, post shard-shooting guitar star solo -- into a universe where the lone planet is future hippie desire -- "O my child of lost creation / come and step inside my dree-eams" -- this is pattered over a slight funk vamp, with a village of acoustic guitars and extreme post-Woodstock noodling across each passing second, which are hurtled into the asteroids of tomorrow's hallucinatory promise.

"Megalomania" closes side 1, and it closes the hole in the sky, it reverses the exploding universe by imploding everything back into the center of your mind. I had to look the word's meaning up when I was a kid, but even reading what it meant didn't change the absolute otherness of the word itself staring into me from the back cover. What does it mean to name a song "Megalomania"? It is a mania of the metaphysical; perhaps the symptom of this mania can only be known through the universe itself....

The song is a dark cauldron of impossible sorcery, something that seems to be from beyond time, but also in the time that is the time inside your head, which is the same hole as the space in the sky. There are swirls of guitars spiraling within synths stacked atop the dream brain that is the one who thinks only of himself in his blindness. Sabbath has always courted madness as a state of mind in their songs, and "Megalomania" is the pinnacle of the madness that plagues the mind that knows nothing of itself, not even its own pain. We get to deal with this for 9:46, and when everything fades, we are still getting to deal with what faded away.

Side 2 entices the most Vegas-ed of us with "The Thrill of it All", a perfect cynical counterpart to "Megalomania', which ends in a cannibalistic carnival of total confusion. "Thrill" begins with forked tongue guitar, soon overridden by the return of the cannibals in droves, 30 guitars and synths and bass and drums and too many people in too few rooms. But when we get to the verse of "Thrill", everything drops out but a greedy rock riff played with democratic vision, even the singing sliding over it all is the riff, too. The thrill is the fact that the self obsessed autocrat is engaged with only this thrill, everything is included inside it, the entire universe compromised by lying still, lying perfectly in the lap of this lie. The narrator is only all lies, the intent of the lying voice is to thrill you with a forked tongue. Lying leads only to tyranny, a tyrant's fantasy of a swirled world of voices, strings, and death.

"Supertzar", whose only words are the play on words of "star/czar", and whose only song is the chorus that accentuates the ascension of each musical mountain, is the result of this tyranny, this mutation of the real into the space that is behind the mountain, that dominates it with its barbaric yawn. The song is "heavy", but what's weird about its "heaviness" is that there is only a lone guitar amongst the multiplicity of strings and chorus, whose mutivalence atop the simple rock accompaniment of bass and drums (these are there but almost unheard) gives the guitar its extra chainsawing cinder block-ed power, as if the guitar is the black figure of the lone rider (as in Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter") and the strings and voices are the sky and sun and the drums and bass are the impotent ground beneath it all. The future, beyond the sun, lies where there is nothing beneath anything, the ground is helpless to crumble, the mind is everything that is every crumb in any world. Insanity, when I walk into a room and everyone stares at the bright new world painted lazily behind my eyes.

"Am I Going Insane" seems to ground us for a moment, the song disguised as a sheen pop surface with entwined guitars in splendiferous harmony. We hear that everything is right, except for the fact that everything feels wrong in this song, the bass awkwardly loud and thundering and stomping like a zombie stalking the moon, the crunchy edges of the guitars peeled back to reveal only a pierced vein of twisted soloing. The singer seems too loud, too large, a baby crushing the zombie stalking the moon, semi-articulate and semi awake. As the song fades, a crazed chorus (the mirror image of the warlord choir in "Supertzar') arises, cackles and frantic howls and intensities of the inner voice gone to the zombie moon. The voice that wins out over all is the voice that screams the loudest -- the screams of a child whose pain will outlast every universe. Sabbath lets that voice extend 11 seconds into the next track, the exploding monolith "The Writ".

Writing about this is tiring, and "The Writ" is the most tiring of the writing. Why? Why write something formal, something to order and organize the world such that the universe itself is no longer only the singular amorphous mass that is the "it" it is? "The Writ" is made up of many shapes, it is also amorphous, and it seems to slip past you before the 8:17 it occupies. The song is like the presence of something that is in a space, that vanishes, that has vanished even while it was there, a law laid down by ghosts of the never to be remembered future.

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Sabotage is that memory of something that never was; it is the reduction of that thing to what can never have been. It's where Black Sabbath was last seen, before we forgot what it meant to see something appear and mean even nothing. It is the meaning of the "less than nothing" that is the universe you will forget right this minute.

....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.

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.

The Set-up

In my bedroom, we have a small Panasonic CD "stereo", an all-inclusive AM/FM receiver with a CD player and a nifty remote control. (I don't think the am/fm have actually ever been used, but since it belongs to my wife, as a gift from her former boyfriend, it is part of a life that precedes me, and therefore has an unknown history, which most certainly adds to its mystique.) I'm sure this thing cost $300 a few years ago, and I could get a new one right now for $50, so it has aged with the depreciation usually saved for foreign cars. (This thing has paid for itself and now actually pays for me to use it, strangely enough....)

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"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.

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Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.

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Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.

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None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.