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.

Warped Plastic Wrapped in Plastic

Boards of Canada are intergalactic. Which is a totally meaningless thing to write, an empty set of the easy imagination, the "first thought/best thought" of this uncensored mind in the desolated midst of their preprocessed sound. Which gets to the meat (an irony of impeccable humanity, this word, "meat", since this is music of no flesh and no blood, no wires and no transistors. It is the music of cuddly metaphysical aliens) of what they sound like, some unknown speck, some red planet at the end of an endless telescopic lens --  meaningless, a perfect gleaming space into which any listener can shovel their every multi-layered fantasy of escape and of rescue.

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Boards of Canada's discography lists 9 recordings -- 3 full length records, 3 eps, and 3 "singles". If you look at the discography page on their website here, you'll notice they don't separate these categories. Everything is the same as a recording, it doesn't matter if you listen to BOC for 75 minutes or 5; everything you hear is part of this same eternal stargazed world, this same nocturnal desert island deliverance. "They" are two -- that is, there are two BOC'ers, although it doesn't appear that the number of people matters much, other than the fact that it can't be "a single" person, because the cosmology of the sound is the cosmology of some ancient pact made "betwixt" one and another. "They" have been releasing recordings since 1996, last doing so in 2006. So it's been 5 years since any "recordings" have been made physical in the world; it's been 5 years since I could walk to the record store, flip through the bins, and find something "new" to hold in my hand. But time is ethereal not only within their music, but around it, too, as though the entire mechanism of time passing is contained within and so ordered by this endless telescopic aura. I forget when I last bought their music; I forget that I know their music; I forget that I covet their music. When I return to their music, a return I attempt to prolong through my most hopeful, my most wonderous forgetting, everything I have ever forgotten of it returns, the ancient planet at the heart of everything I have ever longed for as "music".

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Boards of Canada have their own You Tube Channel. All the imagery they allow their music to be fit to is complete -- aged and ancient, emergent and modern, natural and desolate, man-made and intimate. And yet, endless variations exist, can exist, will exist. I'm sure that no one who would make their own You Tube to BOC would ever run out of ideas, there are as many possibilities as to imagine the narrative elements of these songs as there are atoms in a sheet of sheer Saran Wrap. The ease with which your mind rides the sonic elements through a cloud that parts into alien particles is proof that the entire image is as open and life affirming as amniotic fluid, which nourishes, protects, develops, expands. The internal images you make when you listen to BOC expand as the music swells, as the synthesizers slither around you and the drums suddenly sound, when the echoes are stripped away, like Africa. Where is Africa when you look through a telescope? It isn't that Red Planet, is it? Of course it isn't, that would be unfair to think of Africa as "over there", while I am simply "here" dreaming of it. As though all those people in that country, that continent, are simply what I would wish them to be, as alien as anything I have the arrogance to imagine. Jorge Luis Borges' story "The Circular Ruins" is the story of a man who "slips into the unanimous night" to dream a man into reality, only to die in the dreams of the man who dreamed him into reality. It is this "unanimous night" that is the backdrop of BOC's dream, it fills the dream with the emptiness that defines the heart of all things.

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Boards of Canada's music sounds like a record left too long in the afternoon sun, perhaps stored beneath a window through which the afternoon sun shines and burns into an empty bedroom. Records swell and warp, being made of black plastic, in the heat, and a warped record's grooves turn forever asymmetrical once the sun strikes them and distends them until they become an alternate sound universe. But the strangest thing when you listen to a warped record is this -- you try to deny it is warped, because it means the record is over, that you can't listen to it as it once was, that the universe that has been altered is this universe, that time travel is the travel from one (known) time to another (unknown) time, which is still time, which is still you aging and dying and have been being born. The name of their first full-length record, "Music Has a Right to Children", references the deepest concept of humanity, children, possibly to acknowledge that there is nothing so alien as looking through the telescope itself at the sky, which shines in every window through every day and which knows us as well as we know that we were once born. Because we once were born, because we once had that right, and now we simply have the right to time, to the empty day, to something that sounds like something that it no longer is.