Sandy Bull
E Pluribus Unum

I am traveling. This week, I have traversed space-time borders, moving from Pakistan to Morocco, from there to India, and then from Persia to Baluchistan, gliding over Mauritania, flying over Yemen headed to Tajikistan: from the digital flying carpet, I observe the immense desert expanses, the multitudes crossing them, the crannies among the rocks that wrinkle the earth's surface, transfiguring it into mysterious shapes. Buzzing and multicolored markets, bustling, then spaces of absolute and enigmatic silences from which chanting voices rise, indecipherable sound hieroglyphs in spirals ascending to the sky. I have heard sounds from a past so distant that they seem foreign even to their present offspring, projected into a future that does not foresee a past. And I discovered them, those sounds, close and present, moving. I blessed the blessed absence of words and, when I heard words, I instead blessed my vast ignorance: to me, they are sounds among other sounds, sinuous vibrating lines, mystery within mystery.

But now, by the strange routes traced by coincidences, I've ended up here, centuries later, at the other end of the world, in a land still in its infancy yet already enormous, where 40 years is the distant past, an abyssal distance, history. I am here, in America that is awakening from a dream dreamt by its youth to open its eyes to the nightmare of a lost war, a wound that will not heal. And deep down, it is not as strange as it appears at first hearing, that right here, now, in 1968, the hands of a star-spangled drifter weave the threads of a sound carrying echoes and vibrations and dilations that I heard far away, in time and space: in that incomprehensible millennial East, in the Indian ragas, in the ecstatic repetition of Sufi music, in the crystalline restless brightness of a solitary oud. And it is not strange at all that these threads intertwine with the soul of a dilated and pulsating, dreamlike blues. Indeed, deep down, it's natural: these "long-haired guys" were traveling, towards an elsewhere that would bring them back to the center of the mystery that inhabited them, that inhabits us. And the journey includes meetings, discoveries, sharing, visions.

"E Pluribus Unum," recorded by Sandy Bull in '68 and released a couple of years later, is an album divided into two long parts. The first is basic psychedelia generated by a guitar that at times takes on the semblance of a sitar or an oud, simulating its sound, its progression. Minimal percussion, fragrances of the Orient and a folk aftertaste: simple sound cells that curl and insist, until they ride themselves, doping with primordial effects to finally find peace, like at the end of a long journey or an unending prayer, again in a flash from the Orient that closes the track. The second track is a blues that advances, struggling with the resistance opposed by the cumbersome sousa substance in which it is immersed. Transfigured, it reignites in recognizable flashes and then returns to expand, to disintegrate. Rural and spatial, uncertain and indomitable, it feeds by moving among the spores it generates.

They say that the true masterpiece of Sandy Bull is another album, a previous one, which I discovered is already present in DeBaser. I will certainly look for it because it seems even more dissolved in the ocean of "other" music. But if you are frequenters of the productions of that extraordinary decade and love to encounter figures little illuminated by glory (even posthumous), give this album a chance, I believe its genuine quest will fascinate you.

I am returning to the digital flying carpet: flying over Persia, about thirty years later, I saw a great musician struggling with a strange instrument of sublime sound: I will descend to listen.