Track 1: Time Difference

Clocking in at 6 minutes and 19 seconds, Time Difference starts the album off with a bang. I've actually been putting some time into figuring out this one on the piano, and boy is it complicated. It starts out in a truly bizarre meter: 13/4. Yeah, 13. And people thought Dave Brubeck was crazy when he played in 5/4.


The piano part at the beginning deceptively simple. It only consists of five notes, but the pattern is tricky. If you're interested, here it is. Everything is the same speed (eighth notes), and a "-" means an eighth rest:

G C D F Eb - D C G C D F Eb - G C D F Eb - D C D Eb F -

You can sort of see a "pattern", but not a very simple one, if you group it this way:

(G C D F Eb -) (D C) (G C D F Eb -) (G C D F Eb -) (D C D Eb F -)

Now, there's a really cool rhythmic trick at about 15 seconds in, when the guitar and bass enter. Hiromi keeps playing this same pattern with her right hand, and the guitar, bass, and her left hand play along, but at half the tempo. It might take a few listens to see how this happens, but when you get it, it's really cool. Massive props to Hiromi, because it turns out it's really really hard to do that. Try it yourself, if you're rhythmically inclined. The tricky thing is that, since 13 is odd, it doesn't really line up on the second half. The right hand runs through the pattern once and the left hand gets about halfway, but when the right hand goes to repeat it and the left hand does the second half, they're offset by a quarter note, so things don't line up in the same places as they did in the first half. You can sort of see why that happens when you look at the grouping I made: the (D C) pair of eighth notes messes everything up. Without those, it splits in half very nicely, each half having two 5 note + 1 rest chunks. However, that little two note chunk throws things off by a quarter note.

Anyway, my hat goes off to Hiromi's band for being able to do this at this breakneck tempo. It repeats twice, with the slower group moving down the scale (starting on G, then Eb, and then C), then they both line up and play the faster version, but now the drums, bass, and piano left hand do this crazy accent pattern against the piano right hand and guitar. I haven't started figuring that one out yet, but I think there's some method to the madness.

After that, they settle into a nice "simple" 5/4 groove, with the piano and guitar playing a cool duet until it's time for the solos (we're at about 1:35 now). Hiromi goes first, but on the synthesizer instead of the piano. We're still in 5/4 at this point, but you wouldn't really know it. The solo and the accompaniment are both pretty free and flowing - Hiromi in particular gets a wonderfully lyrical tone out of her synthesizer. It almost sounds like a vocal solo rather than something electronic. The solo gradually builds in intensity, and on the way back down, the lead it switches over to the guitar, with Hiromi still noodling in the background on her synth.

At about 4:00, it gets crazy. Hiromi's right hand and the guitar are playing the main 13/4 theme again at half-tempo, the drums are going nuts, and her left hand and the bass are stabbing accent at seemingly random times.

Finally, at about 4:19, it chills out a bit - and the meter is 4/4! Crazy! At 4:45, the guitarist gets another chance to solo. At 5:34, we're back to 5/4 for a little interlude before closing out the piece as it began, in 13/4. Hiromi and company have one more trick up their sleeves though. They end on the last note of the main riff, instead of continuing through to the downbeat - a whiplash ending to a nonstop song.