The first second is nearly empty — a breath of room, and then the piano is already rolling. It arrives with its whole method in hand: an even, quick-pulsed current of arpeggios in the middle of the keyboard, and beneath it slower, weighted notes moving at their own pace. Within a few bars the figure locks in, and it never renegotiates its rhythm again — that early grip on the body comes from the evenness itself, nothing more. Nothing else is coming, either. Seven minutes, one player. The ear works this out fast and reorganizes: with no entrances to wait for, everything that matters has to happen inside a single unbroken texture.

What happens is harmony. The rolling figure supplies the surface; the chord beneath it supplies the events. Every so often the color pivots — the current keeps flowing, but suddenly over different ground — and around 1:51 the low notes audibly take hold of a new harmonic phrase, stepping to a fresh anchor while the arpeggios pass over them unchanged. In another piece these would be accompaniment details. Here they are the narrative, the only thing moving the form forward.

The memory work this asks is unusual, because the surface gives you so little to mark time by. Small differences have to carry formal weight: a soft dynamic swell near the ninety-second mark, then the first real change of light close to 2:38, when the upper register brightens within the same figure. By the middle stretch the two speeds stand apart as separate agents — the fast rolling of one hand, the slow harmonic tread underneath — and the pedal starts letting resonance pool, so each new harmony arrives with more wash around it, the attacks trailing longer decay.

Lift, settle, lift, settle. The phrase-shape cycles roughly every half-minute: a rise into a slightly brighter placement, a fall back down, no stop between them, no slackening of tempo, no seam. Through the long middle — and at this length the piece is mostly middle — the variables are the harmonic placement of each rotation and the depth of resonance it gathers. Heard casually, that could sound like nothing happening. Heard with the form in mind, every rotation asks the ear to find what moved, and something always has: one lift lands a step brighter, the next settle sinks darker and lower.

Just before the seven-minute mark, the pressure that had been implicit in all that motion lets go, and around 7:01 the pattern breaks — the first true stop in the piece. What follows is not a new section but the figure taken apart: a few separated, quiet gestures, spaced apart, each allowed to decay before the next one comes. The last thins into resonance, and at 7:13 the sound gives way to plain silence. No re-entry, no final chord to tidy things. Just the room.

Only in that silence does the shape of the whole become fully audible: one figure, stated in the first seconds, sustained without interruption for seven minutes, then unwound in a few broken remnants. The piece kept a single structural bargain — the motion would continue until it simply stopped — and the ending draws most of its force from memory, all that rolling still running in the ear after the piano has finished.