Word: aural
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...beings, I would like to think, have progressed beyond the level of the ostrich in this respect. Yet sight, we feel, is much more embarrassing than sound. Why else would we insist on three-quarter stalls in public bathrooms? Why do walls keep our neighbors feeling private, even when aural clues leave little to our visual imagination...
...agile Sakamoto draws on an eclectic background to make this work of solo piano pieces worthy of serious listening, not just aural wallpaper for wine-and-cheese parties. A piano prodigy and student of classical Eastern music, Sakamoto had a brief fling as a Japanese rock star in the 1980s and dabbled in jazz before turning to Hollywood (where his sublime score for The Last Emperor brought him an Oscar). Like all his work, BTTB ("Back to the Basics") searches for common ground in classical, pop and Eastern music. More often than not in this CD of unaccustomed beauty...
...fusion of diverse elements extends to their members as well, and Sunday's performance really pointed out how similar their striking visual presence is to the striking aural presence of their songs. On the one hand there's Australian-born Hansen, the gamine, androgynous face behind Stereolab's characteristically sultry French vocals. (She's possibly the only person in music today who can make a complaint about faulty sound systems sexy: "Does anyone else hear that rumble?") Her look-but-don't-touch attitude makes her akin to the too-hip aunt of Bjork and Winona Ryder, a coy mistress...
...short, Stereolab live was very different than Stereolab in the stereo lab. The band's sound is characteristically everywhere: their records run th aural gamut from fuzzy lounge-lizard pop to gritty reverb rock (and most often are a synth-washed mix of both). Through it all, though, they manage to give you the cold shoulder. Morgane Lhote's Moog must have a special dial for "disaffected": a breath of chilling ennui blows through all their music, a vague sense of world-weary aloofness that has its heart somewhere in songwriter Sadier's low-mixed lyrics...
...overactive imagination and penchant towards over-dramatization might have led to an over-glorification of Frisell's one-night stint in Davis Square. But this is an untestable hypothesis. Frisell's music was perhaps the most pure that one could witness. Pure, but not random or delineated by mere aural frequencies; rather, one can be confident that whatever pleasure derived from Frisell's work is not contingent on some distorted desire for the eclectic or youthful psychological echoes. Even through the shadowy progressions of "Blues for Los Angeles," there was no ounce of offense. Frisell never tried to manipulate, although...