Reading with the ears

It's been a few days since The Books took the stage here in DC but I still have flashbacks in vivid color and gyrating shapes. But maybe that's because I'm still trying to get my head around the experience. To see them live was more surreal than I imaged: notes struck, voices spoke from the corners of the room and in the center two men with a cello and guitar seemed to hold completely still, the center of some sort of muti-media tableau vivant.

It helped too the the audience was completely mesmerized by the beautiful, odd videos broadcast in counterpoint to the music (these were unpolished footage, most often straight out of arcane training video, home movies and cable public access, rearranged into careful collages) I remembered to glance down at the stage all too seldom and I could easily imagine that the musicians sneaked in their playing between beats, waiting for all heads to turn away before they moved their fingers.

This isn't to say that the concert wasn't amazing; it most certainly was. Listening to The Books comes in fits and starts for me and I hadn't had such a fit for a while. Revisiting the songs again re-awakened my wonderment that such artifacts of strange audiophiliac creation exist at all. I genuflected to their delicacy and to the painstaking hours that have gone into their construction. I hope to one day make sometime half so lovely.