"A most pleasing chaos"...

No shocker here... Listening to music ranks pretty dang high on my joys-of-being-alive list. Remarkably, wonderfully, Sarah and I have very similar sonic tastes, although I am sure that we're often hearing different things while listening to the same piece of music. Everyone's filters and neural receptors take on different configurations. To that end, I'm always interested to hear about what she hears. Her powers of description are killer.

"A most pleasing chaos" is how she explained a particularly layered and frenetic song the other day. "It scratches an itch in my brain," she commented on another complex wall of African sounds. "Ah... lysergic acid, not hydrochloric acid," she announced as the meaning of "acid jazz" became suddenly apparent at a live performance last night.

How succinctly she sums up, in a handful of words, years and years of my own sloppy emotional relations with sound. On Miles Davis' "Black Satin" (one of my favorites) she weighed in with, "Insane, for sure, but a different, lesser kind of chaos." Inspired, and wanting to defend Miles, I tried one of my own, "Like the kind of chaos you find in a bathtub full of venomous snakes!" And there I go with my exaggerations...