Kate and Brian

[nessus (Doug Alan)]

>> [Me:] C'mon now, Rob [Stanzel].  This is ubsurd!  Eno's work
>> consistently more crafted than Kate's???  NO ONE's work is more
>> crafted than Kate's (except maybe Boston's, which shows that some
>> being crafted doesn't necessarily result in something worthwhile,
>> but in Kate's case it certainly does).  Some of Eno's work is
>> almost completely UNCRAFTED, he sets up a system and then lets it
>> run with the tape recorder going.

> [Rob Rosen:] Well, I'm willing to let large numbers of people babble
> over Kate Bush, but I won't stand here and let my idol be trod upon!
> Eno is a MASTER CRAFTSMAN.

I never said otherwise.  I said "some of Eno's work is almost
completely uncrafted".  I did not say "Eno is not a good craftsman."
Some of his stuff is finely crafted.  Other stuff of his is
purposefully NOT crafted -- and that's the point of his uncrafted
stuff: to make music that isn't crafted; to make music that is an
experiment; to make music where random relationships are as important
as planned ones.  But since some of Eno's work is intentionally
largely uncrafted, it is clearly false to say that his music is
consistently as crafted as Kate's, much less that it is consistently
more crafted.

> The problem with most people is that they fail to understand the
> minute subtleties which define his work.  It may sound boring to you
> because you can't hear the subtle changes in timbre, [...]

I hear them!  To me, much of it is just boring to listen to.  As
musical wallpaper, it is fine.

> It takes a lot of careful listening to detect this sort of
> craftsmanship.

No doubt there is a lot of craftsmanship in much of Eno's minimalist
stuff.  But going back to the ridiculous claim that Eno's work is
consistently more crafted than Kate's, this is clearly untrue also for
any minimalist work.  Every single sound on Kate's records is
painstakingly crafted.  When she makes an album, she spends a whole
year locked in a studio, twelve hours a day, five days a week, working
on it to get it this way.  And you can hear all the effort put into it
by listening to the album.  A minimalist album must be less crafted,
because even if each sound is as crafted as each sound on Kate's
records, there are, by definition, many fewer sounds.  For all those
minute subtleties that you can find on one of Brian Eno's minimalist
albums, you can hear more minute subtleties on Kate Bush's recent
albums, hidden under all the obvious stuff.

> The man SINGLE- HANDEDLY introduced the rebirth of Minimalism in
> today's music.

Bullshit.

				|>oug