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(They're not just for impressing chicks any more) |
Being a primarily industrial music listener, you wouldn't think I'd have much to say about New Age music, but I do, and it's not ALL bad. After an evening at a Skinny Puppy concert, I find that a nice, relaxing drive home to the sounds of Enya to be quite therapeutic. I have a couple of compilation albums, that have introduced me to some artists I would not have otherwise listened to. So, I have decided to write down my opinions on a few of the major players in the adult lullaby genre.
As I said before, I find her to be quite therapeutic. Unfortunately, she does not seem to have progressed much in recent years. If you listen to one of her early albums The Celts, sometimes sold in the U.S. as the self titled album Enya (It's got her and some dogs on the cover in black and white), you notice quite a difference from her more recent works. Her more recent albums are all starting to sound the same. It's okay for an artist to have a "sound", but they should have some variation within it. Her three most recent albums, Watermark, Shepherd Moons, and The Memory of Trees are all sort of interchangeable. There is the ever-present choral bed beneath everything this woman has written in living memory. For Christ's sake, play around with other instrument sounds, would you?!? Enough already with the "ooh" thing.
No, as for the person. I don't know much about her, but her pictures tell me one thing. Either Eithne (The proper spelling of her name) is the nicest, sweetest person on the planet, the kind that animals are drawn to, or she has got to be a complete, man-hating militant lesbian (Not that there is anything wrong with that). I'm inclined to believe the former.
Next!
He would not be worth mentioning if not for the interesting fact that I suspect him to be the long-lost twin brother of Kyle Petty. Check out the pictures...
Pretty freaky, huh?
Other than that, I don't find him interesting at all.
Okay, this guy kicks ass. He's way cool. I need to buy more Kitaro stuff. I mean, just LOOK at the guy. He's COOL I tell ya. He's cool looking, he's cool sounding, he's just cool. He's 46, and look at him play that guitar. He just rules.
He's probably a real loon in person, though. I just get that feeling like he's into really strange humor and types of porn weird enough to have their own name. Maybe I'm wrong, but he seems more like the kind of guy you want to go party with than the kind you want watching your kids while you go party with someone else.
I used to be REALLY into this guy, but that was a long time ago. The older I get, the more infantile his music seems to be. There are some nice bits, like Revolution Industrielle that I still like. On the whole, his music seems a bit too repetitive for my tastes now. It was largely written in the early days of sequencers, when the idea of one guy "playing" a hundred instruments at once was still pretty neat, even though 99 of the instruments keep playing the same damn thing over and over again ad nauseum.
Wendy is THE MAN! I mean it. Although she's not half the man she used to be (Before the operation). She's not so much "New Age" meaning mood music, as she is "New Age" meaning way ahead of her time. She is out there pushing the limits of music. She did the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange, back when she was called Walter. She did the music for The Shining, and Tron as well. She rules, she always has, she always will.
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Last updated 10/05/01
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