i disagree with this. first, you've skipped from not wanting to list who
plays what to not wanting to show pictures.
Notice that I refered not to band photos but rather to a listener
"picturing each of us arrayed on stage and tweaking our piles of gear" -
that is, suggesting to listeners by way of personnel listings and technical
credits a mental picture of the music as it is being made - as well as that
I have added "for me" and not used any imperatives. In other words, I, as
a listener as well as a musician, prefer to absorb the music directly
rather than through the mediation of stereotypes and expectations that come
with hardware, software, and personnel listenings; on a nonethical and
purely aesthetic level, the technical void whence the mysterious noises of
Zoviet-France came upon my first hearing allows me more freedom as a
listener than does a record on which every noise is documented, credited,
and footnoted. Never would I say that one is universally Better than the
other, and certainly I see no higher Righteousness in the one approach as
opposed to the other, but as a listener such details get in the way for me
of a more direct connection with the sound itself. At the same time the
musician part of my consciousness IS curious about the technical details of
the music, and perhaps I might be interested to discover them after a first
hearing of a record, making me, again, happy with the approach taken in the
"La Selva" liner notes. Then again, as many other posts make clear, what
for me improves the aesthetic pleasures of listening provides obfuscation
and frustration for others here. What I want to underscore then is the
danger of imposing rules for such things - when obviously all of us as
musicians and as listeners have different preferences - and of overlaying
the aesthetics of these preferences with an ethical language to me far more
appropriately focused on other nonaesthetic aspects of music production and
distribution. And really, a brilliant record with a gear list transcends
its hardware and software, as Atom Heart did his MPC screen projections at
CCAC.