I've often said that the twin pillars of all creative expression are creativity and craft. The Creativity you are born with. It is your natural ability, your genetics, your knack for it all. It is the very aesthetics of the ideas you come up with. It is your style, voice, flavour, and opinion. It is how thoughts get in your head.

Creativity can not be taught. Either you have it or you don't. Fat people can't be world class sprinters. Stupid people don't join Mensa. We learn early in life what we are good at, and these god-given talents shape our interests. If you're smart, you pursue academics. If you're fast, you choose athletics. If you're Ron Jeremy, you get into porn. This is creativity.

But all these innate abilities are not good enough by themselves. They need to be trained. They need to be improved. They need to be sharpened into spear-headed readiness. They need to learn the craft.

The Craft is your practice. It is your education, your experience, your training, the honing of your skills into flawless precision. It is what you study and absorb and apply in your daily life. It is the technique, style, strategy and execution of your output. A naturally gifted sprinter will never break the world record unless he works hard and trains for that goal. A genius will never win the Nobel Prize unless he goes to school and acquires the requisite education.

Unlimited creativity without any honed craft results in incompetent, unprofessional work. Without the education and training, even the most gifted artist will produce messy and amateurish art. On the flipside, flawless craft without a smidgeon of creativity results in boring, unoriginal work. Without ideas, the art struggles to stand out or impress beyond anything other than technical merit. Creativity is inspiration. Craft is perspiration. Both in concert is what makes good art.

Here, then, we come to the dilemma of what to do with one Brian Wayne Transeau, better known to the music world as BT. Born a smouldering, middle class Maryland prodigy, classically trained since the age of two and attending the prestigious Berklee music college in Boston, BT had all the credentials and craft to make it in the music industry. He plied his trade to sequencers and samplers and ate it up like Houston at a cock convention. His studio knowledge and meticulous attention to detail have grown to the point where it's practically an obsessive-compulsive trait now.

Here we have BT at a music expo, demonstrating a new device called Ableton Live (this clip is a few years old). Picking a classic Earth, Wind and Fire song, he admits that he has never done anything with it before, so all the cuts and clicks he applies to it are on the fly. And it shows! After nearly butchering the song beyond recognizeability, BT prides himself on looping a beat in sync to the track and going bananas on the horrendously overused stuttering effect that's since worn its welcome like a campaign slogan a day after the election. The loud snare roll that jumps out of nowhere for no particular reason at the -2:25 mark is hilarity. Pay close attention toward the end. He explains to us that the next track is in the wrong key, so he has to pitch it on the fly while keeping timing. This, right here, is the exact problem with BT: He is so engrossed with this technical adjustment to demonstrate his mastery of audiocraft that he's not even aware that he just made September sound like absolute shit. To him, these technical hurdles are more important than actually making good music.

Make no mistake about it: BT's music is very very well done. It is proficient, technically perfect, sound, well-constructed, smooth and polished. His craft is beyond those of his contemporaries, and it seems with each successive release his production values grow with the advancement of technology, sometimes purely for its own sake. It's like he's part of the sequencers and software code, and each upgrade and release only makes him stronger, like Chesty Canyon getting reinforced implants. And this brings us to the First Great Law of BT: That his music is not really all that interesting or catchy. It's really pretty to listen to and incredibly well produced, but it's like one of those meals at a fancy, 4-star restaurant delivered by three waiters, with off-white powder and intricate splotches of red sauce around the edges of the plate. And in the middle, one asparagus. BT's music is like that. Brilliant presentation and even more brilliant execution, but no substance. No hook. No feel. No actual meal. He is the Don "No Soul" Simmons of electronic music. He just doesn't get it.

BT is all craft, no creativity. He is an excellent producer, an awful songwriter. Excellent production gloss, but weak and limp-wristed in the idea department. Compare him to someone like Ferry Corsten, who may or may not be an equal in studiocraft, but is far more creative in the arena of pure melody writing. Despite Ferry's penchance for cheesy bombast, it can't be ignored that the man has a knack for writing addictive, catchy hooks that get stuck in your head. He does it so effortlessly, he can produce a track-of-the-year anthem just walking by a music studio.

BT, tragically, does not possess Ferry's creative faculties to any such level of proficiency. He has no magical quality that would compel him, like a stroke of genius in the middle of the night, to hit the keyboard or computer and pen a Smoke on the Water-esque 'so-stupid-its-good' catchy jingle, and his relentless attack on forward-thinking electronic music theory is never going to teach him how. He must scratch and struggle every day with this handicap. Save for few exceptions, none of his tracks resonate to any kind of next-day washing-the-dishes recollection.

This is not entirely BT's fault. He is a geek, after all. A geek with a relentless hunger for technology, who just happens to have a music background. But he approaches music in much the same way a Trekkie would write Star Trek fan fiction (or any sci-fi dork dedicated to a brandname franchise would write fan fiction). Namely, that too much importance is placed on mundane trivialities that should be given no more than a second's thought, much less have whole tracks written around them as a central theme. That's what BT is. He is an electronic music fanboy, producing fan music. He is very good at what he does, but listening to him always gives you the sensation that he's trying too hard to emulate a scene, style or idea without actually understanding it, like the lone white guy in an all-black gangbang pretending he measures up.

Once again, he is nothing but excellent at what he does. He's just excellent at consistently putting out really uninteresting music. Let's go over some.