(The) Art of Noisenote were an influential avant-garde Synth-Pop/Instrumental Hip Hop group which existed between 1983 and 1989, and then briefly in 1999 with a different line-up. While not the inventors of their craft, they are notable for helping codify many aspects of synth-pop, hip-hop, and electronica which are now ubiquitous, including the extensive use of Sampling and the sequencing of drum beats using a sampler.
The core members of the band were composer Anne Dudley, programmer JJ Jeczalik and engineer Gary Langan, these being Trevor Horn's Production Posse; in the original incarnation, they were joined by Horn himself and the music writer Paul Morley. The team was originally brought together to create a remix of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart", and were so satisfied with the results that they decided to turn the experiment into a full-time project. After the release of the band's first EP, Into Battle With the Art of Noise, and first full-length album Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise, an acrimonious split occurred and Jeczalik, Langan and Dudley moved on to China Records; Langan himself left the band in 1986 leaving Jeczalik and Dudley as a duo, who eventually split in 1989.
Finally, the band reformed with Horn, Dudley, Langan and Lol Creme (formerly of 10cc) to record and release The Seduction of Claude Debussy in 1999— this was then adapted into the music for the London new millennium fireworks on the River Thames, shortly before the group finally disbanded. Since 2017, Dudley, Jeczalik and Langan have been doing short-run tours to promote reissues of some later albums, which have otherwise been deleted for decades.
Discography:
Studio discography:
- Into Battle with the Art of Noise EP (1983)
- Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)
- In Visible Silence (1986)
- In No Sense? Nonsense! (1987)
- Below the Waste (1989)
- The Seduction of Claude Debussy (1999)
- Balance — Music For The Eye (2015)note
Compilations:
- Daft (1986)note
- The Best of the Art of Noise (1988)
- The Ambient Collection (1990)
- State of the Art (1997)
- Bashful / Belief System / An Extra Pulse of Beauty (1999)
- Reduction (2000)
- And What Have You Done with My Body, God? (2006)
- Influence: Hits, Singles, Moments, Treasures (2010)
- At the End of a Century (2015)note
Live albums:
- Re-Works of Art of Noise (1987)note
- Reconstructed... For Your Listening Pleasure (2004)
Remix albums:
- Re-Works of Art of Noise (1987)note
- The FON Mixes (1991)
- The Drum and Bass Collection (1996)
This band provides examples of:
- Alternate Album Cover: The original UK cover for Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? depicts a photo of a facepalming statue atop a black marble backdrop. When the album was released in the US, it was given a new cover depicting a pair of stylized "comedy" and "tragedy" masks (which the band used as a visual motif in their early years) against a blue marble background. Later that year, a third cover would appear on continental European reissues depicting a small pair of silver, traditionally-designed comedy/tragedy masks lying on a sheet of blue velvet. The three covers would be interchangeably used across regions when the album was released on CD.
- The Band Minus the Face: Inasmuch as AON have faces, this happened repeatedly:
- Paul Morley and Trevor Horn were jettisoned after Who's Afraid— Jeczalik considers them to have had a minimal input onto the band's music (and Morley, for his part, agrees, saying that his role was to make the tea).
- Gary Langan left after In Visible Silence, leaving the band as a duo.
- Jeczalik and Langan didn't return for The Seduction of Claude Debussy, leaving Dudley as the only consistent member.
- Bizarre Instrument: A key part of the band's sound was the use of samples of everyday objects to form songs that are effectively sound collages. The sound effect of a starting car is used quite regularly, the sound of a flushing toilet is used on "Hoops and Mallets", the sound of a ruler being "boinged" against a desk forms a large part of "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise", and much, much more besides.
- Book Ends:
- Daft opens with "Love" and closes with "(Three Fingers of) Love", both remixes of "Moments in Love".
- The last two tracks on the band's final album, The Seduction of Claude Debussy, sample "Moments in Love" from the band's first album, Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?.
- Boxed Set: 2006's And What Have You Done With My Body, God? compiles various outtakes and demos across four CDs. The fourth additionally contains the band's debut EP, Into Battle With the Art of Noise, which was previously unavailable on the format (six tracks out of nine total were previously included on the 1986 compilation CD Daft).
- …But He Sounds Handsome: The liner notes to Daft take extended potshots at the post-ZTT lineup and output of Art of Noise while praising the original incarnation of the band, singling out Trevor Horn and Paul Morley as the group's linchpins. Said liner notes were written by "Otto Flake," a pseudonym for... Paul Morley.
- Clip Show: The video for "Instruments of Darkness (All of Us Are One People)" intersperses clips from previous Art of Noise music videos, tying in with the song's nature as a promotion for the 1992 version of The Best of the Art of Noise.
- Compilation Re-release: Daft brings together almost all of the group's released material from the Trevor Horn era, including the Into Battle with the Art of Noise EP, the Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? studio album, and the "Moments in Love" remix single.
- Concept Album: The Seduction of Claude Debussy is part biography of Debussy's life, part exploration of themes surrounding his music.
- Continuity Nod: The cover art for The Seduction of Claude Debussy nods back to that of Daft, featuring a stylized sun mask that acts as a motif for the album.
- Cover Version:
- In Visible Silence features a rendition of the Peter Gunn theme with guitar parts by Duane Eddy, who previously had a hit single with his own version of the song. The track won a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.
- In No Sense? Nonsense! features the band's take on the Dragnet theme, made for the 1987 film adaptation of the series.
- The Best of the Art of Noise includes a cover of Prince's "Kiss", featuring Tom Jones on vocals.
- Below the Waste features a cover of the theme for The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and the James Bond theme.
- Cross-Referenced Titles: "Opus 4" and "Opus for 4".
- Distinct Double Album: Re-Works of Art of Noise is a single-LP variant. Side one consists of remixes of tracks from In Visible Silence, while side two consists of live recordings from that album's supporting tour.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Into Battle with the Art of Noise, the band's first EP, is a remarkably minimalist album by comparison to even Who's Afraid; a number of the tracks are closer to being proofs of concept rather than "songs" as they might be understood, with most of the tracks clocking in at under two minutes in length.
- Electronic Music: Absolutely not a Trope Maker note but almost certainly a Trope Codifier and innovators in their own right.
- Epic Rocking: Sparingly.
- "Moments in Love," in its full version, is over ten minutes in length.
- "The Focus of Satisfaction" is a remix of "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise" which lasts for eleven full minutes.
- Everything Is an Instrument: The band's extensive focus on sampling, aided by the Fairlight CMI, meant that practically anything could end up in their songs, from vocal snippets to car ignitions and chainsaws.
- The Faceless: The original concept for the group with Horn and Morley involved its members wearing specially designed masks in all public appearances, so as to emphasise the music over the individuals that made it (one of these masks forms the cover art for Daft). This was dropped post-Who's Afraid after the band split from Trevor Horn and Paul Morley, whose idea it fundamentally was, although they still maintained a minimal public profile and generally avoided publicity.
- Fading into the Next Song: Almost all of In No Sense? Nonsense! is like this; songs fade into each other via sound effects and ambient noise with little in between.
- Four More Measures: Actually more like "one more measure" but Anne Dudley has noted that the first section of "Moments in Love" tends to confuse people because it's based on sections of five measures instead of four. After the middle eight it settles into a more regular four-bar pattern.
- Genre-Busting: It's extremely difficult to categorise Art of Noise's music; there are good arguments for it being electronica, avant-garde, synth-pop, musique concrete, dance and hip-hop, and incorporate elements from all of these. Most simply categorise them as "Synth-Pop" and leave it at that.
- Genre Mashup: The Seduction of Claude Debussy combines Drum and Bass, opera, Hip-Hop, impressionist classical music, and spoken-word monologue, alongside some ambient trimmings.
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: Named after Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto The Art of Noises.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: "Opus for Four" on In No Sense? Nonsense! features spoken Japanese. "Yebo!" on Below the Waste meanwhile features lyrics sung entirely in Zulu.
- Greatest Hits Album: A downright irritating variety throughout the years.
- Daft was released by ZTT Records shortly after the band's acrimonious split from Horn and Morley, and features pseudonymous liner notes by Morley (as "Otto Flake") trashing the band's new aesthetic; it's essentially a cross between Into Battle, Who's Afraid, and the "Moments in Love" remix single.
- The Best of the Art of Noise compiles material from both the ZTT and China Records eras of the band, plus an exclusive Cover Version of Prince's "Kiss" that features Tom Jones on vocals. The album was later reissued in 1992 with the ZTT tracks removed, with more material from the China years in their place (including cuts from Below the Waste, which came out the year after the original release). Of note is that while the first version focuses mostly on 12" mixes, the second centers around the 7" edits (barring a limited-edition two-disc release, which features the 12" versions on a second CD).
- Influence: Hits, Singles, Moments, Treasures... is a far more comprehensive work released in 2011, which includes tracks from both the ZTT and China Records eras of the band as well as its 1999 incarnation, along with a number of different rarities.
- Instrumentals: The vast majority of Art of Noise's tracks are instrumentals, only feature vocals that are monosyllabic samples or only feature a single vocal line.
- Longest Song Goes First: The Seduction of Claude Debussy opens with the eight-minute "Il Pleure (At the Turn of the Century)". The next-longest track, "The Holy Egoism of Genius", just barely falls under that mark at 7:56.
- Meaningful Name: They're not just named after Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto The Art of Noises because it sounds cool — the manifesto talks about the possibilities of future musicians manipulating sounds from real life to create original compositions, which is an important part of what the group actually did.
- Miniscule Rocking: Only a couple of tracks on Into Battle breach the two minute mark, with one being six seconds long. Somewhat justified as the EP is essentially a proof in concept combined with a work in progress for Who's Afraid.
- New Sound Album: A few throughout their career:
- In Visible Silence ditched some of the more experimental, atmospheric, non-"song" tracks that were on Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? and instead featured almost exclusively more recognisable songs.
- In No Sense? Nonsense! featured more orchestral arrangements and moved towards a less "danceable", more ambient/lush pop sound with traces of World Music.
- Below the Waste removed almost all of the Instrumental Hip Hop elements of its predecessors and dived full-force into worldbeat, also ramping up the orchestral elements.
- The Seduction of Claude Debussy is the most radical departure, all but completely eschewing sampling in favour of Drum and Bass style beats alongside orchestral arrangements, opera, and Hip-Hop.
- Pop-Star Composer: Leaving aside Anne Dudley's long and storied scoring of film and television, Art of Noise itself produced soundtracks for Hiding Out and Dragnet. They also produced the most well-known theme tune for The Krypton Factor, something so indelibly associated with them that the theme song was included on the Greatest Hits Album Influence.
- Portmantitle: "Paranoimia" combines "paranoid" with "insomnia," highlighted by Max Headroom's monologue on the 7" version, where he rants about his inability to fall asleep.
- Postmodernism: An influence on the group's early presentation and general aesthetic. Rather than making music about things, they tended to just make music that was about essentially nothing.
- Production Foreshadowing: Before becoming an official group, all of the members (minus Morley) worked together on other productions, and their work on Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock and Yes's "Owner of a Lonely Heart" in particular clearly foreshadow what they would do in their own right. The Red & Blue mix of the latter is cited as a direct prototype of Art of Noise.
- Pun-Based Title: Each of the band's studio albums during their tenure on China Records indulges in this trope.
- In Visible Silence plays off the phrase "invisible silence."
- In No Sense? Nonsense! plays off "innocence."
- Below the Waste derives itself from the idiom "below the waist."
- Rearrange the Song: Trevor Horn has a habit of taking a song and making an immeasurably large number of variations on it, a habit that carried over to Art of Noise.
- "Moments in Love", "Beat Box" and the song "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise" were remixed and rearranged repeatedly on various releases. The compilation album And What Have You Done With My Body God? has three CDs worth of remixes and earlier versions of these.
- "Close (To The Edit)" was remixed into "Close-Up" (with impressions by Chris Barrie, of all people).
- "Beat Box" itself was released first as a relatively minimalist four minute long version on Into Battle with the Art of Noise, and then expanded and iterated upon to create "Beat Box (Diversion One)". This in turn was radically remixed for the B-side "Beat Box (Diversion Two)", which then got turned into "Close (To the Edit)" (which appears alongside "Diversion One" on Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?).
- The band later remixed their single "Legs" to create the vastly different "Legacy", itself released as a single in both normal and extended variants.
- Most famously, "Paranoimia" (a slow, minimalist, atmospheric track on In Visible Silence) was remixed featuring Max Headroom to create one of the band's few hit singles. This was then remixed again for the 12-inch featuring a different Headroom monologue.
- Re-Cut: The CD release of In No Sense? Nonsense! swaps around "Ode to Don Jose" and "A Day at the Races". To preserve the album's constant use of Fading into the Next Song, the field recording that closes out the former was moved to the end of "E.F.L."
- Remix Album: Plenty, because of the group's influence in the dance and techno communities, although most were issued after the band stopped producing new music (e.g. The FON Mixes and The Ambient Collection both came out in the early 1990s).
- Sampling: Although Art of Noise were not the first band to employ the use of samplers in music, or even the first band to make compositions mostly out of samples (Yellow Magic Orchestra also used samplers around two years earlier to make the album Technodelic), they can be considered Trope Codifiers for it given the extensive range of samples used that verged on musique concrete— from starting cars to voices to flushing toilets. They were also among the first acts to use a sampler to sequence drum sounds, as opposed to using an existing drum machine.
- Shout-Out:
- "A Time for Fear (Who's Afraid)" interpolates "Suicide is Painless" during the first bridge.
- "Close (to the Edit)" plays on the title of Yes's "Close to the Edge" (Trevor Horn was a latter-day member of Yes and frequently played it live) and alludes to Robert Frost's "Home Thoughts from Abroad". The same song also includes a snippet of the a Capella singing from "Leave It", which Horn produced; the sound would reappear in the band's covers of the Peter Gunn and Dragnet themes.
- "Opus 4" is a partial setting of a poem by Thomas Hood. "Opus For Four" from the following album includes a very partial translation of it into Japanese.
- The album mix of "Paranoimia" includes a snippet of the king's speech
in Hamlet. - The second disc of Influence (Hits, Singles, Moments, Treasures...) is given the subtitle "Before and After Science", a nod to the Brian Eno album of the same name.
- Siamese Twin Songs: In No Sense? Nonsense! is designed to flow as a single track, with constant use of Fading into the Next Song to ensure that there are no audible gaps from one piece to the next. The North American cassette release even features the full album on both sides of the tape (rather than splitting each half across each side like the LP release) to ensure that nothing gets interrupted.
- Speedy Techno Remake: "Instruments of Darkness (All of Us Are One People)", a remix of "Instruments of Darkness" made by The Prodigy for the 1992 version of The Best of the Art of Noise, transforms a slow, foreboding Dark Wave piece into a fast-paced dance track.
- Spell My Name with a "The": Played with. The band is either "Art of Noise" or "The Art of Noise" depending on who you talk to or what album cover you're looking at in particular. Either are used interchangeably and without any real rhyme or reason.
- Spoken Word in Music: The vast majority of any "lyrics" used in Art of Noise's music are this, be they sampled from outside sources or contributed by guest vocalists. There are hardly any sung lyrics across their entire discography (the main exceptions being Tom Jones' contribution to "Kiss", Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens on "Yebo!", and the operatic and rapped vocals on The Seduction of Claude Debussy.)
- Studio Chatter:
- Opens up "Beat Box (Diversion One)" with Anne Dudley's appalled "Oh no... oh no, I don't believe it!" Similarly Dudley's "can I say something?" makes up a lot of "Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?".
- A discussion can be heard at the end of "Ode To Don Jose", with what are presumably volunteers who have been jingling bells for the album discussing payment (and whether what they just did was actually all they needed to do) with Dudley and Jeczalik.
- Take That!:
- "Instruments of Darkness" is a commentary on Apartheid, featuring snippets of white South African politicians defending the system on the grounds of "preserving law and order," underscored by a foreboding synth instrumental. When played live in 2017, the samples were replaced with ones of Donald Trump and Theresa May.
- The liner notes to Daft are an extended potshot towards the second incarnation of Art of Noise, courtesy of former member Paul Morley (writing under the pseudonym Otto Flake).
- Voice Clip Song: "Instruments of Darkness" revolves around editing clips from speeches by pro-apartheid South African politicians and setting them to foreboding music, acting as a nonverbal means of protesting The Apartheid Era.
- A Wild Rapper Appears!: Rakim appears on "Rapt: In the Evening Air", "Metaforce", and "Metaphor on the Floor" on The Seduction of Claude Debussy.
- Word Salad Lyrics: Where Art of Noise's music has words at all, they're almost entirely nonsensical and delivered without context. It's difficult to know what (e.g.) "Legs" and "Close (to the Edit)" are even supposed to be about, if they're meant to be about anything at all.
