Trivia / Art of Noise

• Better Export for You:
  • In No Sense? Nonsense! was designed as an uninterrupted, 41-minute suite, featuring liberal use of Fading into the Next Song. However, while this was easily achievable on CD, limitations of the LP and cassette formats meant that the album had to split itself in half to fit across the two sides. The North American cassette release, however, is able to preserve the intended configuration by storing the full album on one side of tape, even duplicating it on the second to allow auto-reversing decks to play the material ad infinitum.
  • The initial US CD release of The Seduction of Claude Debussy featured a bonus disc containing remixes of "Metaforce".
• Breakup Breakout: Gary Langan has had a successful career as a Record Producer. Anne Dudley has had an extremely successful career writing soundtracks for films such as American History X and The Crying Game, as well as scoring orchestral arrangements for bands like Rush and Pulp; both things she's arguably better known for than Art of Noise.
  • Averted with JJ Jeczalik, who withdrew from the music industry almost totally after about 1997.
• Channel Hop: When the band first formed, they operated under co-founder Trevor Horn's ZTT Records label in conjunction with their distributors at the time, Island Records, which lasted until the group parted ways with Horn and Paul Morley in 1985 due to Creative Differences. Afterwards, they signed with China Records, which was distributed by Chrysalis Records. In 1988, China Records switched distributors worldwide to Polydor Records, then moved to Pinnacle Entertainment in the UK in 1993, taking Art of Noise with them and licensing their catalog out to Off-Beat Records in the US. In 1999, Art of Noise were back on ZTT, and have remained there ever since, while their China catalog was eventually snagged by Warner Music in The New '10s.
• Creator Backlash:
  • An interview with the band after the release of In Visible Silence indicated that they weren't best pleased with Who's Afraid, with Dudley saying she thought much of it was "dodgy", and Jeczalik considering Paul Morley's writing pretentious (or, in full, "mispelt, incorrectly punctuated badly-phrased cribbings from German Existentialists which personally I think is bleep, bleep, bleep").
  • Morley, three years after the fact, appeared to dislike The Seduction of Claude Debussy, calling it "decaffeinated coffee table drum and bass" and remarking that "there is no known marketable genre for an album that features both Rakim and John Hurt".
• Feelies: Parodied with Daft. The cover art depicts one of the band's paper masks, with a dotted line and scissor icon around it, seemingly encouraging the buyer to cut the mask out and wear it as their own. However, because the album was never released on LP — only on CD, cassette, and digitally — the mask is way too small to practically wear.
• Late Export for You: Daft wasn't released in the United States until 1998, well after the band's other releases went in and out of print there.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: A number of Art of Noise's tracks, particularly from the China Records era (from In Visible Silence to Below the Waste) are astonishingly hard to find, with copies available on torrent sites being about the only way to obtain them. This situation is getting better following the release of expanded reissues of In Visible Silence and In No Sense? Nonsense!, but it's unlikely that the comparative flop Below The Waste will be reissued, and it has long since been deleted.
• Production Posse: They effectively were one, albeit they stopped being so after breaking off on their own. Before this the members featured on some of Trevor Horn's productions, in particular ABC's The Lexicon of Love and Malcolm Mc Laren's Duck Rock.
• Reclusive Artist: The original "masks" concept, although largely one of Paul Morley's stunts, had a kernel of truth— the members of the band (two of whom were "behind the scenes" audio engineers and one of whom was better known as a session musician than an artist in her own right) had no interest in a public profile, and indeed completely eschewed one right up until the end of the group.
• Referenced by...:
  • "G.T. II°" by Ryuichi Sakamoto prominently samples "Legs".
  • The drums of "Beat Box" are sampled in Nine Inch Nails' song "Ruiner" from their album The Downward Spiral.
• Throw It In!: Frequently. The group's work was often produced from messing around with the Fairlight CMI in the studio, and many elements were just derived from the group recording weird samples into it and Jeczalik playing with its various features.
• What Could Have Been: Dudley, Jeczalik and Langan were considering reforming in the early 90s, but this fell through for undisclosed reasons.

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