Art of Noise

About halfway through our year in that apartment, Eric had switched from being a pasta chef (or rather a Pasta & Cheese 1-2-3 chef) to working at a record store in Times Square. The only real perk to that job was getting to hear lots of stuff as it came out and getting to buy it with an employee discount, so he was often wandering home with some new hot slice of vinyl. Many times, I was less than impressed (Rain Parade?), but this particular night he brought home a strange disc called Into Battle with the Art of Noise. It was a Friday night, so I didn’t have to go to work (I had since switched to the night shift, and was walking home at four in the morning four times a week) and Bruce didn’t even know what a job was, so we were hanging out, not doing much of anything. Well, I wasn’t doing much of anything, but Bruce had dropped acid a couple of hours before and was screaming through a smiley trip while I tried to simultaneously stay out of his way and make sure his flight went well.

Fresh out of high school, we were going through a period of fairly heavy drug experimentation. I had locked into smoking pot as my preferred form of mental adjustment (well, who am I kidding, we were all smoking like fish at that point), and Bruce was doing a fair amount of blow (like any self-respecting independently wealthy party kid should) and the three of us would take some sort of major trip about once a month – be in acid or ‘shrooms or mescaline or MDA or whatever the hell we could get our hands onto. Bruce was going solo this night, so I contented myself with burning herb and trying to keep the vibe as positive as possible.

Eric came in, quickly evaluated the situation, and told Bruce he had something new to listen to. Bruce graciously turned the stereo over to him and Eric unwrapped his new disc, tossed the cover to me (knowing Bruce wouldn’t even be able to read it at that point) and, after considering for a moment, put on side two. A seasoned veteran of internal adventures, Eric chose thoughtfully. Had he wanted to derail Bruce and send him screaming into a darker place, he could’ve put side one on, but he was nice and cued up the first track of side two.

The track started with a round, staccato, breathy sound, tracing out a very simple 16-note phrase. Bruce immediately closed his eyes and started swaying in awe, an orgasmic look of pleasure on his face. Of course, he was tripping, so he probably would’ve done that if we’d switched the blender on. The phrase repeated a few times, adding small details to the mix, including dry bass thumps and the world’s loudest fingersnaps, before the strings kicked in and the track settled into a groove, punctuated by what sounded like a compressed orchestra bleating out short chords. It was all very odd and seductive. There was a strange mixture of organic and artificial sounds, and I couldn’t quite get my head around it. The track stretched on and on, repeating the same 16-note phrase over and over again, glossed up in shiny clothes but not really going anywhere. Bruce was performing an interpretive dance to the colors swirling through his head and I peered at the record cover, trying to make sense of it. With its painting of knights going on the Crusades and pictures of “spanners” breaking windows and assertions that the group “have an almost hygienic need for complications” and “can never accept that a full sentence can ever come from half a man” printed on it the cover, the disc and whoever had made it seemed determined to be as impenetrably obscure as possible. A voice that was both artificial and natural sounding kept repeating “moments in love” over and over again, and the whole piece took on this weird, otherworldly quality. It was soothing, mesmerizing even, but faintly creepy too. There was just enough variation in what was going on to keep it interesting, but not enough to make it feel like it was made by humans.

I glanced over at Eric, who smiled enigmatically from behind the bong. Just as it seemed the track would go on forever, and just as Bruce started to get bored and was about to suggest a change of stimulus, the track started shifting. Everything died away except for the thumping bass, stuck on one note, over and over again. Then this strange, slightly warbly voice muttered, “now”, and another voice started moaning. The bass kept thumping along, while more and more urgent and overlapping cries of “now, now” started building up. It would relax for a second, then the voices would start up again, tumbling over each other, building up the tension, The piece had taken a definite turn to the dark side, and Bruce stopped dancing and glanced nervously at the stereo and at the two of us. Now! Now! and more moans started. The tension was building and what had before seemed slightly creepy was now downright ominous, and heading towards some awful place. A crescendo started, cranking the tension up even more, and a long harp glissando began, going higher and higher, making Bruce grind his teeth start breathing hard and unevenly. And then, just as suddenly as it started, the weird middle section evaporated and we went back to the plodding, hypnotic, breathy cycle that started the piece, with the disembodied voice once again intoning “moments in love”. But now, having gone through that disorienting middle section, the syrupy strings and repeated vocal fragment sounded even more ominous than they had before. Although it came years before David Lynch’s masterpiece was released, it had the same effect as the end of Blue Velvet, in which the happy hyper-normalcy of the opening sequence is recalled after the horror of Frank Booth has played itself out. Jeffrey and Sandy are back together, the bad has been banished, the good is back, and the fake birds twitch in the too-green trees. The memory of the horror lurking within has forever tainted the sunny exterior, and even the most innocuous object stinks with the knowledge of the dark desires that fuel the soul. Moments in Love is a stupendous track, capturing some of the ineffable hope and fear that love can inject into your life and it has become a powerful touchstone for me throughout my life – despite the fact that Madonna chose it to walk down the aisle to when she married Sean Penn.

Eric wisely refrained from playing the rest of the record while Bruce was in such a highly suggestible state, but the next day, intrigued, I pulled it out and listened to the whole thing. Moments in Love is an anomaly on that disc – most of the other tracks are considerably shorter (Moments in Love clocks in around 10 minutes), and considerably noisier. The rest of the record was filled with strangely funky collages of industrial sounds mixed together with boogie-woogie bass lines, stolen vocal samples, heavily manipulated found sonic shards and the biggest, most exhilarating drum sound I’d ever heard. I was immediately captivated. Melodies were constructed using the manipulated sound of an engine starting or a “bite” of the Andrews Sisters singing “in the army now” from Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (it’s their “now” that permeates the disturbing middle section of Moments in Love), or breaking glass, or cathedral organ, or whatever sound – exotic or mundane – captured their fancy. There’s a faux-horror soundtrack snippet consisting largely of footsteps and a giant, twisted organ. There’s a moody spy-movie theme that utilizes a breathy sample and a few chords stolen from Stravinsky’s Petroushka. Strange disembodied voices get caught in the dense mix and repeat their fragmentary message over and over again (“it stopped”), getting twisted and mangled in the process. There is an exhilarating and bewildering sense of experimentation and it truly sounded like nothing else I had ever heard. All in all, it is a pretty uneven disc, with tracks bumping awkwardly into each other and suddenly getting cut off in the middle of a. But it’s a fascinating work, full of intriguing ideas, and I was immediately smitten.