Art of Noise

Producer Trevor Horn brought classically trained keyboard player Anne Dudley and computer whiz JJ Jeczalik together as session musicians during the production of ABC’s glossy pop confection, The Lexicon of Love. They worked together on a few more projects over the next couple of years, including Malcolm McLaren’s seminal Duck Rock (which also features Thomas Dolby) and Yes’ career-revitalizing 90125 album (the name is not a zip code, a la Beverly Hills 90210, but the catalogue number of the album). During the sometimes tense 90125 sessions, Horn and Dudley and Jeczalik started putting their various areas of expertise together (Horn with his astonishing production skills, Dudley with her classical training, and Jeczalik with his inventive synthesizer programming) for a few experimental tracks. These experiments led directly to the formation of Art of Noise, the first group to be released on Horn’s new Zang Tuum Tumb label, distributed by Island in exchange for their appreciation for him supplying that label with their only (British) number 1 hit, Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star.

In many ways, Art of Noise (name taken from an Italian Futurist manifesto) fulfilled the promise of those pioneers of musique concrete, who, forty years earlier (the movement was officially started by Pierre Schaffer in 1948) wanted to take music-making out of the hands of a rarified few using only officially sanctioned instruments playing in authorized venues and make the entire world a musical instrument. Music isn’t just violins sawing away in unison, they said, it’s also in birdsong and in the sound of a dump truck and in the way wind whistles through the wires. Art of Noise took that concept and applied it to the most up-to-date technology available – the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument). Breathtakingly powerful and prohibitively expensive, the Fairlight was the first real sampler available to musicians – the first instrument that could record sounds of the real world and use the digital profiles of those sounds in creating new sounds. Other synthesizers built their complex timbres up by combining and modifying a few basic raw waveforms: the sine wave, the triangle, the sawtooth, the square, and varying amounts of “white” or “pink” noise – random and semi-random swatches of the sonic spectrum (otherwise heard as static). But now, the sound of a crumhorn could be mixed with a sneeze and manipulated into a whole new world of sonic possibility.

Shortly after Into Battle, Art of Noise released a 12” single of two variations of one of the tracks on that first disc. Called Beat Box (a nickname for the drum machines that were starting to take over and make drummers very nervous), the original track features a thundering hip-hop beat underneath some stylized, musicalized sound effect samples. The remix single – clearly aimed for the dance floor because of its format (the 12” single) – takes those embryonic ideas and riffs on them, pumping up the boogie-woogie bass line, refining the samples, and throwing whatever they could think of into the mix. Although extremely experimental by pop music standards (or by any music standards, really) Art of Noise also had a good sense of humor, and the disc is peppered with lots of humorous moments and comical vocal bites. It is a stunning, groundbreaking single, and took the underground dance world by storm. Not only was the content of the track excitingly novel, with tuned engine solos nestled in next to arty piano riffs and breaking glass effects rubbing up against eviscerated vocal bits, but the drum sound was bigger and thicker and meatier than anything else coming out of the embryonic electronica scene.

Some of that was a matter of economics. When the techno and house revolutions started in Detroit and Chicago, respectively, they were underground dance sensations created by fringe musicians and producers. These fledgling knob twiddlers had very little money to spend equipping their studios, so the machines they could afford were bottom of the line toss offs, most famously the Roland 808 and 909 drum machines and the perversely cheesy 303 bass line sequencer. The sounds were thin and tinny (and tiny) and artificial, but they became the sound of the new scene, to the point that their featherlight sounds continued to be exploited by dance producers long after the technology changed to allow bigger, more realistic sounds (like the famous Linn drum machine that appears on hundreds of pop recordings from that era). A few dance-oriented producers, notably British dub freak Adrian Sherwood, Yello’s mastermind Boris Blank, and Trevor Horn, shunned the fashionable tinniness of the times and tried to add a little muscle to the mix. On these two Beat Box variations, creatively titled Diversion One and Diversion Two, Horn takes the fashionable compressed gated drum sound pioneered on Peter Gabriel’s third solo album (called, like the first two, Peter Gabriel) and cranks it up through the roof, making it sound like an anvil slamming into your head. As a technical aside, that popular drum sound was achieved by running a drum hit through a noise gate that has been set unnaturally high. A noise gate is a filtering device that only lets sounds of a certain volume through and is usually used on acoustic instruments and, especially, vocals, to minimize background sounds, fret noise, and any other distracting and unwanted ambience. By applying it to drums and setting the gate impossibly high, only the very loudest part of the hit gets through and, as soon as the volume starts to decay, the gate cuts the signal off completely, giving the drums a highly stylized, super-chunky sound. And because there’s virtually no delay, you can drop these beat bombs in the track without muddying up the mix too much.

Shortly thereafter, Art of Noise released their first proper album, Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise (Into Battle is considered an EP (or “albumette”, as they call it), although it runs longer than many albums). Featuring Moments in Love and a slightly trimmed version of Diversion Two called Close (to the Edit), Who’s Afraid became the defining album for the Art of Noise. A video for Close (to the Edit), directed by one of my favorite unknown experimental film and video directors, Zbig Rybczynski, featured a couple of guys in suits and a tarted-up punkette cheerfully chainsawing a grand piano into bits in some unidentified industrial wasteland, making visual and visceral their affront to the musical establishment. Carrying on from their early experiments, the album liberally mixes both art and noise to stunning effect – and catalyzed the nascent electronica scene. Although they were never terribly popular, Art of Noise’s early sonic explorations into musique concrete with a killer beat remains one of the most important touchstones of that era, and informs much of the dance music that followed it.

At the time, early 1983, hip hop was still in its infancy, and rap had just broken out of the brag/party straightjacket. Grandmaster Flash’s epic and revolutionary track The Message had just been recently released, and it set a new standard for lyrical content in a rap song, using it to make social commentaries and critiques. The widespread success of that track heralded a new age in rap, and signaled its desire and ability to be taken seriously. But, the music was still a ways behind. Most rap tracks were looped funk riffs that provided a steady beat but didn’t get in the way of the words. Dance music was either trying to shake off the disco hangover, with straight-ahead four-on-the-floor beats underneath a screaming divas (Shannon’s Let the Music Play, the Weathergirls’ It’s Raining Men were unavoidable club fixtures of the day) or was clogged with lots of catchy but embarrassing novelty songs (Men Without Hats’ Safety Dance, Taco’s perverse version of Putting on the Ritz). Art of Noise’s willingness to throw out lyrics entirely in favor of short sampled phrases (a technique that would pretty much rule to dance scene for years to come) and focus on the texture of the track and the strength of the beats was almost unheard of at the time. Now it so common as to be cliché, but at the time, it was quite a revolutionary approach. Of course, the real story in popular music at that moment was the unprecedented popularity of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, which kept spitting out hit singles and had so overtaken the world in general and NYC in particular that I couldn’t walk out of my apartment without hearing the seductive shuffling backbeat of Billie Jean echoing from a thousand windows and stoops.