Art of Noise

After Close (to the Edit) became a moderate hit, Art of Noise released a blinding blur of one-off remixes of the track. Every week, it seemed, a new mix would come out, confounding early fans (I largely gave up after chasing a few of these phantom tracks and hemorrhaging cash in the process). This was an irritating in-house joke for Zang Tumb Tuub records, who were also doing the same thing with their one flash-in-the-pan cash cow, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and their archetypal track, Relax.

After the myriad Beat Box remixes, Art of Noise splintered. Anne and JJ and engineer Gary Langan carried on with the name to a new label (actually, they changed their name slightly from Art of Noise to The Art of Noise, for what it’s worth) and left Trevor and original member Paul Morley behind (Morley was responsible for the marketing and look and logos of the group (reminiscent of those bloated ‘70s prog rockers that included their lighting designer as a full-time band member (hello, Nektar! (hey, quadruple parentheses!))). According to which camp you set your tent in, either Dudley and Jeczalik wanted to get out from under Horn’s considerable thumb or they betrayed Horn and Morley’s ideals of Art of Noise being a deeply conceptual postmodern critique of a pop group to sell out and become a defanged actual pop group. According to the liner notes from Daft, a collection of Zang Tuum Tumb tracks the group recorded in 1983,

Members Jeczalik, Dudley, and Langen, disconcerted by Horn and Morley’s subversive attempts to bruise the complacency of the rock industry and prepare a long term large scale project of celebration, interpretation, and malice, have retained the name Art of Noise as the commercial success associated with it suits their brazen career-besotted attitude”

Perhaps Dudley and Jeczalik did sell out, but how long would you want to be trapped in a studio with somebody that talked like that? Horn and Morley threatened to form a competing group called Act and Art, but that never materialized (although that may have been part of the inspiration for a rare Art of Noise b-side called Acton Art that was released on the back of the Dragnet single).

After living together in that loft for almost a year, things started falling apart. Eric was getting tired of having breakfast with the revolving cast of Calvin Klein underwear models that Bruce would bring home. I was getting tired of the work-drugs-work rut that my life had fallen into and Bruce was getting tired of us not being rich and gay. So, we all agreed to split up and go our separate ways. Bruce stayed in the loft, and I sold him my speakers to get out of debt to him. Eric moved uptown and started attending Julliard to get his dance studies back on track. And I applied to and was accepted at Hampshire College, where I joined the “F84” class (you are classified by your starting date at Hampshire, instead of your graduation date so as not to oppress you with society’s straightjacket of expectations, man). Part of the reason I had gone back to school was that my disastrous year at the University of Chicago had faded from memory enough to let me think that the problem may not be all colleges, but that one in particular. I was also keen to try something a little more challenging than going to work every day and smoking pot all the time and thought completely changing my environment might be a good way to do that. Although, if I was really serious about avoiding drugs, I should probably have picked a different school than Hampshire College. Anyway, early in my second year, I stumbled across a delightful new Art of Noise single called Legs, which wryly featured a sample from a L’Eggs pantyhose commercial. I hoped this track was clearing the way for a new album, so I bided my time while wearing out Legs’ considerable grooves (and my neighbor’s patience).

Then one afternoon, while slogging my way through a paper, there was a knock on my dorm room door. I opened it to see Geoff, grinning maniacally and clutching the new Art of Noise album, In Visible Silence. He ran down the hall to his room (having a far superior stereo), and I eagerly followed him (what paper?).

Geoff and I had hit it off early in the year. Compact (don’t call him short – he’s taller than NBA slam-dunker Spud Webb, he likes to point out) and wiry, with bushy brown hair and a full beard, Geoff looked like one of the crunchy granola Earth First types that were legion at a place like Hampshire, although, as I was delighted to discover, he was a lot more cynical than those irritatingly ungrounded Grateful Dead followers (the campus would empty out whenever the Dead got within a hundred miles) that ran rampant and stunk up the place with their idealism and patchouli. Quiet and shy, Geoff shared with me a passion for certain types of music (beaty, synthetic, and free from extraneous singing) and he had a similarly jaded outlook on life, although his came from a different place. In my household, creative expression was held to be the highest pursuit one could devote themselves to. In the years since that ideal had been instilled in me, I had come to realize the futility and frustration of such endeavors. Those who were the most successful were almost always those that were the least creative and those that were the most vitally creative often starved to death in obscurity, only to have their reputations redeemed long after they’d shuffled off this mortal coil, if ever. As much as some of the popular arts are rewarded in this culture (to the tune of $20 million per picture), most of what passes for culture is almost unbearably depressing schlock. I was coming to realize that I’d been sold a bill of goods. Geoff, on the other hand, was taught to honor science and rationality as the highest human ideals, “the search for truth”. He had also recently become disillusioned with those ideals with his understanding of the real nature of science (politics as usual) and with the overbearing hubris and selfishness of much of what passes for enlightened rationality. I had come to Hampshire from the depths of the most urban of cities, and he arrived fresh out of the wilds of Alaska (so remote that once he stopped by while I had Billie Jean playing on the stereo and, after nodding his head agreeably for a couple of minutes, said, “hey, this is pretty good – what is it?” This was, I should point out, over two years after Thriller had been released). So, although much of our surface experiences were radically different, the clocks that ticked inside were largely in synch, and we quickly became good friends.

Geoff broke the seal and carefully slipped the record out of the jacket put it on his turntable (ah, the smell of fresh vinyl), and cranked it up while we settled back in to enjoy the new tunes and pore over the record jacket. In Visible Silence starts with an odd poetic trifle, called Opus 4, which uses looped and layered vocal bits to build an elaborate pun.

Although the group had “sold out” by splintering away from Horn’s Zang Tumb Tuub label, In Visible Silence was hardly the mass-market pandering their former label-mates sniffily accused them of making. And, although they had also purged willful obfuscationist Paul Morley, the new release was no less impenetrable than Who’s Afraid, with their dedication to both Bill and Edmund Haley (“see you next time round”), their sly in-jokes (using a tiny vocal nibble (“boy’s don’t”) from 10cc’s surreal and influential postmodern 1975 hit I’m Not in Love (one of the main creative forces behind 10cc (so named because it’s the average amount of male ejaculate), Lol Creme, was made a member of the version of Art of Noise that reformed in time to release their nod to Debussy as the century he ushered in faded into the night)), and their fixation with early photographs of and by Eadweard Muybridge, whose photographic series of people and animals in action revolutionized the way movement was seen and portrayed, paving the way for “motion pictures” (not as anachronistic as it may seem, as the Art of Noise was doing to the sounds of the natural world – breaking them into unnaturally small pieces – what Muybridge did with images). I must point out that, even considering the usual density and complexity of some of my decidedly run-on sentences, that last one has to be one of the thorniest ones to yet dance off my fingertips – I dare you to diagram it.

As proof that In Visible Silence was still about as far from a standard pop record as you could get, it took us until the fourth track before we realized that Geoff had his turntable set to 45 rpm instead of 33 rpm (hmm, remember records?). And we only caught it then because track 4 is Legs. If we both hadn’t’ve (double contraction!) been as familiar with that track as we were, we could have very easily listened to the entire album at the wrong speed and never noticed. I can’t help but think the Art of Noise would approve.

Unfortunately, for all their far-out experimentation, there was a bit of a novelty track on In Visible Silence that drastically altered both the band’s trajectory and their public image. Dusting off king of twang Duanne Eddy for a high-octane cover of Henry Mancini’s classic Peter Gunn theme, the Art of Noise struck gold and, consciously or not, that marked out the group’s final niche in the wider public’s perception. They quickly remixed one of the disc’s finer tracks, the sublime Paranoimia, to include guest vocalizing by the world’s first virtual reality star, Max Headroom. The remix trades the original’s subtle pulse and refined Shakespeare (“is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow”) with a four-on-the-floor raver smothered with Max’s tiresome ranting (“and on drums, The Pope!”), and the remix was such a hit (well, relatively speaking) that they replaced the original version with the Headroom mix on subsequent pressings.

In Visible Silence also continued the Art of Noise’s oblique political slant, by including the ominous Instruments of Darkness, and its soundbites from the volatile politics of South Africa (Who’s Afraid includes a similarly obtuse political track called A Time for Fear). Although not as bracingly noisy or astonishing as the group’s first album, In Visible Silence is a wonderful disc – my overall favorite of theirs. Some criticize it as being too glossy and polished, but I’ll take its alluring sheen over Who’s Afraid’s sometimes off-putting angularity.