From mike Sent Fri, May 28th 1999, 06:01
From mike Sent Fri, May 28th 1999, 06:01
This is a review I posted to the AoN-chat and ZTT mailing lists.
The Art of Noise, Trevor Horn's 1983 side project, was a novel
interpretation of a 70-year-old idea of an Italian Futurist by the name of
Luigi Russolo. To listen to Horn tell it, the success of the combination
of Yes and Frankie Goes to Hollywood session hands J.J. Jeczalik, Anne
Dudley, and Gary Langan, under Horn's direction and packaged by Paul
Morley, was a complete and total accident.
Gosh, we're pioneers with this new sampling technology? People are dancing
to "Beat Box"? "Close (to the Edit)" is an international hit? How could
this be?
Please. That 'Into Battle' and 'Who's Afraid' were clever, arty, yet
mostly accessible pieces of sample-based pop-dance by _design_ is obvious.
Yet despite Horn (and Dudley)'s oh-so-British faux naivete, the fact
remains: those two albums, and arguably the Horn-less "parody" that
followed ('In Visible Silence'), are of groundbreaking importance not just
in that they created palatable music from found, sampled sounds, but also
in that they did it so _well_. And the arrival of this non-band
foreshadowed a movement in electronic music that would lend new meaning to
the term "faceless", influencing generations to come.
While the Art of Noise had some fine moments after breaking with Horn's
ZTT label in the latter half of the 1980s, its members parted ways in
1990. By the time popular interest in electronic music was surging in the
mid-90s, Art of Noise had become synonymous with bland remix and
compilation albums issued by the China label after the band's dissolution.
Against the backdrop of this time that they had been ahead of, all of the
former members discussed at one point or another the possibility of
reforming, but it wasn't until Dudley and Horn worked on Marc Almond's
'Tenement Symphony' that a new Art of Noise was born, this time without
Jeczalik and now incorporating Lol Creme and Morley again in more
productive roles. Work began in 1996 and took over 2 years to complete.
One would hope that the fruit of this labor would be a kind of redemption
for the tarnished name of the Art of Noise, a bold return to new, untested
ideas, something that would be as exciting and fresh in 1999 as 'Into
Battle' was in 1983.
Well, 'The Seduction of Claude Debussy' is a reinvention, to be sure, and
in some ways it marks a return to some of the original concepts, but it is
not by any stretch as daring as the Art of Noise of old. Further
disappointing is that its creators are standing by the "we were good by
accident" rhetoric, dismissing the contrast between the new and the old as
a misunderstanding on the part of the fans as to what the Art of Noise was
really about all along.
On some levels, TSoCD is a triumph for Horn. It's clearly his baby, and
his high production values permeate every second of the album's 60 minutes
(or so; there are multiple mixes of the album in circulation already).
Dudley's string and piano arrangements, based on relatively unknown
Debussy compositions, swoop and swirl with grandeur around drum'n'bass
styled percussion patterns, Sally Bradshaw's operatic declarations and
John Hurt's narration about the life of Debussy that is so carefully
placed at the right moments in the album.
But the implication of such deliberate incorporation of each and every
element of sound leaves the listener feeling like the new Art of Noise is
now just all about technical perfection. Where's the accidental beauty in
that? For that matter, where's the _fun_? Never has an album so perfectly
produced by such talented people been so devoid of intensity. The new Art
of Noise is very Euro, very mild, even when hip-hop icon Rakim delivers a
surprisingly tolerable rap about Baudelaire, among other things, halfway
through the album ("Metaforce"). The drum'n'bass inspired moments have
half the drums and none of the bass that they should, and the closest
thing to a real mood in this epic is the all-too-brief ambient interlude
"out of this world (version 138)".
That said, one still comes away from this album with a sense of relief.
The Art of Noise are back and whether it was deliberate or not, they have
crafted a quality album that, while not living up to anyone's expectations
or being very much ahead of its time, is more cohesive than anything AoN
-- or very many other musicians, for that matter -- have ever done. It's
not without its moments, and there's a promise of more to come. Welcome
back. We're not afraid.