Art of Noise (also the Art of Noise) were a British avant-garde and electronic group formed in early 1983 by audio engineer and record producer Gary Langan and programmer J. J. Jeczalik, along with keyboardist and arranger Anne Dudley, producer Trevor Horn, and music journalist Paul Morley. The group had international Top 20 hits with its interpretations of "Kiss", featuring Tom Jones, and the instrumental "Peter Gunn", which won a 1986 Grammy Award.

The group's mostly instrumental compositions were novel melodic sound collages based on digital sampler technology, which was new at the time. Inspired by turn-of-the-20th-century revolutions in music, the Art of Noise were initially packaged as a faceless anti- or non-group, blurring the distinction between the art and its creators. The band is noted for innovative use of electronics and computers in pop music, particularly its innovative use of sampling.

History

Beginnings

The technological impetus for the Art of Noise was the advent of the Fairlight CMI sampler. With the Fairlight, short digital sound recordings called samples could be played using a piano-like keyboard, while a computer processor altered such characteristics as pitch and timbre. Music producer Trevor Horn was among the early adopters of Fairlight. While some musicians were using samples as adornment in their works, Horn and his colleagues saw the potential to craft entire compositions with the sampler.

In 1981, Horn's production team included programmer J. J. Jeczalik, engineer Gary Langan and keyboard player/string arranger Anne Dudley. The team produced ABC's 1982 debut album The Lexicon of Love, increasingly using the Fairlight to tweak live-based elements of performance but also to embellish the compositions with sound effects such as a cash register's bell on "Date Stamp" (Dudley also co-wrote a track on the album, which launched her scoring career). The team also worked on Malcolm McLaren's 1982 album Duck Rock and would go on to work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood on what would become the album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (realised predominantly on Fairlight).

During January 1983, Horn's team were working on the Yes comeback album 90125 – Horn as producer, Langan as engineer, and Dudley and Jeczalik providing arrangements and keyboard programming. During the sessions, Jeczalik and Langan took a scrapped Alan White drum riff and sampled it into the Fairlight using the device's Page R sequencer (the first time an entire drum pattern had been sampled into the machine). Jeczalik and Langan then added non-musical sounds on top of it, before playing the track to Horn. This in turn resulted in the Red & Blue Mix of Yes's "Owner of a Lonely Heart" single, which showcased the prototype sound of The Art of Noise.

Seeing further potential in the idea, Horn teamed Jeczalik and Langan with Dudley in February to develop the project and brought in one of his business partners, ex-NME journalist Paul Morley, as a provider of concepts, art direction and marketing ideas. Morley came up with the project name (taken from the essay "The Art of Noises" by noted futurist Luigi Russolo, and finalised at Jeczalik's request by dropping the final 's'). Much later, in a July 2002 article penned for The Guardian, Morley wrote "I loved the name Art of Noise so much that I forced my way into the group. If over the years people asked me what I did in the group, I replied that I named them, and it was such a great name, that was enough to justify my role. I was the Ringo Starr of Art of Noise. I made the tea. Oh, and I wrote the lyrics to one of the loveliest pieces of pop music ever - Moments in Love." Horn himself joined the new group as production advisor and provider of further ideas. This was the first time that he had been part of a group since parting company with his The Buggles' partner Geoff Downes (after they had been part of Yes). It would also be the first and last time that he would enjoy chart success as an artist since the new wave hit in 1979 with "Video Killed the Radio Star" (not counting writing credits on The Dollar Album).

Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1983–1984)

The debut Art of Noise EP, Into Battle with the Art of Noise, appeared in September 1983 on Horn's fledgling ZTT label.

In Visible Silence (1986)

After the split, Dudley, Jeczalik, and Langan moved to the UK-based China Records label, taking the Art of Noise name with them. The Peter Gunn video featured comedian Rik Mayall in a parody of the private eye film genre. The piece would later be used as the theme music for the 2008 BBC TV series Bill Oddie's Wild Side.

From the same album, the "Beat Box"-like single "Legs" (using the same drum sounds) was a mild underground hit in dance clubs. In 1986, the album track "Paranoimia" achieved some success when a remix of it was released as a single with overdubbed vocal samples provided by Matt Frewer as the supposedly computer-generated character Max Headroom. and all the tracks were released as part of the At the End of the Century box set. Instead, a new single called "Dream On" – which featured remixed versions of the forthcoming album track "Dreaming in Colour" – was released to club DJs later in 1998, showcasing mixes by Way Out West.

A second single, "Metaforce", featuring a rap by Rakim, preceded the 1999 release of the concept album The Seduction of Claude Debussy, a cohesive concept album depicting the life and works of Claude Debussy, on the ZTT label.

This album later formed the basis of a 17-minute soundtrack for London's Millennium fireworks celebrations on the banks of the River Thames. The firework display was synchronised to an edit of "Seduction" which also featured a collage of samples from some of Britain's most famous pop and rock songs, plus classical composers. It was broadcast live on 95.8 Capital FM and BBC London 94.9. Trevor Horn worked on the project with Jill Sinclair, Bob Geldof, Capital Radio executive Clive Dickens and producer Ross Ford.

After performing a handful of live shows in the UK and US, the band dissolved. A DVD (Into Vision) and CD (Reconstructed) were released in 2002 and 2003 respectively, featuring music recorded and filmed in Chicago, at the Coachella Festival (10 September 1999), at the Shepherd's Bush Empire (22 March 2000) and Fountain Studios, Wembley, London (1 June 2000).

Later work

A reunion of sorts occurred at a 30 November 2013 live performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra (with a live BBC radio broadcast) including Dudley's orchestral arrangement of the band's EP Into Battle and a new piece entitled "Rhythm of a Decade" by Dudley and narrated by Morley. In their programme notes, they explain "Rhythm of a Decade" was inspired by an unreleased Art of Noise piece: "Of the many Art of Noise albums that did not appear – even if they were recorded – was one that set out to represent various decades through the rhythms that appeared during that particular decade – charting the development of rhythmical patterns and the physical changes in drum sounds throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s".

thumb|Art of Noise performing live at Liverpool Sound City in May 2017 On 25 May 2017 Art of Noise members Langan, Dudley and Jeczalik reunited as Reboot Art of Noise, performing at Liverpool Sound City as special support for The Human League during the festival's Pioneers of British Electronic Music.

The three appeared again when they played highlights from their In Visible Silence album plus other career highlights as "Dudley, Jeczalik, Langan" at the British Library in London on 9 March 2018 as part of the library's "Season of Sound" celebrating 140 years of recorded sound. This performance included a recorded video intro and outro from Paul Morley.

Most recently, Jeczalik and Langan have been performing intermittent live dates as The Art of Noise/Revision/VJ Set, with a four-person line-up also including video operator Ian Peel (a long-term Art of Noise chronicler) and Chilean musician/producer Raimundo Ladrón de Guevara (and following "very good-humoured discussions and input from Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and Paul Morley").

Re-releases

In 2003, a 20th-anniversary edition of Into Battle was released the first time in CD form in Germany, including bonus tracks and a bonus DVD of their promo videos and a selected discography slideshow of album art. The CD substituted the original version of "Beat Box" with the later "Diversion One".

In early 2004, the Karvavena label released an Art of Noise tribute album, The Abduction of The Art of Noise. This album contains covers of various tracks, including a new version of "Beat Box" performed by J.J. Jeczalik under his Art of Silence moniker. 2004 saw Dudley and Horn perform "Close (To the Edit)" together at a The Prince's Trust charity event.

In 2006, Lol Creme, Trevor Horn and others formed Producers, a band made up of record producers and musicians. Gary Langan was the band's audio engineer.

21 August 2006 saw ZTT release a 4-CD Art of Noise box set, titled And What Have You Done with My Body, God?, which consisted of tracks exclusively from the 1983–85 ZTT era, from the initial tentative demos created by Gary Langan and J.J. Jeczalik in the wake of the Yes 90125 sessions, to selections from the Ambassadors Theatre performances featuring Horn and Morley, recorded at concerts profiling ZTT acts—prior to which, Langan, Jeczalik, and Dudley had abandoned the label (and, for the time being, the band). The set featured over 40 unreleased remixes, demos, and works in progress, as well as the complete vinyl version of Into Battle... – sourced from the original masters – for the first time on CD. The project was conceived, researched and compiled by music journalist (and Art of Noise aficionado) Ian Peel, who also wrote the box set's accompanying 36-page book, which featured new interviews with all of the original members.

In April 2011, Peel continued his archiving of classic and vaulted ZTT material, now named the Element Series, with a Deluxe Edition reissue of Into Battle with the Art of Noise. This was intended to be the first of a chronological remastering and repackaging of the Art of Noise's output, collating the original album or EP with extended and previously unavailable tracks. Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?, considered the first "true" AON album, was released as a Deluxe Edition on 19 September 2011.

In May 2017, a two-disc deluxe edition of In Visible Silence was released. Included is the remastered album, along with several remixes and B-sides, taken from previous 12" singles and available on CD for the first time. Also included are outtakes and unreleased material from the group's time with China Records. Shortly thereafter, a similar deluxe edition of their next album, In No Sense? Nonsense! was released.

Other work

The Art of Noise wrote and recorded the theme music to the popular British game show The Krypton Factor, which was used from 1986 to 1993; the group also composed the short music pieces that introduced each of the six rounds. The group also composed and performed the opening theme for the third series of the chat show The Max Headroom Show. The track, titled "Happy Harry's High Club" (after a phrase spoken by Max Headroom on Paranoimia), is featured on In Visible Silence.

Discography

  • Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise? (1984)
  • In Visible Silence (1986)
  • In No Sense? Nonsense! (1987)
  • Below the Waste (1989)
  • The Seduction of Claude Debussy (1999)

Videography

  • "The Art of Noise in: Visible Silence" (1986) – a concert filmed in the Hammersmith Odeon on 15 August 1986.
  • The Art of Noise: "Into Vision" (2002) – four different concerts between 1999 and 2000 in Chicago; The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California; in Shepherd's Bush, London; and in Wembley, London.

Band members

{| class="wikitable"

|+ Official Art of Noise members

! 1983–1985

|

  • Anne Dudley
  • J. J. Jeczalik
  • Gary Langan
  • Trevor Horn
  • Paul Morley

|-

! style="background:#e7ebee;"| 1985–1987

|

  • Anne Dudley
  • J.J. Jeczalik
  • Gary Langan

|-

! style="background:#e7ebee;"| 1987–1990

|

  • Anne Dudley
  • J.J. Jeczalik

|-

! style="background:#e7ebee;"| 1998–2000

|

  • Anne Dudley
  • Trevor Horn
  • Paul Morley
  • Lol Creme

|-

! style="background:#e7ebee;"| 2017

|

  • Anne Dudley
  • J.J. Jeczalik
  • Gary Langan

|}

See also

  • List of Billboard number-one dance singles of 1984
  • List of artists who reached number one on the U.S. Dance Club Songs chart
  • Musique concrète

References

  • Official website