ALBUM REVIEWS
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ALBUM REVIEWS |
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Art Of Noise
INFLUENCE ZTT 2.8.10 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk
Art Of Noise were the British Kraftwerk – just not so long-lived. From 1983 to the early 90s (with a brief reappearance in 1999 to make a concept album about the life of Debussy), they produced quirky and imaginative electronic music with a wicked sense of humour as well as style with razor-sharp creases. By electronic, I mean they used studio tools to shape a mix of samples, synthesised and acoustic sounds into something that couldn’t, then, have been made in the studio. Like Kraftwerk, they presented themselves as faceless at the outset, hiding behind masks and clever-clever words. Despite having made a few albums, they are best known for a couple of singles – namely Close (To The Edit) and Peter Gunn and dismissed as a typically eighties band – all style and little substance. Thing is – it was a superhuman amount of style and that’s enough to make this two and a half hours set fascinating. Roving through a bewildering number of line-ups, the constant is a playfulness and myriad of re-workings. I remember having a cassette single of Close (To The Edit) that had been remixed to twenty hypnotic minutes. Uber-fan, Ian Peel, has trawled the archives to pick the best or most representative versions before sequencing them into a continuous stream of invention. Noises are always plucking at your ear or appearing from nowhere, like percussive revving engines, cars starting, snippets of samples. It’s a big game of percussion far more than melody and it’s busy and frenetic. This is the product of a lot of producers up waaay to late in an over-equipped studio, plainly over-stimulated and having fun. There is a marvellous level of pretension that was only encouraged by wordsmith journo, Paul Morley and is to be embraced and celebrated rather than derided as a product of the age. Being an afficiando, Ian Peel has chosen to run the albums chronologically, disc one being a “best of” and disc two an alternative history – b-sides, alternate mixes, etc. This makes the album a find for fans and newbies alike, since there hasn’t been a decent and affordable hits collection of the band. I find the second disc as interesting as the first – it’s a lot sparser but as eclectic) and, were I a fanboy, I could soak up the very detailed notes in the booklet. The package is clearly a labour of love rather than a cheapo repackaging and the attention to detail is evident in the notes recording eve when a poorer quality source has been used for a missing master tape (not that you’d notice without looking for it). A highlight is a track released solely as by Tom Jones – the playful re-working of Prince’s Kiss. It’s easy to forget that, at the time, Tom Jones was just a cheesy Las Vegas singer, treading Variety Club boards – using him was a re-invention of cool and helped reboot his career. The band reached the end of the trail with the aforementioned Debussy album in typically quirky fashion – recruiting Rakim for a big thumping single that, given the subject matter, was always going to surprise and a drum and bass-ish epic outlines the pace of progress in driving rhythms as Something Is Missing before classic luvvie, John Hurt, narrates The Holy Egoism Of Genius. One to listen to with the booklet, soaking up the detail and again as a symphony of the artier moments of eighties pop. And again as a soundtrack to the unexpected. www.ztt.com |
