Art Of Noise — Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?(Deluxe CD + DVD

This comprehensive “deluxe” edition of the 1984 debut album by Art of Noise is another disturbing reminder of how malleable our listening choices can be and how what we listen to now affects the way we’ll be listening next. The brain’s little understood abilities to rapidly learn patterns, enjoy anticipating them only to tire of their over familiarity is perhaps what keeps us searching for alternative structures for stimulation. Such a quest often sees work from the distant past cast in a new light as the wide rotation of styles and approaches builds an ability to better interpret previously misunderstood languages. Unfortunately (and a little ironically) for the Art of Noise, the advancements in technology, and particularly our ease of access to recorded music from throughout history, now helps highlight their rather conservative and cynically commoditised aspects.

When it was released, Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise did seem pioneering – a word that has somehow stuck to this day: it’s use of everyday sounds sampled on the then new Fairlight machines neatly jigging in time with electro drum machine rhythms pillaged from New York sounded fresh to impoverished young British ears tutored by a mere fraction of the channels available now. However, today the ‘pioneering’, and even the ‘Art’ and the ‘Noise’ tags seem incongruent with their sound now that we’ve had the chance to get our heads around some of the other homegrown synth ‘n’ sampling ‘pioneers’ of the era that weren’t seen on television nearly as much, if at all (such as, say, Cabaret Voltaire). Indeed, ignoring the packaging and promos, the path Art of Noise sound like they were paving is more towards the tinny pop productions of Stock, Aitken & Waterman that littered the latter half of the same decade.

This, perhaps, shouldn’t be surprising given that the musicians involved were effectively a commercial production team formed by Trevor Horn to turn vacuous glossy pop like that of Dollar’s into, well, dollars. This is perhaps why the music by itself now sounds just like traditional, disposable ‘hits’ and not some Futurist-inspired artistry.

Tellingly, the music works much better on TV and this reissue includes a DVD that dutifully collects together all the relevant footage (including a range of television adverts, some voiced by Kenneth Williams, no less). It shows how Paul Morley’s art direction was the true pioneering aspect to the work to the extent that you get the impression it didn’t really matter how substantial the musical cues were, Morley’s vision would wrap it up in deftly designed yet ambiguous new clothes that everyone at the time wanted a piece of. This was not only evidenced in the excellent animation of the ‘Closer (to the Edit)’ video that seems like the Fairlight is triggering kaleidoscopic images as well as sounds but also across the pretentious packaging that had photos of statues instead of the band members who Morley tried (and failed) to keep faceless, a rare stance at the time.

Listening again, it seems their pioneering status was not earned through creative composition but through a combination of marketing savvy and being the first people to be able to afford new, expensive technology – music made by yuppies for yuppies, even. Maybe in future, when the flux of styles and approaches forms other constellations in our mind, the art in The Art of Noise might realign, but for now these once-liked tunes feel duplicitous, where sadly the ‘innovation’ we were sold has been lost from the sounds only to reveal the previously hidden sales strategy.