Review by DjBatman
4 stars out of 4
Not the easiest record to listen to, but the brainchild of Anne Dudley,
Trevor Horn, J.J.Jeczalik, and their partners Gary Langan and Morley
is a milestone in the history of music. In early 80's Trevor Horn (musical
director of the ZTT label) was the producer to a lot of fundamental
records for pop/rock music, and he helped Anne Dudley (famous for writing
film scores too) and other friends putting together and releasing this
outrageous collage of drum machines, noises, vocal samples, spoken word
and other stuff the most electronic stuff around was New Order's "Blue
monday". AoN anticipated the house revolution of late 80's and the
subsequent rise of electronica in the 90's and their tracks have been
widely known and reprocessed by electronic music freaks. "Music
is the art of sound", says the first line of a classical music book
I have. Car noises, footsteps and screams are "sound", so Art
of Noise can make great music out of these and also every other kind
sound, with a particular inclination for industrial stuff (the recording
is curiously dedicated to Henry Ford), and also small fragments from
other records, I suspect (like a little jazzy insert that seems to have
been captured from the radio). The shortest album cut
("Snapshot", lasting one minute only) sounds like a piece of
the Giorgio Moroder soundtrack to "Electric dreams" (don't
worry, they were released almost simultaneously... so chances are that
neither Moroder nor AoN cared about the similarity). The album
seems like a symphony divided in two movements, with the first part being
more noisy-drum-machine type of music (with the exception of the
above-mentioned "Snapshot") while the second part introduces
melody and reduces the impact of drums and noisey samples.
"Momento" is pure ambient music, with cathedral organ, bells,
footsteps and natural sounds, and there's something similar in "How
to kill", with a moody keyboard carpet filled with weird vocal
snippets. But the longest track (10'14"!) is also the finest part
of the album and probably AoN's most famous cut; "Moments in
love" is the proof that electronic music can be calm and romantic
without losing its rhythmic feel. There have been various remix albums
of AoN tracks and "Close (to the edit)", featured here, was
sampled on The Prodigy's "Firestarter". I suggest to check
the original versions and learn by yourself why these cuts are considered
a piece of music history.
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