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EDUCATION & SCIENCE
And What Have You Done With My Body, God?: well, it certainly ain’t Quo
ART OF NOISE
By Andrew Harrison
The first band to push sampling to its limits, Art Of Noise built music from car engines, the Andrews Sisters and marmalized human voices. They represented themselves with pictures of spanners and tragedy-comedy masks, they plas-tered their record sleeves in futurist quotations and in their spare time Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley, Gary Langan and the wonderfully-named JJ Jeczalik comprised the engine room of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Yes and Malcolm McLaren. As Art Of Noise, the music they made between 1983 and 1985 was genuinely revolutionary The crushed, busted Godzilla stomp of Beat Box antic-ipated The Chemical Brothers' own heavy metal techno; Close (To The Edit) was a rolling blues boogie in Cyberman clothes. When Madonna married Scan Penn, she walked down the aisle to the luminous ür-chill of Moments In Love.
Now, you'd never know that any of it hap-pened at all. In the intervening 20-plus years, pop fashion has reversed itself Instead of pretending to be cleverer than you really are, the post-Oasis settlement requires that bands affect stupidity. It's no surprise that writers of pop history have airbrushed the band and their label, the capitalist arts label Zang Tuum Tumb, out of memory more effectively than Stalin did with Trotsky. This was partly revenge on Paul Morley, the impenetrable NME writer credited/blamed with turning the paper into a weekly semiotics symposium. As Art Of Noise's in-house theorist (how '8os is that?) and curator of sleeve quotes, I've got him to thank for my understanding of TS Eliot's The Waste Land and thus my English A-Level.
All of Art Of Noise's nonsensical brilliance appears on this four-CD anthology, although it's a little overlong and many of the 56 tracks turn out to be the same chunks of modem musique con-crète rearranged in a different order (that's Fairlights for you). Most listeners will just want to nick a couple of takes of Close (To The Edit) and Moments In Love from iTunes. But the “director's commentary” booklet is extremely entertaining, and this inspired, wayward music towers over the later version of Art Of Noise that resurrected Tom Jones.
And What Have You Done With My Body, God? is released by ZTT
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