Masters of sampling J.
Jeczalik and Anne Dudley proudly present their first "Best of" LP...
yet the new 'Kiss' is what's topping the charts. Interview by John Diliberto.
ALIEN SONIC LANDSCAPES - trains, horns, street noise and -musical
snippets - collide in the textured creations of the Art of Noise. Voices
stutter and repeat, and a momentary blast from an unidentified symphony
invades the scene as a fleeting glimpse of sanity, viewed through
twisted mirrors.
Perhaps things haven't changed much since 1948, when Pierre Henry
and Pierre Schaeffer re-contextualized sound in a style called musique
concrete. Forty years later, the Art of Noise has taken the style,
digitized and synthesized it, locked it into a crunching groove and
turned it into dance music for the '80s. While Schaeffer and Henry spun
actual phonograph records and, later, tapes, mixing them live, the Art
of Noise uses Fairlight CMIs and Akai S1000 samplers and the skyscrapers
of multitrack recording to create their updated sound.
According to J. Jeczalik, the Art of Noise began as a technological
jam session while they were working on the Yes album, 90125. That album
helped launch digital sampling into the forefront of America's
consciousness, with its big band sampled break on the hit single 'Owner
of a Lonely Heart.' The duo also worked with Malcolm MacLaren on his Duck Rock album and the dance hit, 'Buffalo Gals,' co-written by the other half of AON, Anne Dudley.
The Art of Noise was originally part of Trevor Horn's production
team for Zang Tuum Tumb Records, producing the techno-decadence dance
music of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda and others. Taking their
name from Luigi Russolo's 1913 Futurist music manifesto L’arte dei Rumori,
which translates to "the Art of Noises," they launched an avant-garde
attack on the dance charts with 'Into the Battle' and 'Close (to the
Edit).' The group was faceless, not even appearing in their malevolent
videos, which nevertheless became MTV hits.
After the first album, Gary Langan, Anne Dudley and J. Jeczalik
split from the Zang Tuum Tumb organization, a fact that Trevor Horn and
Paul Morley, ZTT's image shaper, extolled upon bitterly in their liner
notes to the CD compilation Daft.
Nevertheless, as JJ. smugly points out, they went on to have hits. 'Legs,' the theme from Dragnet,
'Paranoimia' and most recently, a trance-dance version of Prince's
'Kiss,' sung by Las Vegas belter Tom Jones. The team's framework is set
up in such a way that Anne Dudley handles the melodies with her Royal
College of Music training, while J.J. holds down the groove and takes
care of the technical end.
J.J. lives an hour southwest of London in a house called Laundry
Cottage. It's there that he sets up his Monster Rat (as opposed to
Montserrat) studio in a dining room, with Series II and III Fairlights,
Roland TR Rhythm boxes and other devices. He'll soon be moving Monster
Rat into his garage when he builds a serious studio with a DDA console.
He's a techno musician to the core, describing his keyboard skills as
"Digital, as in one finger."
He leaves the dexterity to Anne Dudley, whose own home studio is
about 30 miles away and includes a 24-track Sony MC1 and Soundtracs
console with a Roland D50, Akai S 1000 and a Bösendorfer grand piano.
Dudley is currently heard on the soundtrack to Buster, starring
Phil Collins. She wrote the score and arranged the strings for Collins'
UK hit, 'A Groovy Kind of Love.' She'll also be heard on 1989 albums by
Boy George and Peter Frampton.
When we spoke, J.J. was at home at Laundry Cottage; Anne was in Los Angeles, cutting another film score for Cameron (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) Crowe's new film, Say Anything. They're currently making some rare press appearances to pump The Best of the Art of Noise,
which includes most of their hits, but in radically altered and
re-mixed form. Re-contextualizing is what the Art of Noise is all about.
MT (John Diliberto): I always had the feeling that the idea of the group came out of studio experimentation.
JJ (J. Jeczalik):
'From the first day I met a Fairlight, it struck me that the obvious
thing to do with it was to actually put non-musical sounds in and play
them in a musical way. When I was programming for other people, I always
had these noises that I wanted them to use on records and they wouldn't
because they were too outrageous; people thought I was mad back in
1980. Now, of course, every record's got them and more; it's become much
more in vogue."
MT: It's actually become clichéd in many ways. Did you think there was a danger in that?
JJ: "Oh very
much so. The thing that fascinated me quite recently was that 1 had a
new library sent over to me from Fairlight and on it was a sound that I
know I sampled, that I created in 1983! It had been given someone else's
name. The irony of it was that it sounded better on the library disc
than when I first did it, which made me laugh. And also, the fact that
it had been entirely around the world in the form of digital information
was an odd situation. But it didn't bother me at all. It's irrelevant
who did it - it's the way you use it and when that makes a difference."
MT: I guess you can wind up with samples of samples of samples to infinity.
JJ: "Yeah,
exactly. But until quite recently, whenever you made a sample there was a
slight loss. It occurred to me that in a logical extension of that,
inevitably things would disappear altogether, and the world's biggest
drum sound wouldn't exist at all."
MT: A lot of times your sampling sounds down and dirty. There's not a lot of processing or anything.
JJ: "Oh yeah,
very much so. Because, especially with the (Fairlight) Series II, which
I still have, the quality is not its great strength, let's face it. But
to me, after a while it became horribly apparent that you just have to
take things as you heard them. And if you hit the key and it sounded
great, that's it, and there was no point in fluffing with it, you know.
One of the problems people have gotten into is, in the immortal words of
a great keyboard player friend of mine, 'That sounds good, let me
change it.' You know that's something that 1 tried to avoid myself.,
it's so dangerous. Suddenly you wave bye-bye and the sound disappears
and the idea is gone and you've lost it.
"A lot of it sounds a bit
crude because I may have sampled something, and Anne would play
deedle-a, deedle-a, and then we would record and that would be it. And
that's when musicians are at their best - fooling around, thinking
intuitively, working things out and kind of finding out what's going on,
what the possibilities are."
MT: Had you listened to musique concrete?
JJ: "Some, but without knowing it. It didn't have any bearing on what we were doing as such."
MT: I had always thought of the Art of Noise very much as musique concrete with a groove - a sort of 1980's version.
AD (Anne Dudley):
"Everything we did with the Fairlight was feasible using the techniques
of musique concrete, using pieces of tape and doing what they used to
do. But when the Fairlight came along it became easy to experiment
quickly and find out whether something was going to work immediately.
Musique concrete was so complicated. If you're physically cutting up the
tape, slowing it down and turning it around, you're never getting an
immediate effect. That's not a very attractive proposition to me because
I like to work quickly and I like to be fresh and I like a certain
amount of improvisation to be in our music."
MT: Do you think you work less intuitively now?
JJ:
"Unfortunately, yes. Because over the past five years I've been exposed
to a huge amount of information about song construction and all that
business, and necessarily there are things that I had to comply with so
that people could come to terms with the music. And, in fact, if I
listen back to some of our early creations, it's pretty standardized.
There were verses, choruses and bridges, but because there's not a lead
vocal they're not as easy to identify. But the essential elements of
music are there."
MT: Speaking of vocals, you've just done your first one with Tom Jones.
JJ: “Well,
funnily enough, when we first started in 1982, Trevor Horn was always a
great fan of Tom's and he said, 'Wouldn't it be great to do a record
with Tom Jones?' We all laughed and said, ‘Yeah, Trevor, go and make
some tea.' And that was the end of it. He wanted to do it because he
thought he had a great voice, which indeed he has. So that idea was
forgotten until about six months ago. I was producing some stuff for
Nick Kamen, and the A&R chappy was on the phone and said, 'Yeah, it
would be great - Tom Jones and the Art of Noise.' It was a laugh and
then bells started ringing and I thought back to five years ago. And
actually, of all the people who could sing, I couldn't think of the
sound of one voice that I wanted to work with more, maybe other than Bob
Hope or Bing Crosby, because I think they have such a sound in their
voice, and likewise Tom."
MT: What did Tom Jones think of it, playing in this context?
JJ: I don't
know what he thought of it initially, because we didn't work together at
the same time. The tape we sent to Los Angeles had a different rhythm
track than the one that ended up on it."
AD: "That’s why he was great to work with (laughs) - send him a tape, get it back, and you meet on Top Of The Pops."
JJ: It came
back to England and I worked on it for a few days, and thought it was
boring. His voice sounded so out there and up front that I thought it
needed something radical going on in the background. Eventually, after
I'd figured out that we had this lead vocal and we could swing things
around it, we mixed it and sent it back and he thought we were geniuses,
because we had a good sound on his voice essentially. It came down to
engineering, but also the fact that we didn't have that modern
boom-crash - which I think is there to disguise the fact that a lot of
people can't sing - stomping all over his voice."
MT: It has a very trance-like rhythm. How were the drums processed on that?
JJ: In verse
one they were from the Fairlight into the room at AIR studios, gated,
compressed, miked up and back in again and then fiddled with on the
desk. Verse two was just a sample and verse three was a percussion loop
with some original drums from verse two, I think, which were taken from a
previous track on another album that I had laid together, which was the
cabaret bit."
MT: Why did you incorporate snippets from your other songs?
JJ:
'Publishing. We were incorporating bits from other songs because we were
defending ourselves, really. It's on a greatest hits compilation. We
thought if we didn't it would sound like a Tom Jones record. Also,
they're quite good tunes, and there was this bloody hole that needed
filling. 'Think I'm gonna dance now,' hmm, so what? 'What are we gonna
do here? I know, a medley.”
MT: How do you think using non-instrumental sounds affects the rhythm?
JJ: "For example, take 'A Day at the Races' which is on the previous album, In No Sense? Nonsense!
We had a recording of race horses galloping down in the field on a
windy day and that sort of thing. And as I heard the tape go by I
thought, 'Well, if I take out that bit there and repeat it, it will
become its own rhythm,' and that was the origination for the whole
track. Everything was built around that because there's an innate rhythm
in that, which you can't possibly make up. And as soon as you start
cutting it up and repeating it, then it takes on an entirely new
character."
MT: From the beginning you've had tracks that are very avant garde, arhythmic tracks.
JJ: "Yeah, I
know what you mean. A lot of those were failures, actually. Let’s try
this and that and bang them together and see what happens. And they
failed. But others had their own momentum and had their own meaning. And
so it kind of made sense to leave them as they were."
MT: Are
you one of these people who walks into a room and starts banging on
things to hear how they sound, or when you hear something your first
thought is, 'Let's sample it?'
JJ: "Well, I
think if you start going around and tapping things and thumping things,
inevitably they end up sounding like things that already exist in music.
You can't tap the hooter of a diesel train. It has its own reason for
being there, it has its own crazy force. It was designed for a reason,
it has a purpose and so you can then capture that rather than forcing it
to be something you want. That's much more interesting than going
around and tapping things and saying, 'Well, why doesn't this diesel
train sound any good?' Because it was never designed to sound any good
to you or to anybody else. It's there and you have to take it at face
value, which is where the kind of dirty, crude bit comes in, something
that's got distortion."
MT: You toured with the Art of Noise in the States, and there wasn't a lot of Pre-sequenced material.
JJ: "No, it
was all live. Well, actually with the exception of 'Moments in Love'
because it was my job to play the ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba--ba-ba for ten
minutes and I just could not do it. I don't mind admitting it was tough.
So that was sequenced."
MT: There
seemed to be, a "gee whiz, look what we can do" quality to the
performance. For instance, I remember the drum solo where Paul Kevin
Robinson was just playing samples (from 'Opus 4') and Anne came out and
said, "How did he do that?" like it was a parlor trick. And you were
kind of miming to some of the things.
JJ: I think
the problem came about because I had never played live before. And there
was this thing of, 'What do you do?' You can't stand up there and press
a key down and have a sound come out and expect people to be excited
about it. But I don't think there was any kind of 'gee whiz' attitude
about it."
MT: 'Opus 4' is an unlikely track to put on your greatest hits.
AD: "Is it on there?"
MT: Yes, it's the lead track.
AD: "Oh, I
didn't know. It was intended to be a sound poem, because I've always
liked that Thomas Hook poem 'November' and the girl who sings it is
named Camilla, whose voice is magical. The combination of the two seemed
to work great."
MT: It
seems in the beginning that An of Noise was making social statements and
was more politically inclined on pieces like 'A Time for Fear (Who's
Afraid)' and 'Instruments of Darkness' with Botha's voice.
JJ: "They may
be perceived as being statements but their origination was the sound.
In those particular instances, 'Who's Afraid,' the Americans had just
gone into Grenada and we were listening to the news and just happened to
have a tape recorder lying around and recorded what was going on. I
remember seeing this story emerge. There's some chap in a foxhole in
Grenada and he doesn't have a clue about what's going on and he's got
his radio on to find out why people are bombing him and that's how that
started. But yeah, I suppose that was a statement, a reflection of what
was going on. "Whereas the one with Botha, that was there because I
found the sound of his voice and that of lan Paisley, the Irish
gentleman, so fascinating. And Hitler and Churchill might have been on
there as well because of the way they sounded rather than what they were
saying. The fact that they may have had a message afterwards was
coincidental. And from there on it's up to the person listening to it."
AD: "I think
it would be a mistake to put too strong a political emphasis on those
tracks. I don't personally think pop music is the place to make heavy
political statements I know why you're saying that, because they have
coherent voices saying coherent statements...
MT: Well, when you put Botha on a track...
AD: "You're
saying something. We're just trying to give a general impression. We put
the choice there and let people decide for themselves."
MT: Are
your songs generated out of the sounds that you have at hand, or do you
go looking for sounds to fit the songs that you have?
JJ: "Both. Of
course ' there's a large library now. 'Moments in Love' started from an
orchestra sting and I just played three notes and Anne said, 'Hang on a
second, that's a good idea,' and played a chord and said, 'Play those
notes again.' And that's how it started. The chord of the orchestra and
the notes I chose to play, quite by chance, evoked what then became the
song. And then we started to look for things to put on it. So it was
very much a kind of two- or three-way process. Very symbiotic."
MT: 'Eye of the Needle' has a jazzy, hipster kind of groove with that crooning voice.
AD: "The idea
came from the particular sound we had for the bass. I remember thinking
it has an interesting bass sound, and wouldn't it be interesting to
have a walking bass part with this kind of bass sound. So we started
with the walking bass sound and the whole piece developed a jazzy kind
of vamp around it."
MT: 'Moments in Love' used, I believe, what was called Orch 5 on the Fairlight?
JJ: "Well, there used to be one called Orch 6, but it wasn't that one. That was my own."
MT: That
sound became very much a cliché of the early '80s and that was one of
the first records to have it. Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome To The
Pleasure Dome had the same sound all over it.
JJ: "Similar.
Well, it became pervasive after a while. Orch 6 was on the Fairlight
library for years before it was 'discovered,' and the Art of Noise and
many other people used it at the same time."
AD: "I had a
D50 some time before most people had them and I used those wonderful
wispy floaty sounds. Then I heard them everywhere else and thought, 'I
can't use them anymore.”
MT: The
Yes record you worked on, 90125, particularly 'Owner of a Lonely Heart,'
was one of the first overt uses of that kind of sampling in the
instrumental break to appear in a big way in America.
JJ: "Yeah,
absolutely. It was a bit of a milestone actually in terms of shoving up
the ears of the listening public as to what was going on. Funnily
enough, the stab sound was the sound that came back to me on the
Fairlight library. It's everywhere now, but at the time it was exciting
and new."
MT: You pull a lot of things off of other records and many people think that's cheating.
JJ: "No, and
there's a precedent for it, not that it justifies it in any way. All
composers from time immemorial have borrowed from each other, stolen
from each other, copied, improved. The only difference with the new
technology is that you can actually physically take things from records
and recordings by other people, but I defy anyone to listen to our stuff
and say, 'I know where that came from.' Because when we have done it,
it's been in such a way that we take the essence of what the mood is and
not the actual thing itself.
AD: "I must
admit that when we did 'Buffalo Gals' in '82, I thought, 'This is
amusing. This is the end of it.' Little did I know that six or seven
years later I'd be hearing the same ideas. I think it's a shame.
Sampling has become an open case of theft. When I hear chunks of songs,
usually James Brown - that's never what we did. We would use tiny bits
of tiny bits and turn them around, put them upside down and try and do
something different with them."
JJ: "What
pisses me off is that people take things verbatim, don't change them,
don't improve them, don't look at them. They just plunk them on their
records and think it's good. Which it obviously isn't. Because I know
that when I sit at the Fairlight and I have a snippet of Bach or
something else, it's meaningless until I do something with it. And just
because one has the Art of Noise drum kit, it doesn't mean you can have a
dance hit."
MT: There's a reference aspect to it, a commentary on what the other recording meant.
JJ: "It's a
two-edged sword. If you're involved in that sort of creation, then you
have to realize that if you keep on doing that, in two or three years
time all the people who are not modifying things and not creating things
of their own will not have anything left to nick. You have to originate
something somewhere, even if it's modified, because after awhile it
will cease to be."