Source: Q
Author: Ian Cranna
Date: July 1999
 
Art Of Noise
The Seduction Of Claude Debussy
ZTT 130
Studio experimentalists return with concept inspired by French composer.
 
Art Of Noise Mk3 are Trevor Horn, keyboard player-arranger Anne Dudley, ex-10cc man Lol Creme and writer Paul Morley, joined here by the soaring (if undecipherable) operatic tones of Sally Bradshaw, Donna Lewis and Rakim. The filmic instrumental sketches - skittery drum'n'bass, driving dance or gentler strings and breathy harmonies, laced with scratchy guitar, quirky noises and nods to Debussy's work - are beautifully executed if melodically vague, but the linking verbiage about sound, perfume, dreaming in colour etc (read by John Hurt) is like a bad advertisement or a pompous football commentary, "a revolutionary who set 20th century music (dramatic pause) on its way". Rakim's cameo is out of place, yet the oddly insidious whole emerges greater than the sum of its parts.***
lan Cranna



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