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Track Listings
| Disc: 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. A Time For Fear (Who s Afraid) | |||
| 2. Beat Box (Diversion One) | |||
| 3. Snapshot | |||
| 4. Close (to the Edit) | |||
| 5. Who s Afraid (of the Art of Noise) | |||
| 6. Moments in Love | |||
| 7. Memento | |||
| 8. How To Kill | |||
| 9. Realisation | |||
| 10. Too Busy Talking (BBC live session) | |||
See all 18 tracks on this disc
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| Disc: 2 | |||
| 1. So what happens now? | |||
| 2. Beat Box | |||
| 3. Close (to the Edit) version one | |||
| 4. Closer (to the Edit) cinema version | |||
| 5. Moments in Love | |||
| 6. An Art of Noise live at The Value of Entertainment, June 1985 | |||
| 7. Moments in Love (live around the world, Summer 1999) | |||
| 8. Beat Box and Close (to the Edit) live at Coexistence, June 2000 | |||
| 9. When Art of Noise met Kenneth Williams (and Other Commercial Breaks) parts one to nine | |||
| 10. Close (to the Edit) version three | |||
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See all 14 tracks on this disc
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Product Description
Review
Art of Noise were all about mystery: the five-piece, normally photographed behind masks, were formed as an 'abstract' group by ZTT masterminds Trevor Horn and journalist Morley (credited as playing "paper") alongside ZTT studio mainstays Anne Dudley, JJ Jeczalik and Gary Langan. Their music was essentially a collection of sound collages built from samples processed by the brand new Fairlight synthesiser, including such diverse sources as Horn's former band Yes and recordings of a car engine. The artwork they employed - the ZTT aesthetic taken to its extreme - was also deliberately bewildering, with, for example, lyrics included for what is essentially an album of instrumentals. With Art of Noise, you see, the magic wasn't in who made the music, or how they did it: the magic was in the not knowing.
Remarkably, this debut was accessible enough to spawn hit singles, including Close (To the Edit) - arguably the only record ever to include the sound of a VW Golf stalling as its central motif - and Moments in Love, soon afterwards employed by Madonna for her wedding to Sean Penn. Both still sound remarkable: the synth tones may be overly familiar, but the bravado of Close (To the Edit) remains intact, as does the strange allure of its disembodied vocal samples; and Moments in Love - in all its 10-minute splendour - may be one of the most romantic tracks of the 1980s (rather than, as Morley describes it, "the sex song of the 20th century").
Beat Box, too, had proven influential in the development of hip hop when released in its original form a year earlier, but elsewhere Who's Afraid� was a fascinating but dizzying rush of ideas and noises adorning a largely familiar pop framework, a smuggling of avant-garde ideas and technology into the mainstream. Richard Skinner's enthusiastic questioning underlines just how inventive it was for the times, and one can only wonder what contemporary pop-pickers, lured into Art of Noise's world, can have made of the frenzied cut-and-paste of the title-track or the deeply atmospheric How to Kill, built around little more than sound effects and a voice repeatedly intoning "It's stopped". A bonus DVD confirms the brazen attempts at disorientation extended beyond the records themselves, with different versions of promotional videos, Morley's attempt at a live performance to compensate for Dudley, Jeczalik, and Langan's departure from the 'band' two weeks earlier, and Kenneth Williams providing voiceovers for TV advertisements. It's provocative and playful, even a quarter of a century later. After all, who needs truth when you have the Art of Noise?
--Wyndham Wallace
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Customer Reviews
The album itself is still stunning. Before they turned their hand to more pop offerings like "Kiss" and "Dragnet", Art Of Noise were more of a sonic experiment in pioneering sampling, rather than a band, and there are some phenomenally odd moments. Despite this, some of probably their most famous tracks are on this album- "Moments In Love" (a glorious ten-minute-long version), "Beat Box" and "Close To The Edit".
The first disc is filled out with a couple of Radio 1 live sessions from 1984 and 1985. It's interesting to hear how AoN would have been regarded by Radio 1 and by the world at large, but apart from a medley of "Beat Box" into "Video Killed The Radio Star", musically it falls into the same category as the "And What Have You Done With My Body God?" box set- there are some interesting subtle differences that hardcore fans will appreciate, but no real undiscovered classics.
The DVD at first looks packed, with a tracklist longer than the CD- until you realise that it is predominantly various versions of the same two promo videos, "Close To The Edit" and "Moments In Love", in subtly different versions which again will fascinate the fans but leave the more casual viewer wondering why they're watching the fourth almost identical version of the same video. Besides the promo clips from the first album, they've thrown on some material from the "Seduction Of Claude Debussy" era, as if there was nothing for AoN between those two albums- completely overlooking Art Of Noise's brilliant work throughout the rest of the 1980s into the early 90s. It feels a little bit too random a selection of whatever video clips they found in a cupboard, rather than a properly cared-for anthology.
The sleevenotes are essentially in two parts. The second part is an interesting and in-depth retrospective of how the first album came into being, which fits in nicely with the overall retrospective of their greatest hits 2CD set from last year. The first part is Paul Morley at his most... intense. I always preferred AoN as a musical offering rather than as an artistic statement so while the occasional soundbite and cryptic phrase on their album artwork from Morley helped add to the mystique, when Paul Morley starts to write about the Art Of Noise at length I'm afraid I rapidly lose interest and find it somewhat pretentious, and slightly at odds with the music. But at the current bargain price of the album, I'm not going to complain about that.
The DVD with extras is OK but not your main consideration for purchasing this. The "live" tracks/sessions on this disc are pretty horrific, what was the point of a "faceless" group playing tracks live again, I missed that irony?
The good:
* the BBC sessions included as bonus tracks. Particularly nice is the version of "Beat Box" which ends with "Video Killed the Radio Star" when the piano bit comes in.
* the DVD. The classic videos for "Beat Box", "Close (to the Edit)", and "Moments in Love" are here - and, as one might expect, in multiple versions. There are also live performances and a series of commercials. Video and audio quality varies.
* the booklet. I was particularly glad for the inclusion of the essay, "The Genesis of Stupidity", which I'd only ever seen in the original Japanese CD. Lots of photos and the usual essay.
* the sound quality. The tapes have clearly held up well.
The bad:
* the volume level. While the sound quality is actually very good, and the audio has clearly NOT been subjected to the indiscriminate squashing through limiting and compression that still plagues too much of commercially released music these days, Who's Afraid... is still considerably louder than the other ZTT reissues I own, including Into Battle. Which means that anyone wishing to substitute the full-length version of "Moments in Love" included here for the shortened cassette version which appeared on the reissue of Into Battle will have to either do a bit of level matching, or be prepared to reach for the volume knob a couple of times whenever you listen to that particular playlist.
* only one CD. If you followed The Art of Noise during the first couple of years of their existence, you'll remember that there was never a shortage of material available, much of it on 12-inch. Most notable were the "Beat Box" remixes, each labelled "Diversion [#]" "Diversion 1" begat "Diversion 2", which begat "Close (to the Edit)", and so on -- up to "Diversion 10". Since the unreleased LP Worship was included on the Into Battle reissue, this would have been a good place to collect these different versions (whether or not they kept going with the "Close (to the Edit)" branch). Instead, it is now a missed opportunity, since the label (as we've seen with Frankie Goes To Hollywood) tends to spread its 12-inch mixes all over the place when it comes to reissuing them on CD.
* the DVD is PAL. Granted, that is the video system used in the UK, but an NTSC disc would have ensured greater compatibility, enabling folks in the US and Canada to actually view the DVD on their TV sets, while still being viewable on PAL TV sets. In fact, a number of European CD releases that include DVDs make them NTSC-compatible for that very reason. Not that you won't be able to view the DVD at all; you'll just have to do so on your computer. Unless, of course, you actually like all that vertical rolling on your TV screen that you can't adjust...
In short, while this is a decent reissue overall, it isn't without its flaws.
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