Formed in the early 1980s from a collection of studio musicians (notably whiz producer Trevor Horn) and writer Paul Morley that would coalesce into the ZTT label (and give the world Frankie Goes to Hollywood among other delights), the Art of Noise were an instrumental electronic unit wrapped up in a bow of heavy yet cheeky conceptual art. Leaving aside its manifestos and jokes, which are undoubtedly a key part of the band's appeal, these pasty English folks were pioneers of electro, hip-hop, and even Latin freestyle and house. (You'll still catch "Beat Box" on many a U.S. urban station's "Flashback Lunch" hour.) And What Have You Done With My Body God? is a new 4xCD box that takes pages from the group's sketchbook of ideas, with something like more than 40 unreleased tracks.
The lead instrument in the Art of Noise was the Fairlight CMI, the first digital sampler. You can hit up Wikipedia for much more detailed info, but suffice to say it was an incredibly expensive instrument. In its final version, the 1985 CMI Series III, it went for about £50,000-- all for features that you could get from a $400 yard sale PC today. As a result, it was used mostly by art rockers and big name studio techs and producers. (What's most amazing is that technology was moving so fast that only a few years later digital samplers would be cheap enough to be democratized, leading to hip-hop and dance music's sampling golden era.) Even a casual pop listener might recognize some of AON's tics and noises, the vocal stabs and stuttering hooks it built its name on. (The "hey!" vocal hook off of "Close (To the Edit)" would make the band a little richer when sampled by the Prodigy for "Firestarter".)
Already built on sampled drum breaks, ghostly choirs of multi-tracked vocals, and string loops, And What Have You Done sounds like the band never, ever left the studio, pushing a small handful of sampled elements into as many different shapes as it possibly could before it got bored or the money ran out. But despite the mad scientist nature of this creative over-abundance, the Art of Noise's music isn't cold or forbidding or boringly studio hidebound; it can even be lovely. The group's masterpiece, "Moments in Love", is a 10-minute new age make-out track built on floating motes of voice and shiver-up-the-nape-of-your neck strings, the kind of thing Harold Budd might throw in when it's time to knock boots. It gets three re-workings here-- including the 7" mix on the Into Battle EP-- not counting the tracks that feature just a sound or two plucked from it.
Much of And What Have You Done barely qualifies as "songs," just a few minutes of a beat being fucked with-- say, played up and down the octaves of the Fairlight or reversed and put through a filter. (There's also some seriously creepy circus music, experiments for voice, and solos for keyboard.) And some of is just studio fuck-around stuff that no one's life would have been any poorer had it stayed in the vault. But the sketchier tracks sound undeniably like first generation IDM-- the early records of Plaid and Aphex Twin, winsome keyboard melodies over crunchy hip-hop breakbeats-- obviously an important (and unheard until now) bridge between American street-level electro and the bedroom electronic producers of the 90s. As a document of digital creative thrift, four discs of unfinished studio experiments and obsessive self-remixing is amazing and exhausting. And now that computer beats are no longer the strange, alchemical art of pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain types, we'll never see another band like the Art of Noise, for better or worse.
