The Art Of Noise/Revision/VJ interview: “The revenge of the nerds is what they’re calling it.”
Legends who shaped dance culture are back on the road
The Art Of Noise co-founder JJ Jeczalik scans the room from right to left with his phone, making sure to capture as many of the sellout crowd at the Jazz Cafe as is possible in one fairly reasonably quick video clip. Convinced he’s done as good a job as he can, he replaces it in the pocket of his smart jacket.
“When I’m lying on my bed of doom,” he tells the still rapturous audience, keen to be remembered by the Art Of Noise founder in his personal archive, “I shall show this to my children and tell them ‘this was what it was all about.’”
His fellow founder member, engineer/producer and programmer Gary Langan beams from ear to ear and also drinks in the sight of 500 fans of all ages cheering at the top of their lungs, all of them come to worship at the altar of one of the most influential – probably, after Kraftwerk, electronic music’s most influential – groups. To Langan’s right, video operator Ian Peel is jamming with 30 different film clips – that’s 30 for each track, mind – riffing on the musical improvisations that the pair are playing with, extending certain periods by a few beats or a few bars, never worrying too much about sticking to tempo or structure too strictly. The mysterious Raimundo, a new collaborator from Chile, operates mysteriously in the shadows stage left.
If it’s hard to know exactly what’s going in the specific terms of which button does what, then that, we suspect, is how JIJ and Gary like it. When we meet them in a cramped, flightcase-filled backstage side room for a quick post-soundcheck, pre-showtime chat, we ask about the personnel for what is dubbed The Art Of Noise/Revision/VJ Set. Having seen a grainy photo of the show on the band’s official website, we note with interest that there are four people on stage. So, that must be two video operators and two musicians, we ask? “No,” contradicts Jeczalik, just about maintaining a deadpan poker face as he delivers the punchline, “there are no musicians!!”
Langan picks up the baton and adds, pretty proudly, “The revenge of the nerds is what they’re calling it!”
The pair’s roots with Langan as studio engineer and Jeczalik as the expert working with the then brand new Fairlight CMI sampler – the first keyboard with sampling capability – may be nerdy on paper, but their creative contribution is nothing less than era-defining. The pair were working as part of Trevor Horn’s production team in his Sarm West studio in Notting Hill – you know, the one in the Band Aid video – on landmark recordings like ABC’s Lexicon of Love and Malcolm McClaren’s Duck Rock, among others.
In January 1983, the team was working on the Yes album 90125 when Jeczalik and Langan took a discarded loop of the prog rock band’s drummer Alan White and sampled it into the Fairlight. It wasn’t long before they’d created what would in effect be the first Art Of Noise production, the Red & Blue remix of the Yes crossover hit ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’.
Both it and the first official track under their name, the equally stripped down ‘Beatbox’, have the immediately recognisable hallmarks of the outfit stamped all over them. They’re essentially rhythm-based workouts with the iconic brass stab of the Fairlight much in evidence, alongside sound effects and sampled voices, with scant regard paid to impeccable timing, sonic polishing or even, at times structure. Langan laughs that when they play with fellow AoN member Anne Dudley, as they did in 2018 to celebrate the addition of their back catalogue to the British Library’s archives, the now esteemed virtuoso classical composer complains: “it’s not very easy to play!”
They’re very much of the punk rock school of electronics, more concerned with vibe and a feeling of rampant playfulness than balanced, logical arrangements, characteristics that apply to the pair as people just much as these landmark tunes. Why have they suddenly arrived back on the live circuit now? “Well, it’s the 40th anniversary of something or other,” says Jeczalik, conscious of leaving the agrandising of their achievements to other people. Likewise, when they fail to mention any single piece of modern pop music they like, Langan chides him by saying “remember what we said about not sounding like grumpy old men.” Langan adds: “I hear a Taylor Swift record and I think, that’s a decent enough pop tune. But I couldn’t make a record like that.”
Instead, their four decades in the business have not dampened their quest for the spark of chaos that inspiration requires. They talk about Yes bass guitarist Chris Squire and his concept of whether a track was “happening” or not, and laugh about the ‘Warp’ function on Ableton, their software of choice for this live incarnation which – after (apparently very good-humoured) discussions and input from Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and Paul Morley – be referred to as The Art Of Noise/Revision/VJ Set Set (the Revision coming from Morley, VJ Set from Dudley). “We’ve learnt that you can’t Warp ‘happening’,” laughs Jeczalik.
They are lovers of technology, though, obviously. “If it hadn’t been for (Island records founder) Chris Blackwell taking ‘Beat Box’ over to New York on a humble cassette and playing it in the Danceteria, who knows how things might have turned out?” Jeczalik laughs. It launched the band in the States, where their rapid adoption by the hip-hop and breakdancing communities ironically led to them winning awards in the Best Black Act category.
Despite costing the equivalent of a house and being the most advanced piece of studio equipment around in the early 80s, the Fairlight’s tiny sampling capability created a need to innovate and squeeze the creativity. “I used to cheat and double the sampling time by halving the quality,” says Jeczalik, “but that’s what gave the samples that slightly strange, grainy texture.”
The real time jamming software that meant JJ and Gary could rehearse the set with the enigmatic “Raymundo” while he stayed in South America, was an advance that the pair found amazing. Another, JJ says, that he particularly appreciates is the souped up levels of bass available in the live arena, which had taken him by pleasant surprise at their first show at the venue the previous night. “You certainly didn’t get that in the old days.”
As the band’s dinners of burgers and fries show up, we leave the pair to prepare for the show, and head out front where DJ Food’s Strictly Kev is warming an already growing audience with a clearly specially curated selection of proto-electro and hip-hop beats from the first half of the 1980s.
Then, soon enough, it’s showtime, the band taking their places behind their technology as the time honoured space footage fills the screen and cheers fill the air. What follows is less like a gig and more like an exercise in showing how these two geeks irrevocably changed the world. From the raw hip-hop backbone of ‘Beatbox’ – the record that rather hilariously persuaded most of America that they were a black act – and a few diversions into other projects they helped shape, from Malcolm Maclaren’s ‘Duck Rock’ to that Yes remix that forged the AON template, it’s an alternate history of music.
In a drastic contrast to their former boss Trevor Horn’s attempts to recreate that classic sound using big orchestras and real instruments, this ‘no musicians’ version is inevitably closer to both the spirit and the true, machines-gone-wild sound of the original records. Using Ableton – pronounced, tongue very much in cheek by Jeczalik as “Ahh-bleton” between songs and getting quite a few laughs in the process – the structures are, we’re assured by their video technician (and long term chronicler) Ian Peel are still fluid, and he’s armed with a plethora of different clips depending on where the music takes them.
In the world in which we currently live, where the cutting edge of programming and conceptual pioneering remains very much in the underground, their set is also a reminder of just how much success they enjoyed with their creative purple patch. There’s ‘Close (To The Edit)’, as sampled on Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Paranomia’, accompanied by the head of Max Headroom, once a familiar sight to all sinking into the sofa for some post-pub TV vegetation. There’s the pre-ambient chillout classic ‘Moments In Love’, which, as Jeczalik proudly says, Madonna walked down the aisle to and which has clocked up 12 million plays “despite having one of the worse videos ever made.”
Even the poppier moments – the version of ‘Kiss’ by Prince made with Tom Jones and their final encore, the intensely stylish ‘Peter Gunn’ with Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Neal X standing in for Duane Eddy and Italian Job minis flying through waterfalls, are so ahead of their time they’re still way ahead of the pack.
Jeczalik is definitely right – the music they designed four decades ago sounds even better through the bassbinned systems of today. Even more significantly, while you may not be able to ‘Warp’ a happening, with a back a catalogue like this, a sense of mischief and a bit jeopardy, you can certainly create one. Let’s hope this show gets on the road for a proper outing, because regardless of the convoluted name, The Art Of Noise/Revision/VJ set is as close as you’ll ever get to the real deal.
Ben Willmott
The Art Of Noise/Revision/VJ Set play Rewind Festival Scotland (21-23 July) Rewind Festival North (4-6 August) and Rewind Festival (18-20 August).