This was how it tended to go from there, according to the three Art of Noise members who ended up making In Visible Silence. Dudley, Jeczalik, and Langan would create the music; Horn would provide producerly suggestions about what was working and what might benefit from a tweak; and Morley would slap on a title. Much of Into Battle… and Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise?, the full-length that followed, was in the same brash, percussive mode as “Beat Box.” (This sound, clearly inspired by hip-hop, would soon reciprocate the influence: “Beat Box” became a staple of breakdancing culture and has been sampled by everyone from Marley Marl to Lil’ Kim.) One major exception was “Moments in Love,” a 10-minute fantasia that spends most of its time cycling through the same three notes, a deceptively simple pattern that becomes more mysteriously beautiful each time it repeats.
Meanwhile, ZTT was racking up hits and Art of Noise were helping to make them, even when their name wasn’t on the spine. (According to Frankie Goes to Hollywood singer Holly Johnson, the only contribution the band’s instrumentalists made to their world-conquering ZTT single “Relax” was the sound of their splashing in a swimming pool, which Jeczalik recorded and sampled with the Fairlight.) But tension was mounting among the members. As Jeczalik put it in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times: “In the early days we decided to be anonymous, and lo and behold somebody else got all the credit, namely Horn and Morley.” The press tended to assume that the two most famous men in Art of Noise were the masterminds, a notion that Horn and Morley did not go out of their way to dispel. Dudley, Langan, and Jeczalik—who were “responsible for 98.98% of the music,” according to the latter—left ZTT, and, after some legal squabbling, managed to bring their band name with them. In response, Morley distributed a statement to the press whose blind self-regard reads like parody: “Members of Art of Noise who aided on the musical side of Horn and Morley’s swindling, mediating project, have now decided that they are competent enough to pursue a conventional rock career.”
In Visible Silence, the second full-length by Art of Noise and first without Horn and Morley, makes clear that the 98 percent figure is not terribly exaggerated. All of the technical dazzle and textural strangeness of the canonical early tracks are still present. Some of the surreal humor and revolutionary posturing too, though the smash cuts have been softened; song forms that once reveled in harsh juxtaposition now glide along softer arcs of theme and variation, statement and recapitulation, tension and resolution. At its best, In Visible Silence fulfills the promise of “Moments in Love,” moving past the new technology’s capacity for garishness and novelty and exploring the shadows beyond.
Even “Legs,” the first single and track most indebted to the “Beat Box” approach, with drums like a giant set of pistons and a vocal sample that might have been taken from an overcaffeinated cheerleader, has a combination of suppleness and rigor that feels almost classical, generating excitement through the interleaving and development of a few simple themes rather than reaching for a new idea whenever boredom sets in. Tiny bits of speech fly through the mix, leaving trails of echo that fall just outside the lines of the rhythmic grid. Working with an arsenal of hardware, and lacking the ability to sync the tempo of each machine with the sort of precision that modern laptop producers take for granted, Langan programmed these echo effects by ear, aided sometimes by a stopwatch. Their not-quite-perfect time gives the music a lively sense of push and pull that contemporary gear would smooth over by default.
