Editorial Review:

Album Description:
Long-form book style box set comprising of four CDs. It boasts 56 tracks, 41 of them unreleased on CD and/or previously unheard plus two hidden tracks, remixes and demos. Involvement and contributions from of all the original Art Of Noise members - Trevor Horn, Ann Dudley, Paul Morley, JJ Jeczalik & Gary Langan. Booklet contains interviews with all members, with track by track commentary. Hugely influential, dance music and pop in general owes a huge debt to these original recordings. The finished records have become almost ubiquitous - and are regularly re-sampled and referenced by artists as diverse as Janet Jackson, the Ying Yang Twins, Jurassic 5 and the Prodigy. A stunning audio presentation that sounds fresh and exciting even decades after it was originally recorded. ZTT. 2006.









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Disc 1:

1. Beat Box (One Made Earlier)
2. Once Upon A Lime
3. War (Demo 2)
4. Close To The Edge
5. Confession
6. Moments In Love
7. Sign Of Relief
8. Who's Afraid Of Scale
9. So What Happens Now (Take 2)
10. The Subject has Moved Left
11. It's Not Fair
12. Close To The Edge (Ruff Mix)
13. A Time For Fear (Who's Afraid)
14. Moments In Bed

Disc 2:

1. Moments In Love (12' B Side Idea)
2. Tears Out Of A Stone
3. Samba #2
4. The Chain Of Chance
5. Fairlight-in-th-Being
6. Diversions 3
7. Close (To Being Compiled)
8. Diversions 5
9. Damn It All!
10. Structure
11. The Angel Reel: Hymn 1 (Take 2)
12. The Angel reel: Hymn 3
13. The Angel Reel: Fairground
14. And What Have You Done Wity My Body, God?
15. Klimax
16. Who Knew?

Disc 3:

1. War (Demo 4)
2. The Focus Of Satisfaction
3. Moments In Love (7' Master Rejected)
4. It Stopped
5. The Uncertainty Of Syrup
6. The Long Hello
7. The Vacuum Divine
8. The Ambassador's Reel: Beat Box
9. The Ambassador's Reel: Medley
10. The Ambassador's Reel: Oobly
11. Goodbye Art Of Noise

Disc 4:

1. Battle
2. Beat Box
3. The Army Now
4. Donna
5. Moments In Love
6. Bright Noise
7. Flesh In Armour
8. Comes And Goes
9. Moment In Love
10. That Was Close
11. Moments In Love + Love Beaten
12. Love Beat
13. In Case We Sneezed
14. A Time To Hear (Who's Listening)
15. (Do) Donna (Do)

Rating: - Let yourself dive and delve into this musical rhythm
This retrospective set of four CDs with all the historical recordings of the group is essential for anyone who is interested in modern music, electro-acoustic music, of course, what has been called concrete music, noise music, and probably some more names of the same kind. They represent the impact of modern technology, microphones, samplers, virtual editors, sound processing software, and many other computerized digitalized technologies, onto the composition process and onto the very nature and definition of music. In this case, Art of Noise keeps, most of the time, drums and percussions to create a rhythmic universe behind their music. But the whole process is to create rhythmic patterns with elements that were not originally rhythmic in essence. That's the first and probably most striking element of Art of Noise's music: its rich rhythmicity. The second element is of course at the level of the musical objects they use to compose their musical universe. They use as raw materials all kinds of instruments, all kinds of voices and all kinds of recorded noises. Then they sample, edit and process them all into a homogenized fabric dictated or just woven by the rhythmic patterns we have already spoken of. The most surprising elements are first the voices that actually say words and the meaning of these repeated words is elaborated, expanded or distorted, by the musical environment, and second the extreme musicality each sound no matter how noisy or un-musical they may have been originally. This music then represents a tremendous social change in the comprehension we have, both individually and collectively, of our modern world. More than ever every simple moment of our life is the melting pot or the salad bowl of all types of small sound tidbits that resonate and mix in a rhythmic fabric that can at times sound chaotic but that we always experience as rhythmically organized: our rhythm in our movements, or the rhythm in all the various movements we may hear, and as for that see too. Even language surrounds us and we do not catch more than a couple of words both because we are passing through and because we do not concentrate beyond these tidbits. They represent the total deconstruction of our modern world, and the no less constant reconstruction of it all at any moment, not under our eyes but in our ears.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

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Rating: - Good mixture of their ZTT days, but too repetitive and no new revelations.
I was a huge AON fan in the 80s, and still like both their earlier ZTT recordings and later works like "Below the Waste". For the price of the 4-CD set, it would make an interesting introduction to the band's ZTT days for a first-timer. But, like me, if you already have most of their previous recordings, there is nothing new here and FAR TOO MANY versions of "Moments in Love" included on each of the 4 discs. It becomes tedious to me to listen to all 4 discs in sequence because that darn "Moments in Love" tune keeps showing up all over the place. To me, AON was not a one-hit-wonder band just known for one tune; heck, I liked "Beat Box" better than "Moments in Love" anyway. But if you cannot get enough of the "Moments in Love" tune, or if you buy every single recording that AON has to form a complete collection, you will like the selections on these discs. I would have very gladly traded most of the "Moments in Love" versions on these 4 discs for different versions of their later non-ZTT works or, better yet, previously unreleased completely new tunes (instead of slightly different versions of existing tunes).

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Rating: - Only contains mixes from the first & second album
Dunno, I thought a 5 disc set would have a little more variety. Don't get me wrong, it's good. It's just that it only covers one phase of the band's history. I admit it should've been obvious since the product is published by ZTT, which only owns the first two albums Into Battle..., and Who's Afraid... So that's what it is, it's a bunch of alternate versions of the stuff from those two albums. In other words, its like a "Daft" remix album. That being said, the interview/comment booklet that comes with it is great, and you get a real sense of what was happening and not being said during their work on ZTT. (Still I wish there was away to score some of the lost work from In Visible Silence, and In No Sense? Nonsense! -- Mrs. Dudely? Can you hear me? Now that you're super-successful as a composer with the BBC, can you pull a few strings and get the lost recordings out?

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Rating: - Great, but not ideal for those new to the band
Hands-down, the best part of this collection are the liner notes. They provide a rare insight into the band and the personalities.

The music is a fantastic smorgasbord of the early years on ZTT. Those unfamiliar with The Art of Noise will probably be much better suited by acquiring one of the "The Best of the Art of Noise" collections.

Disc 4 (Into Battle, That Was Close, The Tortoise & the Hair, Besides Close) is possibly the highlight of the collection. While completists would have most of these tracks, gems such as Love Beat are a treat. The other discs are still excellent - you can see the seeds for what would become their later released versions - but there is little expansion into new sonic realms here. While this project seems much better polished than "Bashful" (an Internet-only collection of early/unreleased tracks that was put out in 2000 - and where some of these tracks have appeared before), it lacks the variety and newness found in that release.

It is a shame that this is a label-bound project. Art of Noise is a magnificent band, and a collection including such B-sides as Instruments of Lightness, Who's Afraid (of Scale), Hoops and Mallets, In the Mood (a cover of the Andrews Sister cover on the bootleg "On the Road to Tokyo"), Why Me?, and the Dreaming remix series could help make a smashingly great set. There's a wealth of great material available, and this indepth collection sadly barely scratches the surface.

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Rating: - Outstanding... a collage of collages of collages of...
I can see why some wouldn't dig this box set but I think it's a great treat. It's an era of a single album, ep and some singles expanded out to four discs - demos, remixes and all kinds of variations. It's the sound of the evolution of a revolution... I keep my AON next to my Meat Beat Manifesto (and Jack Dangers), The KLF, Coldcut, Underworld, The Orb, DJ Shadow and The Avalanches.

The commentary on each track is entertaining. Anne Dudley's comment that she often confuses their two biggest hits of the time is funny - I do the same thing. AON in this phase were a concept band - my only fault with a exhaustive box set like this is it did not include all the artwork of the era... especially Paul Morley's essays.