Mystery machine

The art of ZTT's noise

by Douglas Wolk

The Art of Noise

When the English label ZTT was founded, in 1983, it was unlike any other. The label's name stood for "zang tumb tuum" -- a snatch of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's 1913 manifesto "The Art of Noises" that referred to the sound of cannons firing. And it was devoted more to its own existence as a rich, funny art project than to the business of cranking out hits.

The label's two principals were Trevor Horn, who'd made a name for himself with lush productions for ABC and Yes, and Paul Morley, a music journalist more interested in experimental writing and high-concept gestures than simply rating new albums or churning out celebrity profiles. What came out of their union could have been pretentious and bombastic, and it did sometimes fall into being a triumph of style over substance. More often, though, ZTT's catalogue was the triumph of style as substance: its superstars were its producers and designers; its arrangement and production were as baroque and engrossing as its songs were trivial; and its ideological underpinnings suggested an intellectual depth that depended on the shallowness of the hit parade -- on the idea of pop as chatter, as ephemeral experience.

A decent-sized chunk of the early ZTT catalogue has recently been reissued by Universal: Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Welcome to the Pleasuredome and Liverpool, plus Bang! (a greatest-hits collection drawing on both) and Reload! (a remix collection); Propaganda's A Secret Wish and its remix counterpart, Wishful Thinking; the Art of Noise's Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise and the subsequent compilation Daft, which includes all of the former album; and the first three 808 State discs, Ninety, Ex:El, and Gorgeous. The re-releases offer a fair overview of ZTT's musical mission, but they stop short of conveying a true sense of what made the label so exciting in its day -- the way ZTT operated as a mystery machine, pressing version after version of its releases until there were no definitive editions, wrapping its sounds in quotes and allusions and images that co-opted the highbrow intellectualism of Barthes, Genet, and the Frankfurt School's critique of pop in a way that defied everything that pop was supposed to be about.

Frankie Goes to Hollywood

In fact, ZTT operated as a sort of spy in the house of early-'80s pop. Both Horn and Morley have suggested that they thought of the label as a home for the experimental and the extreme. That changed very quickly in 1984, when one of their first releases, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax," became a #1 hit in the UK. Given a huge push by being banned by the BBC, "Relax" was a natural hit, as salacious a song as has ever been recorded, built on a relentlessly pounding one-note bass part and bathhouse sound effects. Horn's subsequent productions for Frankie were even more lush and gigantic, culminating in "Welcome to the Pleasuredome," a scrap of Holly Johnson's singing worked up into a majestic 15-minute soundscape. When the album of the same name finally came out, in October of 1984, most of it was pretty awful, but the singles are still impressively immense. And though Frankie were by no means the first band to celebrate homo-eroticism, they were the first band since the Village People to do it so blatantly at the top of the charts.

The hetero-erotic side of the label was left to Propaganda, a German synth-pop quartet whose dark, rhythm-heavy records were mostly produced by Horn disciple Stephen Lipson. Their songs, in terms of both lyrics and music, were about losing one's organic self: in abandonment of will, in sex, and mostly in the processes and rhythms of machines. Singer Claudia Brucken appeared in a few photographs wearing a wire-lattice dressmaker's model, but the band's main visual icon was the model itself, empty and standing fetishized in space, photographed by Anton Corbijn or represented in a more abstract drawing: a machine in the shape of a body that works on its own as one might have once expected the body to work. The voices of Brucken and Susanne Freytag, too, surrendered to the mechanics of the mix, trying and failing to find their way out of the percussive labyrinths of "Frozen Faces" or being overwhelmed by a tsunami of synthetic orchestration at the end of "p:Machinery." So Propaganda's essential album isn't even the song-based A Secret Wish; it's Wishful Thinking, the remix album, where Brucken and Freytag are almost entirely lost in what the Goethe quote on the sleeve calls "umzuschaffen das Geschaffene" -- "to refashion the fashioned."

But the flagship outfit of ZTT was the Art of Noise. As originally conceived, they were the clearest statement of the company's aesthetic ideal, of pillaging the 20th century in a thoroughly postmodern way. Their response to the idea of the death of the author was the absence of an artist. The Art of Noise were pictured on their record sleeves only as a hand clutching a wrench in front of a broken window, or as comedy and tragedy masks. The members credited on their ZTT albums were a producer (Horn), a publicist (Morley), a sound engineer (Gary Langan), an arranger/keyboardist (Anne Dudley), and a Fairlight synthesizer programmer (J.J. Jeczalik). No stars, no images, nothing to wrap the normal machinery of pop stardom around: a name and an album, but no band.

Their music and videos broke the same kind of ground. "Beat Box" was basically just a super-heavy beat, dosed with sound effects and dub treatments, splintered, reversed, mutated, and doubled back on itself. "Moments in Love" was a barely there synth-hoot that went on for more than 10 minutes, totally sappy and, as far as some people were concerned, utterly romantic: it was played at the wedding of Madonna and Sean Penn. "Close (To the Edit)" took an arty cut-up of a motorcycle starting up and set it to a ferocious dance groove -- pure noise turned into song. In the best-known of several videos made for this number, a tiny woman and three men in suits destroy a grand piano with chainsaws. Once again, it was a song of near-absolute negation: no band, no singing, no hook that could be represented in conventional notation, no nothing -- only the noise, and the beat. It was a huge dance hit.

Everything the label released was tinged with mystery and arcanely catalogued. There was the "Action Series," with most major releases assigned a number, and the "Incidental Series," which gave a number to everything associated with the label: ads, live performances, Holly Johnson's walking stick, the actors in the "Two Tribes" video. The Art of Noise's "Close-Up" single was actually three very different singles, quietly released in identical sleeves; one might offer a slightly altered remix of the tune, another a raucous live-in-the-studio re-recording of it. Quotes from 20th-century writers -- Roland Barthes was a particular Morley favorite -- appeared, uncredited, everywhere (on album and singles sleeves and T-shirts). Linguistic games would wind from record sleeve to record sleeve: one would say "How do you do? How do you dance? What do you think?"; another would twist that into "Who? Chance? Blink?" The front cover of one 12-inch featured nothing but a giant photograph of a bowl of fruit and the serial number "12XZTAS7"; the idea was that ZTT fans would see it and instantly decode it as meaning "the limited-edition alternate 12-inch version of Zang Tumb Tuum's Action Series number 7," meaning Frankie's "Welcome to the Pleasuredome."

But this initial exuberance didn't last. The Art of Noise eventually split from Horn, Morley, and ZTT, went off on their own, had a few dance hits; made some dull proto-ambient music, and finally fizzled out. A promising band called Instinct never got further than one track on a compilation LP; the dreadful Das Psych-Oh Rangers made only one single before they called it quits. Recording sessions with Grace Jones produced basically one song, "Slave to the Rhythm," which was nonetheless puffed up into an album of the same title. Propaganda splintered, then resurfaced on a different label with only one original member and a new, American singer while Brucken stayed on ZTT with the rather nifty Act. Frankie's second album, the arrogantly titled Liverpool, stiffed, and they got into a messy legal battle with the label, then broke up. Finally, Paul Morley left the label, and with him went a lot of its conceptual splendor.

That might have been it for ZTT if two of its most important acts hadn't turned up in the wake of Morley's departure. In 1989, Graham Massey's 808 State emerged on ZTT in the middle of the house-music explosion, but Massey was much more far-sighted than most of his dance contemporaries. 808 State's early tracks looked forward to what we think of now as electronica and big beat. Much of the music on Ex:El, which included a couple of Björk's first appearances with electro-dance back-up, was far ahead of its time; a remix of the album's "Cubik," in fact, is on the British dance charts right now. And, in 1990, Seal signed to the label and scored a series of massive international hits built on Horn's over-the-top-and-out-of-the-stadium production.

Other than Seal, ZTT has kept pretty quiet for the last year or two, which the label has spent extricating itself from a distribution deal with WEA. There has been an occasional signing -- the Marbles and the Frames, each of whom will release a debut album next year. Meanwhile, here in the States, the first batch of ZTT reissues has appeared in stores with very little fanfare -- "We'll be concentrating on catalogue exploitation next year," says Fraser Ealey, the head of the label's international division. That's likely to include lesser-known (but collector-beloved) albums like Anne Pigalle's Everything Could Be So Perfect (a peculiar mix of French chanson and synth-pop), the soundtrack to Nicolas Roeg's film Insignificance, and composer Andrew Poppy's two bizarre albums of orchestral dance music.

But the big news is that the Art of Noise are once more a going concern -- this time as a quartet of Dudley, Horn, Morley, and Lol Creme, the former 10cc member and renowned videomaker. They've been holed up for the last year and a half, putting together an album to be called The Seduction of Claude Debussy, which will involve, among other things, drum 'n' bass beats, a full orchestra, and rapper Rakim. The group's ornate, funny, very obviously Morley-created Web site (at www.ztt.com) notes that there's a new AoN single, "Dream On," and that it's not available in stores; figuring out how to get a copy is left as an exercise for the reader. The mystery is back, thank God.