Art of Noise – In Visible Silence

In Visible Silence This album kicks off with an inauspicious jumble of spoken words which certainly lives up to the Art of Noise’s obligation to produce pure noise! Thankfully, you can skip to the second track, “Paranoimia” (known to most people as a song that Max Headroom talked/rapped through on an extended single version), and things will be just fine. Also hailing from this album is “Legs”, a relatively popular Art of Noise single – you know, the one that starts out with a huge blast of horns from an unknown source that was also sampled by Split Enz for “Ninnie Kneez Up” a few years earlier, though I’ve always felt the sample/percussion-heavy “Slip Of The Tongue” that immediately follows it is much stronger. This is also the source of the famous remake of the theme from Peter Gunn, which Duane Eddy graced with his actual presence, though some of it sounds sampled to me! A couple of underrated personal favorites of mine are “Camilla – The Old, Old Story”, which is as close as I’ve ever heard the Art of Noise get to pure jazz, and “The Rating: 4 out of 4Chameleon’s Dish”, another brassy beat number. If I were to point you in the direction of just one album by this group that would be representative of their work – though their style jackrabbits from one extreme to the other between albums – this one would have to be it.

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  1. Opus 4 (2:00)
  2. Paranoimia (4:46)
  3. Eye of a Needle (4:23)
  4. Legs (4:06)
  5. Slip of the Tongue (1:27)
  6. Backbeat (4:09)
  7. Instruments of Darkness (7:11)
  8. Peter Gunn – featuring Duane Eddy (3:55)
  9. Camilla – The Old, Old Story (7:24)
  10. The Chameleon’s Dish (4:16)
  11. Beatback (1:16)
  12. Peter Gunn – extended version (6:01)

Released by: China Records
Release date: 1988
Total running time: 50:54

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