The Seduction of Claude Debussy

This might not be as racy a post as you expect, given the title..

I recently bought the latest Art of Noise album, “At the End of a Century”, including the Producer’s Cut of one of my all-time favourite albums, The Seduction of Claude Debussy. I was unbelievably excited to hear of its release. As horribly pretentious as it sounds as I read this aloud, it is a concept album based on the life and music of the 19th Century French composer Claude Debussy, the man, as the album narrator (John Hurt no less!), names as the person who set 20th Century Music on its way.

The Art of Noise, and indeed Trevor Horn’s record label, ZTT, were at the forefront of electronic music during the 1980s, and are up there with Prince and James Brown as among the most sampled artists. I can appreciate that their music isn‘t always that accessible (their early works more akin to Music Concrete than Kraftwerk); some of the later music might have been quirky, but was also incredibly melodic; beautiful even. The Seduction of Clause Debussy to me is the pinnacle of their musical journey, and, fittingly, to date is their last studio album.

It’s over 15 years since the original album was released, and at the time the heady mixture of musical references to Debussy, opera, electronica, rap (featuring the legend, Rakim), the words of the French 19th century poet Baudelaire (“sound and music swirl in the evening air”), contemporary dance production (including Ollie J, Way Out West), composition and orchestral arrangement from Academy Award winner Anne Dudley, the ramblings of the journalist Paul Morley, and the production and composition of the musical legend that is Sir Trevor Horn (you know, the bloke with glasses from the Buggles.. you know, “Video Killed the Radio Star”..) was literally unlike anything I had heard before. It even managed knowing nods to the famous sounds and samples of the Art Of Noise’s earlier works, but done in a seamless, flowing way. It was utter modernity and historical musical reference wrapped up in a contemporary mix of poetry, rap and the biography of someone who helped shape the art of the modern age.

It sounds like a crazy cocktail, but to my ears it works. In fact, it more than works; it’s amazing, beautiful. Like all good music, it reaches the parts that Heineken doesn’t.

Now here’s the thing: It is basically the same as the original release but with different mixes of certain tracks and a subtly different running order. Arguably, the new version flows better as a concept, and features some interesting musical tricks including an almost literal pause for breath in the middle. I must have listened to the original album many hundreds of times over the year. I drove around France one Summer listening to it on almost constant repeat (my wife was really – really – impressed, but it still beat French local radio). Some of the production changes are really quite obvious – a missing operatic voice on one track, and extended and complex orchestral addition to another - but some of the other changes are really hard to discern, even after many exposures to the original.

Even though I am highly familiar with the album, I could only spot some of the changes, arguably the obvious ones. In the absence of listening to the albums in parallel (if we suspend the reality of how one might reasonably do so – especially as I am more deaf on one side!), I could list maybe 10% of the obvious changes, eek out a few more with further listens, but would struggle to identify the greater part of what was new or different despite my “expertise”.

I know this is taking a simplistic view, but it leads me to wonder how on earth you discern differences in evolutions of complex systems. Yes, I know that there should be documentation, description, design, etc to back this up, but this isn’t always the case, and the nature of humans developing is that not all changes made make it in to the documentation anyway. To compare and contrast effectively you really need help. I’ve seen some ginormous regression packs in my time to make sure that unintended impacts of change don’t have a negative impact, but the way of the world is that these are increasingly automated, even though they can remain monstrous. How do you really get to grips with working out what has changed, whether it was supposed to or not? And how can you do so without an inordinate amount of effort?

And for the smarty-pants who realise that the picture isn’t of one Claude Debussy, but of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, there is a prize for the person who can tell me why he’s relevant to this article..