The British group The Art of Noise professed in its name allegiance to the noise art
of the Italian Futurists, and in the 1980s employed the best digital sampling technology available to compile an opulent patchwork-noise-pop from car engines, saucepan lids, “hey” shouts, jazz solos and entire symphony orchestras, which at times reached an audience of millions and remained influential until well into the 1990s. The Art of Noise and their Swiss counterparts Boris Blank and Dieter Meier alias Yello brought noise into the pop charts. Songs like Close to the Edit (AoN, 1984) and The Race (Yello, 1988) were just bursting with cleverly sampled and edited sound ideas from the world of technology – a kind of retrofuturistic sound manifesto enriched with a pinch of Dadaist humor. While AoN acoustically appropriated a neighbor’s spluttering VW Golf, Yello brought the sound of a souped up racing car into the studio using a sampler. That was a lot of fun and greatly impressed the public, but in the following years the idea was flogged to death, which in the end led to the vulgarization of sampling and ultimately croaking frogs (Crazy Frog), fluffy, squeaking rabbits and other monstrosities. Sampling, at least when it simply means copying something, has been fairly out of fashion since the
end of the 1990s at the latest.

“Anyone who is against change cannot hear anything”
Herbert Brün

From then onwards, the driving forces of electronic music, say, in the figure of British musician Matthew Herbert, preferred to produce their sounds themselves again, specifically, live and in front of an audience. Herbert went onto the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival once with a box full of glass containers (beer bottles, glasses etc.), which he then proceeded to relieve of their original purpose with the aid of a hammer. Then, within a few moments, he incorporated the crashing and breaking sounds into minimalist house arrangements, which he then repeatedly varied live. In other words, Herbert not only improvised on a topic, as in jazz, but also waited until he was performing to create the musical subject of his piece.

As mentioned above, even in the early 20th century the Italian Futurists as well as the Dadaists in Paris, Zurich and Berlin wanted to create music that reflected their time and their world. Erik Satie ironically called it “musique à l’ameublement”. Around sixty years later, Brian Eno created his “ambient music” from it. That said, “ambient noise” played more of a minor role, as the objective was to create music for specific spaces. Like a sculpture or a piece of furniture, music was to be present all the time, but was not to disturb people too much. Music as pure acoustic space and furniture and music consisting of ambient sounds are two aspects of an acoustic art that sought to liberate itself from the rigid rules of a centuries-old tradition.