J. J. Jeczalik

He began his journey into music after coming to London and promoting a gig for a pub group called Landscape (of Einstein A Go-Go fame), then later roadied for their co-lead singer Richard James Burgess before meeting the Buggles a.k.a. Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes.[4]

Before becoming a freelance programmer Jeczalik worked for Downes, programming the Fairlight CMI, as Downes had problems with the machine. After that he became a part of Horn’s production team working alongside future Art of Noise members, Gary Langan and Anne Dudley on hits for Dollar, before working on ABC's The Lexicon of Love and Malcolm McLaren's Duck Rock albums.[5]

When the Fairlight CMI Series II came out in 1982, Jeczalik got access to "Page R", the built-in sequencer for the Fairlight. While working on the Yes album 90125, Jeczalik was experimenting with drum and percussion samples from Yes' drummer, Alan White. Jeczalik, along with sound engineer Gary Langan, sequenced drum beats and breaks in Page R and created "Beat Box", the debut single for Art of Noise.

During production of Malcolm McLaren's album Duck Rock, Jeczalik and Langan met Anne Dudley, a classical music session musician and composer. Along with Horn, Langan, Dudley and Paul Morley, Jeczalik co-founded Art of Noise in 1983.[6]

As a freelancer, he was in a minority of musicians around the globe that used CMIs to create music, but unlike his contemporaries, at the time Jeczalik developed his own way of creating noises by taking advantage of the machine's then-poor quality audio output and transformed the distorted samples into unrecognisable sounds. Some of these early ideas can be heard on the Kate Bush album The Dreaming.[7]

One night those techniques would change the way that records were made when Langan asked him to help out with an idea. Jeczalik sampled a scrapped drum riff from a session of the Yes album 90125. That would become Art of Noise, a two-man side project that became a quintet with Dudley, Horn and Paul Morley as additions to the line-up.[8]

They were the first act signed to ZTT Records in 1983 and launched it with the EP entitled Into Battle with the Art of Noise that broke new ground, leading to numerous innovative follow-up hit singles and albums for the rest of the 1980s. Jeczalik was also instrumental behind the success of controversial Liverpool band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood with their number one hit singles "Relax" and "Two Tribes" also on ZTT.[9] Other work for the label involved further work for FGTH on the Welcome to the Pleasuredome album and for another two signings, Propaganda and Andrew Poppy.

The future Grammy Award winner continued freelance work as either a programmer, producer or remixer with his most notable work producing the hit singles "Kiss Me" by Stephen Duffy, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by Pet Shop Boys, a cover of "Jezebel" by Shakin' Stevens[10] and in 1987 composed the music for the BBC documentary The Case of Sherlock Holmes.[11]

In 1990, Art of Noise split, leaving Jeczalik to work on other projects including the Biographers' concept album Columbus with some of the recording done at his own Monsterrat Studios in Berkshire. J.J. Jeczalik’s Art of Sampling was released in 1993 including hundreds of samples from his personal audio library and was released on AMG's Hit Sound Producer label.[12]

In 1995, Jeczalik launched Art of Silence (his spin-off to Art of Noise) and his label Axiomattic with the West 4 single, the album artofsilence.co.uk and website that all followed in the next year with Teach Me, his final release as a musician in 1997. He retired from the music business and taught ITC at two Oxfordshire schools until his retirement in 2013.[3]

• The Art of Noise Online (authorised website)
• Art of Silence