In an unexpected move, Front 242's Daniel Bressanutti has rejoined former member Dirk Bergen (who left soon after the Geography album) to start this new project, heavily rooted in classic analog synth technology and an apparent love of the Blade Runner soundtrack. While being spread across two discs comes across as excessive, there's still a good album’s worth of tracks in here.
With "Marcel Proust (VLEGM)" leading off the first disc with sweeping synth strings and a clipped, resonating bass sequence, NBN sets the mood early on, as a cinematic album that manages to be both understated and bombastic at the same time."Silenzio Monofoniche"'s haunting, echoing synth passages are shaped into creaking, shrill layers of sound that are eventually met with a sequenced bassline, though structurally it’s more disjointed than most on here.
"Mooglish" leads off with the rhythmic throb, but with higher register synth bleeps and lush strings.A healthy bit of dissonance kicks in later on, never too much but a clear and powerful use of contrasting sounds."S2cond S7ven" stands out with its introduction of mangled, inhuman voices on gently rolling synth pads, again creating a balance of dissonance and melody that’s pretty vibrant overall.
With its percussive thump and heavily bass-driven structure, "Puzzle Cosmique" is mostly a rhythmic piece, but enshrouded by an almost formless snowdrift of synths, much like the long "Mass", which takes its time locking into its taut, rhythmic structure.It especially is quite cinematic, but far too active and dynamic to work as film score music, because it simply commands too much attention.
The other longer piece on the album, the clumsily named "CK a) 242 Hurtz b) Vorspiel" is probably the one that works the best on here.Opening with deep, dissonant bass layers and shrill, almost feedback like synth outbursts, it’s the bleakest and most abstract of the pieces, and the icy synths are just the icing on the cake.While none of the other songs here would fit into some trite new age mold, this one especially resists that label.
Nothing But Noise manages to embrace a sound that’s deeply rooted in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but without sounding overly dated or cliché.There is a distinct similarity to Vangelis' Blade Runner score, but it is more inspiration than duplication.The constant use of synth pads and sequenced bass lines does cause one track to bleed too much into the other, but having too much of a good thing isn't necessarily a problem.
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