Here's one I made at home

It hasn't taken the music business long to cotton on to the Internet. From a standing start just a couple of years ago, the record companies have become a massive presence on the Web, with all the marketing opportunities it provides. Net surfers are invited to visit a host of virtual venues: any record label worth its salt has its own home pages loaded to the gunnels with photographs, artwork, video clips, biographies, press releases and screen savers.

David Bowie was first, but he won't be the last, to release his latest single, "Telling Lies", exclusively on the Net. Rock stars taking laptops on tour with them to do just that include the likes of Aerosmith, Metallica and the Rolling Stones.

Before his untimely death, Kurt Cobain posted messages on the Net about plans for the band's future. Michael Stipe of REM has chatted to fans on America OnLine, as has Cobain's widow, Courtney Love. Iggy Pop, Depeche Mode and Yello are online.

More recently, musicians, brilliant and otherwise, have used the Net to post digitised versions of their music for fans to download direct. The Shamen, Supergrass and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins have performed live on the Net.

In reality, though, the slowness of the Net and its restricted bandwidth mean things have been pretty slow, fairly shambolic and the sound quality has been nothing to write home about.

Step forward JJ Jeczalik, formerly one-third of the Art of Noise, the band behind hit versions of "Peter Gunn" and Prince's Kiss, and now the face behind the Art of Silence. His new album, artofsilence.co.uk, is about as interactive as it gets. Fans who bought early copies of the Art of Silence album received a free 3.5in floppy containing a piece of Apple Mac shareware called Sound Effects. Everyone else can download it from http://www.artofsilence.co.uk - the group's Web site. Once they have it, they can sample sections of the album, loop them, remix or add effects and then send them back to JJ. He, in turn, plans to use the best offerings in future live performances or even for album tracks.

The Sound Effects software, developed by Alberto Ricci, an Italian physics student, records in 16-bit stereo so it is CD quality. Its only limitation is the built-in audio in Net surfers' Macs.

JJ is messianic about the use of technology to bring forward new ideas. "It is about enablement, giving people the tools to do the job for themselves," he says. "This piece of software technology is amazing. For $15, it does what I used to do with a Fairlight synthesiser costing thousands. It fits on to the good old floppy - which is sadly underrated these days - and it is instant. It's quite extraordinary.

"A lot of things are called interactive but they aren't, really. The interactivity is between the people who write the software engines and the people who decide the format of the game or whatever. The consumer is stuck in one of a number of pre-determined pathways.

"With this, we enable people to re-create completely what we have done and then send it back to us. That is fully interactive. It is about ideas. With a CD-Rom there is a temptation to fill it up with junk. With a floppy, you have to pare it down. You have to go for the best ideas."

This philosophy is the basis for the artofsilence Web site, which is run by the AoS keyboard player, Ed Kulak. A professional musician who has toured the world several times - Aztec Camera, Everything but the Girl, Hugh Harris - Kulak taught himself to write Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML) so he could improve the AoS site. In addition to the usual graphics and pictures, the site is full of jokes, opportunities for fans to provide feedback, and there is even an anagram page. And he runs it from his living- room.

"JJ was having the site done professionally, but it wasn't really what he wanted," says Kulak. "I thought I could improve on it. I just got the simplest book I could find on HTML and after a couple of days I stole what GIFs he had and started creating my own pages.

"Being a novice, I went for the loudest colours I could find, in a personal visual feedback sense. JJ seemed to like that so we went for the brash colourful approach because we were both fed up with sites we had come across which just took ages to download.''

JJ agrees: "My brief for the Web site was that it had to be quick. When I get up at 6.25am, which is the best time to do this sort of thing, I want Web pages to come up quickly. If I'm still waiting for huge graphics to come up after a few minutes, I'm gone. The idea is still the message. We want content, content, content. It is so important. A lot of stuff on the Net is dross and we want to be able to filter that out at speed. We want to surf, not paddle!"

Already the site is starting to bear fruit. As well as the first remixes of tracks from the album, AoS is getting orders for the album and requests for information from former Art of Noise fans in remote parts of the US and Australia, fans who would otherwise not know of the new album's existence.

Of course, not all who browse the site are fans. Some Net purists have been disturbed by its bold appearance and brash humour. Email complaints that his GIFs do not merge properly and that yellow text on a blue background are the HTML equivalent of Vogon poetry simply amuse Kulak.

"We want the site to be a place where people find quality of concepts and ideas, even if we use crass methods to put those ideas across."

JJ is pleased with the feedback and the two are pushing ahead with the goal of making the site one that is known for its quality of content rather than slick graphics. There are plenty of plans for development.

"In time, my label, Axiomatic, will be using the site to develop other performers. We could have a label chart where people tell us what are their best, and worst tracks.

"A bad idea is not likely to succeed no matter what technology is behind it. We see this site as a way ahead, a way of spreading good ideas. In time, why should people not download the AoS logo, take it to their local T-shirt shop, have it made into a shirt and pay us 50p for the licensing?"