“This is a present from a small, distant world.” Jesse Stewart’s voice, quoting Jimmy Carter, reverberated through the sacred space of St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, a relatively recently reclaimed and refurbished space that was once a church in formal use. Carter’s statement rang true to the audience, but not as he originally intended. Multidisciplinary artist Jesse Stewart helmed the altar-of-sorts. Dressed in black, he stood poised to make an indelible mark on the 20th anniversary of Chamberfest, an Ottawa fixture. Stewart was about to present a possible answer to the Great Silence. A great remix was the order of the evening of August 1, hypothetically created by an alien who had discovered and decoded the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden records, sending them back to earth – with choice edits.
Jesse Stewart – Photo Hanhong Dan
Flanked by laptops projecting the Golden records’ imagery, Stewart intently manipulated sounds on the record using his Reactable, a fairly unknown electronic instrument of Spanish origin. An overhead camera projected the action on a large screen just above and behind him. The imagery was also manipulated, but in a more subtle fashion, so as to present a faux-3D, parallax effect, prepared by filmmaker Colin Power.
The results were palpable, and the concept visceral the deeper into the remix I was taken. Sounds emerged nebulously – dolphin, or human? Heartbeat, or water pump? It occurred to me that to an alien, all manner of semiotics and cultural bias gets thrown out. Instead, I could hear sounds of disparate cultures converging thanks to their absolute complementarity. Greetings could be differentiated from the noise. “Shalom.” Babies’ cries are stretched out, repeated, searching and longing, attenuated, elongated.
Stewart was fairly careful to fluidly transition one sound to the next. For me, this suggests the way that perhaps an alien really would try to make sense of this sonic information, through purely musical matching. I ended up considering more about the source cultural content by hearing it in more disparate contexts. Assumptions wither away, barriers disappear. What is left?
As he manipulated the blocks on the table, detected by an optical interface at its base, it occurred to me that this was not unlike any person simply playing with blocks. The interface enabled complexity and control impossible for any individual using a traditional turn-table apparatus, and it also conveyed the musical process of remixing with visual clarity, effectively communicating the innocence of unbridled play, tied to an aural performance.
Stewart passed Beethoven’s 13th string quartet through a gater as concentric rings spun on the projected screens, suggesting a “music of the spheres” moment to me – but this too faded away, despite the quartet being the final images on the record. My interpretation of this was that it questions the cultural universality of Beethoven’s music, but it was also indicated what felt like a climactic point in the piece. A classic Chuck Berry riff then refreshingly intervened my overthinking, overlaid on Philip Glass-esque piano (which, I later found out, was the opening of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, performed by Glenn Gould). Then, the iconic arpeggio from the Queen of the Night aria emerged out of a haze of aural filters…
Jesse Stewart – Photo Hanhong Dan
My suspicions about the musical as well as ideological goals espoused in this remix were confirmed by Stewart in a follow-up interview:
“Although I agree that music is one of the greatest gifts that humanity could give to the universe, I am uncomfortable with the way that the Golden records implicitly position Beethoven (and, by extension, Western classical music) as the pinnacle of musical achievement,” he explained. “For me, it was important to put Beethoven and Bach in dialogue with other musical traditions (with Chuck Berry for example). At the end, I had Bach and Stravinsky sounding together with West African music and Australian aboriginal music.”
Again and again, Stewart’s remix seemed to question the very idea of genre, taking the carefully curated contents of the Golden records. He created a remix that made me wonder if it was actually the original contents of the records that were mixed, and he was simply putting the musical materials of our world back together – in the perception of an artist of such cultural acumen, I might have to question whether he is even of this world.