Within the cavernous insides of the Old American Can Factory Wednesday night, Toronto sound artist Brian Joseph Davis performed a symphony all on his own. The twist? The channels of sound (17 in all) for Original Soundtrack came from a familiar yet constantly bypassed musical source: the menu stage of movie DVDs. A brave premise, no? Curious of such a feat, I sat amongst the handful of audience members within Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room and waited: a small monument of 10 televisions stood before us, a scattering of DVD players, a laptop, the black spaghetti of interlinking cords, a sound board and further flashing inter-connective gadgetry.
The starter menus of a few art house, science fiction and horror films (Carnival of Souls, Suspiria, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Day the Earth Stood Still) lit up the screens as Davis, a flannel-shirted twitch doctor, stood behind his mixer to perform the ambient score.
My cynicism kicked in early. The pastiche of droning chords, bits of dialogue, laughter and instrumentals were of mild interest early on. Cue strings. Cue backbeat. Cue dialogue. Cue disinterest.
As I stared at Jodie Foster, looping fight scenes and emerging eyeballs I found myself asking whether art is valid because you can understand the effort and/or skill that has gone into it? Even if it’s not doing much for you? Perhaps. I must confess for the first 20 minutes, I appreciated Davis’s aural concoctions rather than engaged with the work. There were crescendos, enough variety to keep my heart beating and above all it was rather relaxing not to have to think too hard.
The beauty of it though, was that as soon as I tuned out, I in fact, tuned in. When I stopped any focus on the performance I entered into some sort of light hypnosis. My mind drifted to the sexual conquests of Karl Malone (WTF?) and I realized that this was an experience that you could engage with, or not, at your own leisure.
There was a kind of magnificence to it, there’s no doubt. The 50-minute piece was anything but boring—more like a peaceful, unstructured audiovisual meditation. It was just so nice to absorb something without having to do any work, and to find the subtle musical wonders in fact quietly, harmlessly, mystically, working me over.
Aural massage? Probably. But I began to think, “anyone who likes to relax, would enjoy this.” Its essence wasn’t defined by experimentation, the avant-garde or artistic snobbery: the piece was all about abandoning expectations, pretensions and artificiality.
Because the magic of Davis’s performance was that it really did make you think. Or not.
