It starts with a gasp. The breathy organ sighs a forlorn tune before guitar ignites like a rocket’s thruster. Its signal skips and sputters and evolves into a machine language: the sounds of calibration, electronics communicating, engines rumbling to life. This first track on the record is meant to represent the launch sequence of a nuclear attack, says its creator, musician Jeremy Greenspan.
The acclaimed producer from the electronic pop duo Junior Boys and free jazz improviser Colin Fisher have together reinterpreted a haunting masterpiece by the beloved Canadian painter William Kurelek in a new instrumental album.
Considered a key work in the Art Gallery of Hamilton collection, Kurelek’s This is the Nemesis shows Hamilton in the midst of a nuclear attack. One bomb has already fallen, while another has just struck the lower city. At centre, the white-hot explosion forms a spotlight around a body fried to the ladder of a smokestack. And, across Lake Ontario, you can see Toronto in the distance, being swallowed by a detonation orders greater.
The painting is large, lurid and horrifying — and to hear Greenspan and Fisher’s response, you’ll need to stand right in front of the gruesome scene. Their recording has been “geo-fenced” to the gallery. It can only be accessed by a QR code posted next to the painting. The project is part of the museum’s new digital program to enhance their collection through augmented reality experiences, interviews and artist interventions like this one.
While some fans will know Kurelek for his bucolic scenes of prairie life, the painter’s wider body of work exhibits an “extreme binary,” says AGH chief curator Tobi Bruce. There are the pastoral images of farming and children at play, and then there are the “moralizing” paintings, such as Nemesis. Kurelek, who made the work in 1965, felt people had strayed from the righteous paths of nature and spirituality, Bruce explains. “[This is the Nemesis] is a dramatic comment on what he perceived to be the current state of humanity.” It is the apocalypse he thought we were driving toward, imagined as vividly as any Hieronymus Bosch.
“If you see that work from across the room, that’s where you’re going,” the curator says.
Greenspan, whose mother worked in the museum’s education department, visited the gallery often as a child. “I grew up there really,” he says. It was much later that he’d take notice of the Kurelek, but its impact was enormous.
“The first time I saw [the painting], I had the feeling that this is completely insane. And every time I’ve visited the gallery since, I’m struck by the insanity of it more than anything.” The artwork’s peculiarly chosen yet highly specific setting brings the subject home for the Hamilton-born and -based musician in ways few images could.
Fisher and Greenspan had just begun a recording project in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. With the threat of nuclear war renewed in the public consciousness, the matter crept into their work as well. One section of music reminded Greenspan of a missile, so the pair followed the idea. At some point, Greenspan introduced Fisher to the Kurelek painting — an arresting and localized vision of atomic war — and it became the central inspiration for their work.
“I am, at my core, not a political artist,” Greenspan says. But nuclear war transcends partisan politics, he explains. “It’s a geologic event … It’s about total and complete devastation. So it’s not a political thing. It’s actually a sort of cosmic horror.”
Art is better able to express those emotions than any ideological statement, he adds. “Sometimes you can’t really capture the way dread feels like you can with music.”
Across the five-song album, Greenspan and Fisher explore the chronology of a nuclear attack. After the initial launch sequence, Track 2, titled Fission and Fusion, zooms in at atomic scale — with noises that grind and tear and spark — to consider the quantum mechanics behind the explosion. And then there is the strike itself. The synths quake and roll in waves; a scorched guitar twists and melts like building girders at the blast. A doleful saxophone sings Track 4. The desolate, denatured soundscape is meant to represent the period of nuclear winter, Greenspan says, when all the vibrancy of the painting has gone grey. Then, the last song, Exit Quaternary, is melancholic, with moments tilting toward hope. This song is about the resilience of the Earth.
“The final track imagines the geologic age that comes next,” he says, “the one that perhaps doesn’t have human beings in it. That reality — that humans have a limited time or that they’re potentially immaterial to the persistence of the planet — is kind of horrifying in its own way.”
This is the Nemesis is the first in what Greenspan hopes will be a series of “situated recordings,” or compositions designed for listening at specific sites or near particular objects.
The idea was inspired by a trip to the Convent of San Marco in Florence, Italy, where he saw the frescoes of Fra Angelico. To get a sense of the Italian Renaissance painter’s work as it was intended to be seen, you must travel to the monastery he decorated. Greenspan was struck by the intimacy and the immediacy of the experience. “It occurred to me that that would be something special to do with a record,” he says.
When the current climate of music distribution hinges on playlist placements, social media followings and streaming numbers, the idea of “situated recordings” felt like a liberating opportunity for the artist to try something entirely different and invite listeners to have an experience.
He’s already envisioned other destinations he’d like to design music for, including the local botanical gardens. Another collaborator has suggested a generative score for southern Ontario’s Bruce Trail. But the musician has a bigger idea still.
“What I’d really love to do,” Greenspan says, “is to see if I couldn’t get more people to do them as well. One could imagine a map with different artists and different musicians all making their own situated recordings, and you could go do each one. I really hope that I might be able to encourage some other musicians to maybe make their own.”