It’s an atypical form of music, surely, but a futuristic, heady mélange of sounds made by human invention, sometimes in a weird attempt to recreate sounds in the natural world.
Or, if you were an alien life form, perhaps your interpretation of the record would feel a lot like Garden Of Delete. If you took all the sounds on that Voyager Golden Record - thunderclaps, bird songs, whale noises, political speeches, Azerbaijani folk music - and mashed them up, perhaps you’d have something that sounds like R Plus Seven. These days it’s hard to think of music more appropriate in some ways, but less representative in others, of earthling sounds than the catalogue of Oneohtrix Point Never.
Ironically, rock music was considered too “new” at the time to be considered essential to extraterrestrial understanding of earthlings, especially in comparison to classical greats, like Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky. Goode” was now hurtling through space via NASA’s Voyager Golden Record project, as an example of the very human sound of rock ‘n’ roll.
It congratulated Berry on the fact that the rollicking guitar riff on “Johnny B. After the recent passing of Chuck Berry, a letter Carl Sagan wrote to him in 1986 began circulating on social media.
