bannergraphic
Hovering O're
2020

by Dan Senn
A Past Life by Dan Senn.
Video with a Sound Track from "The Settling"

See videoduration 7:55 Use headphones
"Hovering O're A Past Life" was filmed in the autumn of 2014 just before departing for my flat in Prague where I would eventually compose the sound track, a string trio (piano, violin and 'cello) called The Settling. I was long puzzled how to use this videofootage and it wasn't until 6 years later, 2020, that I completed the work in Watertown where the video was shot six years earlier.

The "hovering" in this piece was o'er concrete sidewalks I helped pour in 1969 while working for G. F. Young just out of High School. The Vietnam War was raging then, there was little hope of me going to college, I feared being a soldier as my father had before WW2, and I was about to receive a draft notice. Thanks to a childhood knee injury I flunked the draft medical exam and scurried off, a little less frightened, to university lucky to have gained entry.
 






Replacing broken sidewalks for Mr Young, the owner of the company, was my first construction job and later, while studying at the UW-LaCrosse, I continued working summer vacations as a union construction laborer. The irony here was that as essential as my music and art training was a LaCrosse, the skills I learned as a laborer during this time (concrete forming, crude carpentry, tending masons, assisting electricians and plumbers), was as important as the education my labor was paying for.

I am now the age old man George was in 1969, far less grumpy, and have built two large studios where I have invented instruments, made art, composed music, produced many modern time-based events, and will soon build a third. Searching for and then hovering o're these bits of concrete, aged over a half century, was a pensive experience for me.
DS October 8, 2020


A high resolution, full sized video is available for download by request from the artist. Listen to video with headphones or a full spectrum speaker system.

Biography

Dan Senn (Prague-Watertown) is an intermedia artist working in music composition and production, kinetic sound sculpture, experimental and documentary film. He has been a professor of music and art in the United States and Australia and travels internationally as a lecturer, performer and installation artist. He lives in Prague where he directs the Echofluxx festivals, and Watertown, Wisconsin, the USA, with his partner-collaborator, Caroline Senn. Dan's work moves freely between expressive extremes and languages depending upon the aesthetic joust at hand. Dan is cofounder of Roulette Intermedium in New York City, Cascadia Composers of Portland Oregon, and the Echofluxx media festivals in Prague. (read more).