The Catacombs
of Yucatan
by Dan Senn (CD Album from Periplum)
a review by Hilary Robinson, Motion, November
24, 2000
Given
a cursory glance at the spindly wires and suspended metal serving
platters of the Shmoos, Too Flutter and Penduling in The Catacombs
of Yucatan's liner photos, you might be forgiven for wondering
whether they were rescued from a sixties sci-fi movie set. But
Dan Senn, creator of these beautifully intricate "sculptural
instruments," is neither a kitsch fetishist nor a mad inventor:
he is a professor of music and sculpture, veteran of dozens of
installations, composer, performer, video artist, and even a potter.
Senn's instrumental designs are informed by raku, an ancient Japanese
ceramics method that gives unpredictable results, and like Paul
Panhuysen, whose long string installations inhabit similar audio-visual
territory to the sculptural instruments, Senn favours the incorporation
of automatons which allow his instruments to sound by themselves
with little or no human intervention.
Therefore, the prominence of
chance in Senn's aesthetic makes it unsurprising that "found
objects" appear amongst the instruments' components, or that
the opening track, Hands Off Coursing, itself originated as a
"found" composition that Senn captured on tape when
he came across his Shmoos Harp unexpectedly playing on its own.
In Hands Off Coursing, the gentle hum of the Shmoos Harp's soft
feedback tones is used as a smooth, flat acoustic surface across
which the jangling interjections of the Too Flutter - an instrument
comprising paper-winged metal washers that spin freely down vertical
metal rods - clatter repeatedly. The carefully-mixed spatial elements
of this piece, recorded live, demand your best headphones.
Following the soft/hard contrast
and tonal clarity of Hands Off Coursing, the Fayfer Harp ("Fayfer"
is Yiddish for nervous whistler) delivers a spiky sonic cocktail
of steely scraped and twisted sounds, rasps, and pizzicato plinks
in Eight Ways to Fix a Windmill. Tempting as it is to explain
the piece in programmatic terms, the improvisations prompted the
title post-recording rather than the other way around, though
as titles go, they don't come much more descriptive than this.
Of an entirely different scale
and scope, The Catacombs of Yucatan is one of several substantial
offshoots of an installation Senn put together in a Minnesota
limestone cave which was used as a dance hall for a brief period
in the 1930s. (For more information on this and Senn's other "percussive
video" installations, see his fascinating website.) Senn
used video-taped interviews with former employees of the Catacombs
as the basic fabric of the work; these stories were interwoven
with the sounds of carefully-selected sculptural instruments to
create an evocative text-sound narrative. Unlike other highly
manipulated text-sound works with similar expressive aims such
as Steve Reich's Different Trains, The Catacombs of Yucatan preserves
the integrity of each individual contribution. The result is poignant,
accessible and completely unpretentious.
Finally, this wide-ranging album
ends on a tongue-in-cheek note with Toons After Noon, five miniatures
improvised on the Bass Shmoos. The eyebrow-raising titles aroused
(if that's an appropriate choice of word) by the emissions of
the Bass Shmoos include the hilarious Trucker Sex, all leather
seats, creaking chassis and low baritone grunts, and the oscillating
whine that flaccidly trails off to nothing of Boner Drone. Your
encounter with Dan Senn's sculptural instruments on The Catacombs
of Yucatan is guaranteed to be an enjoyable, engaging and stimulating
ear-opener. Posted by hilary robinson at 00:00, 24 Nov
2000
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