Piece Comment

Review of The Enchanted Highway, Part II


What if you go home to the town where you were born and raised and find that it's dying...slowly? Would you become obsessed with trying to save it? If so, what hair-brained idea would YOU come-up with?

While erecting a giant tin family would not be MY idea, it does make for a curious pass on a quiet North Dakotan highway. What brings the deep humanity to the essence of this piece however, is the monumental gesture. By building giant sculptures of tin families of people, deer, grasshoppers and geese in flight, Gary Graff has placed in the landscape a reminder of what brought him home in the first place.

This listen is multi-dimensional. Like a piece of literature, it mushrooms in the mind with the memory of it. It's brilliantly edited with a rich inter-woven dialogue between narration and live recording. I cannot recommend this piece strongly enough as a message of hope beyond time. While a vision and dream may be unrealized in the life of the dreamer, what lasts lives on beyond their passing.