The Yamatorium is an immersive, absurdist experience in a West Philly basement

A few steps down from the sidewalk on 47th Street in West Philly, behind a faded green door with a painted eye, there is a portal to a strange and totally tuberlar world: the Yamatorium.

Some find their way here by chance, others through word of mouth, but everyone who ventures into this surreal experience artist Steven Erdman created in the “underground bunker” of his house is transported into another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of yams. So many yams.

There’s yamophones, yamlights, a yamtron, a yamtrain, and even yam people (with names like Stan Yamly and Arlene Yam Head), all of which Erdman created from wood putty, foam, and his yamagination.

As I watched a personified yam smoking a paintbrush spin around a record player, Erdman saw my confusion and beamed with pride.

“This is a legit accomplishment that should make anyone happy. It’s Yam Boy with three yams on his head, which is not the usual situation,” he said, as if two yams on a head was perfectly normal.

Beyond the titular tubers, the Yamatorium is filled with large cartoon character cutouts; puppets of Frank Lloyd Wright, Erdman himself, and others; repurposed household items from TVs to vacuum cleaners; silly signs like “What is the sound of one hand thinking?” and “Be forever frivolous;” and other art born of Erdman’s absurdist brain.

There’s even a peephole in a door through which you can view a bizarre tableau, a nod to Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The Yamatorium is a cabinet of curiosities, an imaginarium of idiosyncrasies, and a panoply of the peculiar. Exploring it is like spelunking into Erdman’s mind.

When he saw me looking at a large personified poop sculpture coming out a toilet, Erdman nonchalantly said, “Oh, that’s Turdalina,” and then sang a song about her (”Turdalina got my nose on you … Turdalina what am I to doo, doo, doo”).

It was one of at least five times Erdman broke out into song during our interview. He also went through three costume changes, multiple props, and several personas.

At first, he wore paint-splattered blue coveralls, a knit aviator hat, and two sets of glasses at once (one sun, one regular), with one balancing on the top of the other (“I’ve been really into the double glasses thing,” he told me). When we sat down for our interview, Erdman put on his “pretzel-powered colander hat,” which is a colander with a soft pretzel spinning atop it. And for his last costume change, he got into some purple coveralls and a curly blond wig and became “Lawrence Wigmono, creative director of the Yamatorium.”

“Absurdism is definitely my baby, no question,” he told me. “I’m just like this outsider artist creating this slice of life that feels like it’s from another planet with a yam theme that has a Pee-wee vibe to it.”

And where better to do it than West Philly, a land where the wonderfully weird thrive, where strangers connect over groundhog skeletons and residents make sacrificial offerings to sinkholes.

“It’s like a perfect fit … this is an extension of my personality, but I think it’s also an extension of everyone’s personality, you know, just walking into something that’s just not of this earth and I think that West Philly is strangely not from planet Earth, it’s from, like, another universe,” he said.

Erdman is also from another universe — New York City. After growing up on Long Island, he moved to the city and worked as a draftsman and illustrator. One day, he got the opportunity to make props for Nickelodeon and while on set, Erdman started singing some silly songs he wrote for his musical persona, Human Lard Dog.

“It was total Andy Kaufman … I went, ‘Life is like a noodle, just slips away. Life is like a peanut, there’s just not enough,’” he sang.

Some Nickelodeon staffers were intrigued and Erdman got the chance to make three music videos as the Human Lard Dog, which aired as interstitials between shows on the network. That led to other animation work for kids’ programs on PBS and for Daria on MTV, Erdman said.

It also spawned the formation of his band, Lard Dog and the Band of Shy, which performed absurdist songs at venues across New York City. The group, which features Erdman as the front man and a rotating cast of musicians, incorporates large props and audience participation.

The band still plays today but it’s now called Yam On! and features West Philly performers. Their last show was in June at the Rotunda in University City.

While Erdman always thought of his music as “weirdo pop,” after he married in 2007 and had two sons of his own, he tried making a name for himself in the children’s music scene. He performed as Lard Dog on the kids’ stage at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits and got air time on Kathy O’Connell’s Kids Corner show on WXPN (he wants to put a Kathy O’Connell corner in the Yamatorium one day).

When his mother-in-law died in 2018 and left her house on 47th Street near Larchwood Avenue to Erdman and his wife, the family moved to West Philly. The following year, Erdman and his band performed several kids’ shows just outside of Beijing. He was slated to return to China for a full tour in 2020, but then COVID hit.

“I cannot convey to you the level of sadness when this whole thing fell apart for me. I’m an older guy. I had some things happening here and I was moving along, but this was my big break,” he said.

To help bust him out of his funk, Erdman’s wife suggested he get creative with the two-room “bunker” under their house, so he decided to make a set to film a music video for his song, “Yam On!”

“I made a giant yam. I put the yam in the corner of the empty room with dirt and I was like, ‘Oh, this is kind of perfect,’” he said. “And so one yam led to another and I got really, really good at sculpting those things.”

You know how words can lose their meaning when you repeat them enough? Well, the exact opposite happened with Erdman and yams.

“As I started making this thing, yam started becoming a philosophy because it went from being a noun to a verb, like ‘Yam on! Keep going!’” he said.

The space quickly became more than a set, it became another world that Erdman filled with his “oddball” creations. One of his prized pieces is a giant Philly soft pretzel with eyes named Salty Jawn that he created for a music video called “Ode to Pretzel” he made with saxophonist Marshall Allen of Sun Ra Arkestra.

“That is not just a giant silly pretzel. That’s the f— quintessential example of Philadelphia originality, man,” he said. “This pretzel, of course, is not like the New York pretzel or any other pretzel. It’s long and narrow. It also, in a way, represents infinity.”

As Erdman tinkered in the bunker, he often left the door open. Curious passersby asked what was going on and he started telling folks it was the Yamatorium and invited them inside.

“The element of surprise is a big joy for me, personally,” he said. “When they walk into that space and they have that full experience and they’re like, ‘Where am I? What is this?’ It completely cracks me up. It’s just so hilarious.”

Erdman officially opened the Yamatorium about six months ago and most people find their way to it through word of mouth, social media, or by chance. On weekends, sometimes he gets a line of people going through (”Keep the yam train moving!” he’ll say) and during West Philly Porch Fest this year he estimated thousands of people came by.

He introduces himself to visitors at the Yamatorium as the Human Lard Dog, an alien who came from Planet Belopio aboard his Dreamotron machine with his giant flying pretzel, Salty Jawn. He heard music Charlie Parker was playing at Carnegie Hall and came to find the source of those notes, but his crew lost their way.

“We didn’t make it to Carnegie Hall but we made it to West Philly,” Erdman says, in character. “We landed here and this beautiful sweet creature, Yammy Davis Yamtron, invited us into this to this empty basement … and we converted this into the Yamatorium.”

Ever the absurdist, Erdman sometimes goes on to undercut his own story, telling folks that maybe he isn’t an alien after all, but just the super of this building whose neighbors think he’s lost it.

“But then one night, someone looked out their window and they saw the silhouette of a man flying on a giant pretzel and they’re like, ‘Wait a minute!’” he says.

Whether he’s man or alien, I’m glad Erdman is here. I like knowing there are still people making nonsense in an often senseless world, those who show us that unbridled creativity can lead us to experience everyday things in new and peculiar ways — even yams.

“Especially in this day and age … I feel like it’s almost like my role to offer this fun, positive, absurdist experience,” Erdman said. “As long as I’m working with my hands, getting my weirdness on, or flying my freak flag, I’m happy.”

The Yamatorium is open whenever Erdman feels like it and the “Yamatorium Enter” sign is hanging above the door. He also takes appointments, which can be made on his website, yam-on.com.

He has a suggested admission fee, but won’t suggest what it should be.