Originally from the Navajo Nation, Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest and beyond. He is also a member of the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, with who he recently premiered the two-mile-long land art/border intervention, Repellent Fence.
-– Raven Chacon Website
Still Life no.3 (2015)
Sound installation, speakers, text, timed lights
This work retells the Diné Bahaneʼ, the Navajo story of creation and emergence into the current world. Using timed audio and delay systems, the speech of a woman telling the story in Navajo language is transferred through a series of connected speakers activating future and past parts of the same story, revealing instances when long history repeats itself. As words emanate from the speakers, voices overlap, blurring the linearity of the story.
More HERE
Score / Music Composition (2001)
Video: Raven Chacon (shot with Blackhorse Lowe and D.E. Hyde) (2015)
Report is a musical composition scored for an ensemble playing various caliber firearms. The sonic potential of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns are utilized in a tuned cacophony of percussive blasts interspersed with voids of timed silence. In the piece, guns – instruments of violence, justice, defense, and power – are transformed into mechanisms for musical resistance.
More HERE