Experimental composer Raven Chacon is one of the headliners for this year's One Flaming Arrow Festival, an 11-day extravaganza of Native American art. He plays with Laura Ortman at Holocene Tuesday June 9th.
Chacon has performed his solo and collective work around the world, from the Kennedy Center to the Sydney Bienniale, and received awards like the Creative Capital Grant. He is one of the few Native artists working in either chamber music or experimental noise.
We sat down to talk about what's going in his ears these days.
Raven Chacon in concert
Courtesy of Raven Chacon
April Baer: Tell us some things about your music orientation and how your ear evolved.
Raven Chacon: My ear evolved as a young person listening on the Navajo reservation to my grandfather singing. I had taken piano and studied instruments. Eventually that led me to working with chamber musicians, professional musicians, students at University of New Mexico and people I'd collaborate with. Later on I got interested in making my own instruments, noise instruments.
Right now I’ve been working on an instrument made from a mule deer antler prong, a rack of a mule deer. It's a very simple setup. I’ve amplified this antler rack so that when it’s scraped across a pane of glass it makes a chord, three separate notes. That then gets sent through different filters, devices to change the tonality, that make it more into a natural sound.
AB: How would you describe the places in your music where natural sound meets man-made sound?
RC: As much as I like harsh tonalities, I also like a backdrop of acoustic instruments. That might be acoustic guitar or chamber flute or strings. At the same time, I might be against a kind of harmonization, field recordings, or tape — cassette tapes, loops or other kinds of found sounds. It's juxtaposing sounds against each other.
AB: One of the records you made with your collective,Postcommodity, is called "Your New Age Dream Contains More Blood Than You Imagine." That's a great title.
RC: Yeah (laughs). When I began making compositions for my first album, I was thinking about what someone would expect for a new age recording, and I would kind of make the opposite of that.
AB: What's going on with Postcommodity these days?
RC: We've been making art installations. We've got a new recording, "We Lost Half The Forest And the Rest We'll Burn This Summer." We just put it out three weeks ago. Right now our work's on a major project called the Repellent Fence. It's a monument to replicate the border fence near Douglas [Arizona]. What we're making is a fence that goes in opposition to it.
AB: It's perpendicular?
RC: Yeah, it's made up of giant, 10' diameter balloons and flies for four days, October 9th through 12th. The main reason is helium is so expensive! I also have an album I'm working on with John Dietrich of Deerhoof.
AB: Do you want to talk about how you guys met?
RC: Yeah, John moved to Albuquerque… I think in 2009. We were paired up to collaborate at a festival. We've been collaborating since. This time it's interesting for both of us because we're playing instruments we don't normally play. Neither consider ourselves a drummer: we're playing drums and horn instruments! We're both very experienced in improvisation. You start thinking of the protocols that happen when two people sit down and give space. At the same time, there's an opportunity where complete chaos can happen.