Originally trained as a classical composer, Raven Chacon works across a variety of mediums including installation, performance, video, and recording. The works in Report consider the outmost boundaries of an important parameter of sound: dynamics and volume. The loudness of nature and of unorthodox instruments contrast against a landscape of silence, sometimes explained in a score of text, music notation, or other pictographic depictions.
Three places in the Southwest U.S. chosen for their quietness are presented as Field Recordings, further amplified to their maximum volume. While seemingly reduced to noise, the recordings reveal individual colors of the essence of each location.
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.
Artist Bio
Raven Chacon
Raven Chacon holds an MFA in Music Composition from CalArts. He 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 USA, and is also a member of the American Indian arts collective, Postcommodity. Chacon has presented his work in different contexts at Vancouver Art Gallery, ABC No Rio, REDCAT, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Musica, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center among other traditional and non-traditional venues. His work with Postcommodity recently exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and documenta 14. Chacon currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico.