Singing Toward The Wind Now

I was going to write here about Raven Chacon after seeing him perform at Tate Modern's Preemptive Listening Symposium in 2024. I didn't have time then, nor when he was featured in The Wire magazine in April this year (see above), but he is definitely overdue a mention. Chacon described Field Recordings  (1999), his first piece, and For Four (Caldera), a recent 2024 performance, in an Art in America article:  

Field Recordings - 'The idea was to go to different places I’m very familiar with, two of them on Navajo Nation land, to find locations that would be very quiet. ... Then I started making these postcards that are also flexi-discs you can play on a turntable. The idea was to make something like tourist mementos. I have a few pieces like this that critique people’s thinking of ”deep listening,” or going to places in the Southwest and meditating and having profound experiences in silence—the tourist nature of going to places like Monument Valley or places in the Navajo Nation and sending postcards to friends.'

For Four (Caldera) - 'This piece can be performed in any valley that was created by some kind of disruption. This valley is a volcanic crater, from an eruption millions of years ago. Over one of the hills is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they developed the atomic bomb. Within the piece there are four singers who sing the contour of the landscape as a melody. ... Another version of this piece in Norway has a much different sound. That one has joikers, who practice a tradition of Sámi singing that already is influenced by the landscape, whether literally by the contours of the horizon or something more about stories within a place.' 

As another example of his approach to landscape, I am embedding a YouTube clip here from an installation midway through his career, Singing Toward The Wind Now / Singing Toward The Sun Now. These are sculptures in Arizona's Canyon de Chelly: two function as harps and two are solar-powered oscillators that provide a beat. 

When you look across Raven Chacon's career you can a see various ways landscape has been a source for his work: 

• The soundscape captured and amplified via field recordings. 
• The natural environment playing instruments (as in the clip above).
• The form of the landscape shaping the form of song, as in For Four (Caldera).
• Natural sounds informing musical compositions, e.g. Owl Song which features on his recent Voiceless Mass album.
• Ancient petroglyphs found in the desert landscape as an inspiration for graphic scores.
• Site specific events where surrounding sounds interact with a composition, like the 2019 performance at San Francisco's Land's End. 

And then there is landscape as a zone of conflict, as in the Dispatch project where he recorded crowds protesting against a pipeline being drilled through the Standing Rock Reservation. Dispatch 2: The Gathering involves prompts for players 'derived from an analysis of the dynamics and organisation of the Water Protectors ... not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices.' He begins this piece with a meditation on the rock itself.

Rocks have harmonics, resonant frequencies. They are also deities, lives begun millions of years ago, witnesses to the formation of the earth. They can pick up the tremors of extractive colonialism exposing wide caverns that lead to trails deep inside the ground, generating sludge and slurry, releasing poisons meant to stay undisturbed. The time is now to protect these rocks as though it is a last stand.