Grantee: Raven Chacon
Native Citizenship: Navajo
Location: Albuquerque, N.M.
Award: 2014 NACF Artist Fellowship
Discipline: Music
Web Site: http://www.spiderwebsinthesky.com/
Sound artist Raven Chacon explores the range of sound to compose unique chamber music, experimental noise music and sound installations.
The Chinle-born artist transforms analog sounds into fantastically eerie soundscapes through digitization and masterful feedback loops of handmade instruments; ambient recordings of Window Rock at 4 a.m. (2004); or found instruments such as the amplified balloons featured inYellowface song (2007). His installation Singing Toward The Wind Now/Singing Toward The Sun Now (2012) creates music as sand and wind from Canyon De Chelly play five-foot tall geometric metal sculptures like harps to the beat of solar-powered oscillators. Later in 2012, with the band Kilt, Chacon, released Santa Muerte, a two-track album with a carefully layered and deepening intensity.
With the support of a 2014 NACF Artist Fellowship in Music, Chacon will be able to innovate new sounds for the string quartet ETHEL (NYC) and to create archival recordings of Navajo songs in Chinle, Ariz. As composer in residence at the Native American Composers Apprentice Project, Chacon teaches musical composition to reservation students. He is a founding member of the First Nations Composers Initiative.
During his fellowship year, Raven Chacon (Navajo, 2014 NACF Music Fellow) collaborated with Robert Henke, D.H. Hyde and Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo) to produce a video of a Chacon and Henke’s 40 minute moonlight Chaco Canyon.
Still Life by Raven Chacon (Navajo), composition created with the support of a 2014 NACF Music Fellowship.
Raven Chacon (Navajo) taught musical composition to high school students in New Mexico and Arizona.
Black Streaked Humming by Raven Chacon (Navajo), 2014 NACF Music Fellow, from self-titled LP.
