Raven Chacon Sounds the Land at the Park Avenue Armory

Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and Pulitzer Prize winner, transformed the Veterans Room at Manhattan's Park Avenue Armory on October 8 into a stage for an hour-long improvised performance built around field recordings, synthesizers, and a single ceramic horn.

The Veterans Room hosted two sessions on Wednesday and Thursday nights as part of the Armory's Artists Studio series. Chacon filled a center table with sound mixers, pedals, speakers, whistles, a turkey call, and a ceramic horn, then turned each into raw material for an unscripted hour of drone, screech, and breath.

How does Chacon build a performance around place?

Chacon drew on field recordings gathered in New Mexico, layering them against the live intrusion of Park Avenue traffic and passing sirens. "It's unavoidable that we might hear sirens and traffic outside, and those usually become part of the soundtrack of what I'm working with," he said.

He acknowledged the work was not strictly site-specific to the Armory itself.

"When I'm playing in the city, I tend to bring in more field recordings of the outdoors, of wind and other sounds from other places," Chacon explained. "A lot of these were gathered where I'm from in New Mexico."

"While not site-specific to the Armory in this case, I find myself incorporating those more indoors, amongst the other things that encroach upon the interior of the space," he added.

What instruments did he use, and how?

During the October 8 set, Chacon rigorously blew a whistle into a microphone and looped the sound over a rising drone, periodically cutting it to insert electronic transmissions of his own recorded breath.

He mixed screeches against the whistles, shaping them into oscillating metallic tones evocative of radio signals in science fiction. When the composition drifted into speculative abstraction, he pulled it back toward the room with a clear reminder of the world outside.

The session closed with Chacon playing recordings of wind through a hyperdirectional speaker, rotating slowly in a circle. Each turn swept the wind sound across a new arc of the Veterans Room, mapping the geography of quieter worlds beyond the Armory's walls.

Why sci-fi, and what's next?

Chacon's improvisations at the Armory preview concerns he will sharpen for an upcoming exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The SFMOMA show, titled "New Work: Raven Chacon," turns toward science fiction as a lens on colonial history and possible futures.

Chacon also pointed to a recent group exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where a Hyperallergic review likened his sound piece to a "California earthquake." That installation sat near works by Edgar Calel and Ana Mendieta, both of which used soil and dirt.

Chacon said he intended his piece to reference those ground-based works as visitors moved through the Hammer show. The wider context now feeds his upcoming work, including the science-fiction register he plans to develop at SFMOMA.

The Armory performance sits at the intersection of those concerns. It uses everyday and ceremonial tools to score the layered histories of the land it occupies. The SFMOMA exhibition will test whether that vocabulary travels into science fiction, and whether Chacon's attentive listening can carry from Manhattan's Veterans Room into a museum context further west.