Score / Performance

For solo overly-amplified guitar. Performed outdoors, the guitarist takes cues from shadows, wind, insects, clouds, and more to determine the course of musical decisions. Compass encourages the reading of pulses and paces of the world around us. We can align with all entities with whom we share our universe, we can be a part of them and respond when they reveal themselves to us.

Commissioned by United States Artists

New Suns

Radio Station / Sound Installation 

Radio Coyote launched in the spring of 2021 as a short-range FM station, broadcast to 88.1 FM for anyone within a few blocks from the Wattis Institute, as well as an online streaming channel, with a custom-designed website running 24/7, with shows produced by friends and past collaborators, and recordings from his personal collection, along with the entire back catalog from Sicksicksick Distro.

Radio Coyote was commissioned by CCA Wattis, produced with assistant curator Diego Villalobos, and was initially broadcast on 88.1 FM in Potrero Hill, San Francisco until 2022. The station is currently produced by Atomic Culture and with live broadcasts in Tulsa’s Greenwood / Arts District on 90.1 FM from 2022–2023.

www.radiocoyote.org

Textile Score / Sound Installation 

Woven polyester printed textile, digital audio files

Storm Pattern (2021) is a textile score and multi-channel sound installation of field recordings of flying drones at the Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp, captured on Thanksgiving weekend during the encampment. With the drones at average flight speed emitting a tone of A440, the soundtrack of the installation relays the intertwined sounds of surveillance and counter-surveillance.

Sound Installation
Sound, music composition, built materials

Decrescendo / Crescendo is a 40-foot-long corridor with a 7-foot opening on both sides slowly narrowing toward the center. As a listener walks toward a small gap in the center of the corridor, a field recording of the grounds of a detention center reproduces a contradictory soundscape of isolation and reduced outdoor freedom. Reflecting on the dilemma of whether justice is served through incarceration, the sound installation expresses this predicament in an architectural form, reflecting this confining space, finding points of resolution but also echoing where we, as a society, have stalled, unsure of how to solve issues of punishment, rehabilitation, and justic

(for a collection of objects)

Sound Installation / Score
Digital print, audio files
Dimensions variable

Mouth Piece (2020) is a grouping of seven songs composed from sounds and pitches of Pre-Columbian whistles, flutes, and ocarinas in LACMA’s Art of the Ancient Americas collection. Performed by Alethia Lozano, principal flutist of National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, the songs were presented as beams of directionalized sound, introducing visitors to the exhibition spaces, telling the stories of other non-sounding objects in the exhibition, inviting the listener to align their own voice with the cumulative activity in the gallery. The score tells more information about the wind instruments, their pitches, and the artwork they speak for.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Plainsong is a large format outdoor score displayed on the side of a building, presenting musical staves and noteheads of various sizes. While producing long-sustaining tones on any instrument, musicians move to discrete near or distanced positions in order to navigate through the score. Plainsong does not have clear beginnings or endings; a performance of tones appearing as a slow-paced interruption in the day.

Performance
– For many musicians with sustaining instruments.
– Each musician begins the piece by positioning themselves in a spot to read any triangular notehead on the score. This may require them to be far or near the score.
– Perform the pitch (using any clef suitable for the instrument: treble, bass, alto, etc) and hold the tone.
– The three points of the triangular notehead point to potential next notes to be played. While still holding the tone, move to a new location to comfortably view the next notehead and its staff, then play the new note.
– Movement between new locations should allow for distance from other players. One may wait before choosing and moving to a new note to achieve this.
– The piece should last for a long time. The performers may decide upon a duration and how to conclude the piece. In the event that a performer cannot move to a new position, or has felt that they have played every notehead in the piece, they may end their playing and stand until the piece is over.

Commissioned by AKA Artist-Run Centre, Saskatoon, SK

John Dieterich and Raven Chacon in collaboration with Vancouver New Music and an endless pool of musicians

The web instrument, Parallel 03, designed by Endlings (John Dieterich and Raven Chacon) and six Vancouver musicians and sound artists utilizes a variety of cross-platform and anonymous methods for composition and improvisation. Composed, recorded, and arranged over four months of isolation in 2020, the eight collaborators became generators, translators, mistranslators and filters for inputted contributions in an incalculable feedback loop of expansive processes. The instrument is designed to receive new content from other contributors, allowing for a constant stream of unique, ephemeral music.

Parallel 03 collaborators so far are: Raven Chacon and John Dieterich (Endlings), with Parmela Attariwala, Adrian Avendaño, John Brennan, Elisa Ferrari, Marina Hasselberg and Alanna Ho. Website design by Joel Schuman.

in all its phases…

Score presented as a flag and newspaper.

Dedicated to Ida B. Wells

For two women’s choirs, two glockenspiels (or other metallophone), two drums, and coins. 

A score telling the story of historical as well as recent lynchings in The United States of America, its acceptance in the South, and the complacency of the North. American Ledger no.3 is a negotiation of viewpoint, the navigation around noise, and the revealing of truth through voice.

Download newspaper version here.

Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon

co-composed with Du Yun

Libretto by Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas Kearney

Sweet Land (2020) is a Manifest Destiny opera that erases itself while weaving together several narratives simultaneously, opening with the arrival of settler-colonial visitors in the homelands of an Indigenous civilization. As the story unfolds, past scenes are left behind and erased, emulating the whitewashing of dissent against dominant historical narratives.