On a Wednesday and Thursday night inside the ornate Veterans Room at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, a curious collection of objects sat arranged on a central table. Sound mixers, synthesizers, audio pedals, speakers, various whistles, a turkey call, and a ceramic horn rested together, serving as the physical staging ground for Raven Chacon’s hour-long improvisation sessions. Part of the Armory’s prestigious 2026 Artists Studio series, the performances offered audiences a rare, intimate look at the prolific composer, performer, and visual artist entirely at play in real-time.
During his performance on October 8, the Diné (Navajo) artist used each object on the table to surprising, inventive, and frequently discomfiting ends. Chacon rigorously blew a whistle directly into a microphone, looping the sound and layering it atop a rising drone. He intermittently cut the audio to make room for the electronic transmission of the breath he had recorded just moments earlier. He mixed harsh screeches over the whistles, eventually transforming the former into an oscillating, metallic sound redolent of the extraterrestrial signals found in a science-fiction film. Whenever the composition threatened to stray too far into speculative abstraction, he would snap it back with a clear, often frightening reminder of the world immediately outside the building’s walls.
Chacon ultimately ended the session by playing field recordings of the wind through a hyperdirectional speaker, which he slowly moved in a circle around himself. He swept the sound of the wind over a new part of the room with each turn, transmitting with it the geography of alternative worlds—landscapes much less violent than those sounded by the cars blaring up and down Park Avenue immediately outside the Armory, but whose continued existence depends entirely upon our choosing to stop and listen.
Following these immersive performances, Chacon discussed the role of location in his work, his purposeful repurposing of tools historically associated with colonial violence, and his recent turn toward science fiction for an upcoming major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Bringing Site-Specificity to Improvisation
Hyperallergic: For your Arts and Letters show, you were working with both local naturalist histories and the Lenape culture and history of New York. How do you bring site-specificity to a work like this that is entirely improvised?
Raven Chacon: I wish I could say I was responding to the Armory. 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. 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. 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.
Hyperallergic: Those sounds can have a different effect just based on the setting. We recently published a review of a group show you were in at the Hammer that likens your sound piece to a "California earthquake," which is the type of resonance that you wouldn’t get in New York.
Raven Chacon: That was certainly a consideration. Also, with that show, there were a lot of works about the actual ground. That installation was situated at the entry, but immediately, you have works by Edgar Calel, Ana Mendieta, these works that involve soil and dirt. I wanted to reference that with that piece. And as you move through, you have these different interactions with different materials and visual concepts happening throughout the show.
