The Club is to be the scene of a screeching Raven.
Raven Chacon, an American experimental sound and visual artist, will give a special performance of his work at The Banff Centre next Saturday (Feb. 11).
“I’ll be playing some homemade instruments that I brought with me,” he said in an interview following an artist’s talk at the centre last Tuesday (Jan. 24). “Most of them I consider noise instruments and a lot of the structure of the work I do is half improvisational and half composed songs using these noise instruments.
“Some of that includes voice and a drum that gets activated by feedback, and also some microphones that I’ve built.”
Originally from Arizona, Chacon is of Navajo First Nations descent, and draws much of his work from his cultural heritage. He now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“I consider them songs, but they really do have this noise tendency to them,” he explained. “Some of them are unpredictable instruments, and all of them get activated by me and are laid out on a table as these tools that I’m able to use and carry on through to the end of the performance.”
This is Chacon’s second time at The Banff Centre, he said.
“I was fortunate to be invited to come up last year, check out the centre and explore a little bit. I was here a week and I liked it, and got invited to come back as guest faculty,” he explained. “Myself and Candice Hopkins are leading a residency here called Trading Post in the visual arts department, so a lot of the residents are working in the field of visual arts, but also doing other things such as performance and sound and some of these workshops.”
For his part, Chacon is working with artists from different disciplines, gathering them together and allowing them a means to exchange ideas.
“The idea of the residency is this little trading post where people can come in and exchange objects or gifts with each other, but also share skills amongst artists that are participating and learn different techniques from each other,” he said. “We’ve found a way to get them to teach each other.”
Also while at the centre, Chacon plans to work on several other projects.
“I’m writing a stringed quartet right now for a quartet named Ethel, based out of New York City,” he said. “And I’m also going to be working with some students at the Morley reserve while I’m here and have them do a recording project.”
While The Club show will be experimental in nature, Chacon stressed it would be a good mix of his work.
“It’ll be a mixture between very ambient music and noise, so it won’t be a totally active performance, but at the same time it won’t be a boring listening fest,” he said. “It’ll be a mixture.’
