Distant Pairs: Raven Chacon & Rob Thorne

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Thursday, July 8th, ISSUE is pleased to stream the debut collaboration between Diné composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon and New Zealand Māori composer, performer, improvisor, and anthropologist Rob Thorne. The duo’s debut work will stream on ISSUE’s site.

Both Chacon and Thorne have extensive histories using various high-pitched Indingenous wind instruments from their respective territories. Recently, Chacon has composed chamber works including Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun (commissioned and produced by The Industry) as well as Owl Song, for sinfonietta and voice (commissioned by Borealis Festival for Bit20 Ensemble). In 2020, Chacon released An Anthology of Chants Operations on the Ouidah label, a body of recordings drawn from across the last decade of his output capturing live performance, installation, and composition. Rob Thorne has maintained a broad solo and collaborative practice that includes cross-disciplinary works with Berlin based electronic composer Fis, Athenian pianist Tania Giannouli, The NZ String Quartet, and Orchestra Wellington, and in 2017, reimagined a pre-colonial dawn chorus in the field-based acousmatic work Te Koki. Recent work includes contributions to short-film Super Special, chamber opera He Pūtōrino Mākutu with Celeste Oram, and the Unsettling Scores series with Liquid Architecture. Currently a Research Fellow at the NZ School of Music, he has an upcoming album release with improvisor David Rothenberg (US) and vocalist Anna Fält (Sweden/Finland), as well as a creative commission with NZ Crown Research Institute Manaaki Whenua that seeks to express people’s nationally surveyed perceptions of how they relate to trees.

During the Summer 2021, ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.

Notes from Raven Chacon & Rob Thorne:

Sky father watches over us, speaks to us, into us, embraces us as one family.
An exploration of sky languages. Transient, fragile, delicate, always changing, ever present.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, NM.

New Zealand Māori composer, performer, improvisor, collaborator and anthropologist, Rob Thorne M.A. (Ngāti Tumutumu) is a diverse and original explorer in the art of taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments), fusing these ancient voices with modern perspectives and technology. With flutes and horns made from stone, bone, shell and wood, Rob’s practice seeks to decolonise, heal and empower through sound, place, identity, transcendentalism and beauty. A musician and scholar with over 30 years performance experience in bands and solo, alternative rock, free improv, noise, and experimental sound art, his work since 2001 with taonga pūoro has seen him intelligently blending the modern with the ancient, travelling internationally to research, teach, present, demonstrate, collaborate and perform.