Liquid Architecture and Curatorial Practice at Monash University welcome artist composer Raven Chacon to Melbourne for a series of talks, workshops and performances exploring themes of sonic protest and decolonial listening in the work of First Nations and Indigenous artists.

Tactical Sound is a performance event by artist-activists situating sound and listening as tactical mediums deployed in counterforce to state corporate volume in the asymmetric contestation for public and private space.

We have an allocation of free tickets for First Nations folks who want to attend. Get in touch to let us know if you're coming.

Program

Raven Chacon: Solo (Standing Rock 2016)
Comprised of recordings made by the artist at Standing Rock Reservation Water Protector encampment in 2016, Solo (2016-2020) brings together the sounds of gathering, prayer, rest, and quiet protest are augmented with overdriven electronics and cassette tapes to produce an acoustic account of the struggle for cultural preservation, and defence of Indigenous sovereignty.

Bridget Chappell: No Comment
Bridget Chappell's set will explore protest tactics further elucidated in the exhibition 'No Comment' at BLINDSIDE. Sounds of State control are repeled and physically destroyed through custom phase cancellation technology and hyper-directional speakers, paired with everyday counter-surveillance tools, such as laser pens. The musicality of sirens is co-opted; an attempt to rewire our instinctive responses to them is made.

Rob Thorne: Solo
Māori musician and anthropologist Rob Thorne (of Ngati Tumutumu) merges free improvisation with traditional Māori musical instruments (taonga pūoro) in a deeply felt and highly concentrated conversation between the past and the present – a musical passage of identity and connection. Extending traditional Māori flutes and horns made from stone, bone, shell and wood via techniques of experimentation and alchemy,

About the Artists

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, where he taught string-quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high-school students on reservations in the American Southwest.