I was first introduced to Raven Chacon at Dronefest last year when he performed a transfixing three hour noise set involving hyper-directional speakers. By manually adjusting their position, often at high speeds, he created disorienting effects of laser beams or overdriven insects buzzing around the circular space. I had never seen or heard anything like it and instantly became a fan.

I’ve since seen one other of his compositions performed in which a quartet soundtracked one of his graphical scores for which he is well known.

This piece, currently on display at the Swiss Institute in NYC, trades a graphical score for the shapes of the rolling hills surrounding the Valles Caldera in New Mexico, which was formed 1.25 million years ago when a Volcano erupted (it’s also 15 miles from the location of the Los Alamos National Laboratory where the Atomic Bomb was developed).

In the piece, four singers are positioned around a small pond, each facing in a different direction. The “singers slowly rotate and while scanning the horizon line, singing the contour of the landscape.” The resulting sounds are haunting and beautiful, as the overlapping voices gradually shift between harmony and dissonance, evoking the tension between the tranquility of the landscape and the violence of the forces that created it.

Joe Delon included John and I’s release last year in his 2023 roundup and gave us a kind writeup. Always nice to be included in the same breath with anything Davis Galvin does.

A nice review of Castle in the Sky was published in The Fader earlier this month:

With enough curated cheeriness and kitschy synth work, any artist worth their salt can emulate an ’80s sound. But Castles In the Sky takes on the much trickier task of blending the era’s capitalist excesses with its radical elements — art that arose as a response to the brutal injustices of austerity and imperialism masked as American exceptionalism — and projecting the whole mess onto our current technocratic dystopia. Jennifer Vanilla’s dimension of origin is an eternal ’80s, one in which the decade’s false promises are suspended in midair like floating castles. But Grant’s critical eye complicates the premise, letting the weight of the future seep ever so slightly into their avatar’s perpetual daydream.

Walking through Highland Park, a flock of starlings swarmed overhead.

Caught a replay of this mix on The Lot Radio this afternoon and noting it here for the archive :)