For a family to perform,

For as long as they want,

In a tall building,

On different levels, toward the same direction,

Scream out of each window.   

Scream Out Of Each Window (2005)

In 2017, I presented a GIDEST seminar titled “What Gets Amplified,” recounting what I observed as a guest at the Oceti Sakowin Standing Rock camp during a week-long visit the previous November. That talk, and subsequent versions of it, attempted to analyze the complex organizing and actions of the spectrum of Water Protectors, and find alignments to my own work of organizing sound and the musicians who produce it.

There surely must be a better word than “protest” for coming together to protect the land, as the very presence of this many Native peoples had not materialized in over 100 years. The gathering of this many of us became a realignment of its own. The camps became the imagined microcosm of a North America where we were still the majority, self-sustained and self-governed, no other direct action than simply being alive and retaining our ways. What became apparent—even in the short time I was there and under the shadow of militaristic surveillance—was a shared experience: remembering one’s identity, while at the same time re-imagining who we aimed to be. What was achieved there was not a funneling of a pan-Indian sameness, but rather a radial explosion of every potential dreamt history.

For many years, my ears loved noise, whether that was abrasive sonority as content, or the form of a piece of music that exists in a state of disarray. When digital media comes too close to the land there is the danger of encroaching on privacy. This was the dilemma proposed by the gathering at Standing Rock, in its immediate turnaround of documentation, live feeds, and the potential for rumor. What do we make of the scatter of reckoning, against a feedback of misinformation. In 2020, when we are more physically distanced than ever, how do we organize ourselves to seek these shared experiences? What are other non-reductive alignments that avoid the usual contradictions?

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Scream Out of Each Window is a transcription of a recurring dream, coming to me not quite as a nightmare, more like a puzzle. The events of the dream never felt like a response to horror, but rather a storytelling of a past shared experience. In the dreams, the screams oscillated between being howls of remembered terror and cries of coming joy.

A score is a visual document intended to be read, interpreted (and perhaps agreed upon), and then enacted. The above score includes the instruction to “chop wood”. This can be interpreted and enacted as either a destructive or constructive act, yet there is a hope in my scores that prompts become both. The score strives to be interpreted beyond the binary of either/or.

Recently, for some of the music I have been composing, I have become less interested in the quality of sounds made. I liken this reluctance to someone who has caught themselves only speaking or engaging in a conversation to hear the sound of their own voice, or that they had been speaking, but not saying anything at all. The marrow of this music is not in its sonic persuasion, but in the agreement that all performers (and audience if present) find themselves in.

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On July 6, 2020, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the pipeline shut down, to be drained in one month, and subject to federal environmental review. This can be seen as a victory, or a stepping stone, a gift, or justice. At the time of writing, I am nonetheless convinced that we will need to gather our ever-evolving voices and ears again at the next site of dissonance. 

Throughout my time at Oceti Sakowin camp, I carried a small digital recorder in my pocket. The Drum Not To Be Heard was recorded on Thanksgiving Day at the base of Turtle Hill, separated by the Cannonball River, where Water Protectors and Hunkpapa and Sihasapa tribal members gathered to give respects to those buried on top of the hill. Police forces called down to those seeking to climb to the burial site, threatening them with violence for encroaching onto what they considered pipeline territory. This short recording that you have been listening to captures the interaction between Water Protectors and police, documenting a prayer group gathering lumber from the camp and building a floating bridge to traverse the river. The percussive hammering of nails into wood becomes the drum not to be heard.

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.