This Is Not Simple. (Like, it's Really Hard.)

Our Fall issue featured nine pairs—distinguished musician-composers together with artists and professionals working in other disciplines—in conversations about how and why they do what they do, and what they have in common.

Raven Chacon first met Nathan Young when both artists were still finding their way toward practices that reflected a love of a wide range of sounds, an attraction to visual art, and a desire to pose difficult questions about Native American participation in the world of contemporary arts. Their paths crossed more deeply through Postcommodity, an Indigenous artist collective of which Young is a founding member. Among the collective’s works is Do You Remember When?, a sound installation in museums in Tempe, Arizona, and Sydney, Australia, in which, as the collective’s website explains, a hole revealing exposed earth “becomes a spiritual, cultural and physical portal, from which emerges an Indigenous worldview engaging a discourse on sustainability,” and a block of concrete on a pedestal “functions as a trophy celebrating Indigenous intervention in opposition to a Western scientific worldview.” When they got together recently via Zoom to talk, Young, formerly an elected member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Tribal Council, was in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where he grew up. Chacon, who now splits his time between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York, was in a Times Square hotel room. —Ed.

Raven Chacon: I think the first time I’d heard of you was in 2005. At the time, I didn’t know any other Native folks that were doing noise music. And then you wrote me an email to introduce yourself and tell me about the early stages of Postcommodity, the group you were founding.

Nathan Young: I’d heard about your work in The Native American Composer Apprentice Project. I realized that we were doing the same kinds of things in underground and noise music. You had a large cohort of people in New Mexico, and you’d been composing for a long time. Your practice was broad and expansive, even back then. Yet we were both coming from these kind of bedroom situations, playing music on our own. Even today, I can see how our artistic processes are still influenced by that era, by learning how to work with people and learning what collaboration means.

Raven Chacon. Photo: Neal Santos

RC: That was an interesting time. It was still very cheap to rent a space—a noise venue or an artist-run space or a studio—even in Los Angeles, where I was living at the time. There was an energy, a DIY spirit, that was strong.

NY: It was a prime time for finding each other and hearing what we each sounded like. We weren’t on labels or making commercial products. And touring in the West was quite an undertaking. I mean, it took a whole day to drive between each of these towns.

RC: And each town was an island, really. I knew there were a lot of Native people in Albuquerque, and a lot of musicians. With the group Death Convention Singers, I wanted to gather people together to encourage them to make noise. They didn’t even have to know how to play an instrument.

NY: When we were starting Postcommodity, around 2006, it felt like there was not a Native American voice in contemporary art. That was truly the impetus to start the collective. It felt like there was something missing. And when you came on board in 2009, I felt like you were kind of the missing link. We kind of felt like we were complete then.

RC: The first I heard of Postcommodity was when I was on an advisory board for a short-lived group called the First Nations Composer Initiative. That was a project of the American Composers Forum—a small group of Native composers, mostly working in chamber music, who gathered just to find each other, and be in the same room. Postcommodity had submitted an application for a project in the Czech Republic. I thought, Wow, these guys are doing some interesting things. Then you and I started communicating, maybe we even jammed. I went to art school for graduate studies, at CalArts. I’d always wanted to work in interdisciplinary ways. Even though I consider myself a composer and musician, first and foremost, I was interested in other things, in film and video. Also, I was seeking others who were making complicated music, and I just wasn’t seeing or hearing that at that time. When Postcommodity approached me to join the group, I started to think this might be a way of exhibiting the sound art I’d already been making. I just didn’t know what it was called or what you did with it. I knew I was making things that didn’t fit on the stage or on a recording or in a score, but they were something, you know? I just didn’t know how to exhibit those things until I joined up with you guys.

Nathan Young. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

NY: What was so great about Postcommodity was all that time we spent together, and those ideas and problems we talked about while waiting for planes or driving. We talked about intentionally complicating things. I felt that was kind of like our impetus: This is not simple. Like, it’s really hard. We have 500-plus tribes of indigenous people in America alone. So, we had this idea that stuff was just complicated. I think that feeling materialized in a lot of our exhibitions, in installations where the animating ideas were hard to express. We just kind of leaned into that.

RC: One thing that brought us together was a shared idea that we were not so interested in our own identities. We know who we are, and we don’t really care if anybody else knows who we are or not. It was a very conscious effort that the work not look like our own individual tribal identities. You would see no signifiers of traditional artworks of our tribes inside of these pieces. Our concerns were those of our region—of the West, the Southwest of Indian communities, from Oklahoma through Arizona and California. What are the systems that are encroaching upon these communities? Those were topics of these early works. How are we implicated in that and possibly even contributing to those systems? Some of this looked toward self-critique, saying basically: We’re Native people, but we’re also in the 21st century, and we’re all implicated in these markets and these systems that serve the very power that is affecting us, that are suppressing our traditions and our rights.

NY: Those ideas seem commonplace today, but 15 years ago we were just starting to pull them out. You know, in some ways you are a living embodiment, I’m a living embodiment, of our tribal identities. So I don’t really have to say too much about that identity. Everything I do is that identity, and I think that’s one way that things may have changed. I feel like that gets back to this idea of expectations of Native art, which have finally changed. And that connects to this idea that you need to do one thing. I would guess that your creative approach as a composer and an artist are not very different. Would you agree?

RC: Yes, and as a performer. I mean, they’re all separate, but the tactics are the same. I make it a point to jump around them enough so that I’m not pinned down to any one of them for too long. Of course, they all overlap. I think that’s how our identities are—our tribal identities, our identities as indigenous people. We’re not always in our communities. We’re not always practicing our traditions. We’re not always in alignment with our traditions, either. I think we should all question some of the things we are told—not just as indigenous people, but as people in general. We all should embrace more of the unknowable parts of the universe rather than having a dogmatic outlook on who we are and where we come from.

An artist’s job is to question these things. I think there’s an invitation in art to confuse the situation, to bring more elements into the conversation: I am Diné, I am a composer, but that’s not all there is here. There’s the work, and then there’s me. That’s why music excites me so much because, yeah, I might generate the initial idea but then it gets passed on to other collaborators. In Postcommodity, we’re all indigenous, from North America. We have our own worldviews, and the collision of these worldviews, even among just three or four members, produces powerful ideas about the world we live in today.

NY: I’ve jumped around from different artistic practices. I feel like fine art museums are focused on things being complete. There’s this idea that you don’t need any other context. You need to be able to read it right there. Everybody should be able to read it. Music seems, to me, more free. Like you said, it can come out of you and, next thing you know, you hear another version and it’s still got that same spirit. One thing we had in common in Postcommodity was that idea. First of all, we all came through noise; we share a true love of sound and the power of it.

RC: That makes me think about Do You Remember When? That was a huge project. It had been a project of the collective before I joined, and it was completed after you left the collective. We cut a hole out of the floor of a museum in Tempe, Arizona, and of another in Sydney, Australia. It is a conceptual work, a sound work, that to me is really a signifier of the group. I think this way of focusing toward the land itself—aiming a microphone into the ground and allowing stories to emerge through a process of art making—is representative of the philosophy of the group.

NY: In a way, it was our proof of concept. It was the beginning of a certain practice, of making things very difficult. These days, the methodologies of, say, Pauline Oliveros, are well-known; most people know what “deep listening” is now. In some ways, that was Postcommodity listening in its own way, suggesting another way of listening that may seem very basic but is also very complicated.

Raven Chacon is a Diné (Navajo) artist born in Fort Defiance, Arizona. He works across different mediums, as a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and a visual artist, and performs regularly as a solo artist as well as in the performance art group Death Convention Singers. He was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Voiceless Mass, composed for chamber orchestra and pipe organ.

Nathan Young is an artist-scholar-composer working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, and experimental music. His work often engages the spiritual and the political, re-imagining Indigenous sacred imagery to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime.