Apr 14 2024

Performance | White People Killed Them: Raven Chacon, Marshall Trammell and John Dieterich

Sun | 4PM

To commemorate the closing of Raven Chacon’s solo exhibition at SI, A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak, please join us on our rooftop to witness a performance by White People Killed Them, a trio formed by Chacon with musicians Marshall Trammell and John Dieterich. The trio, according to its members, is “one of several imaginings of new designations, calamities and celebrations by group members recorded in 2019 when we all happened to be in New Mexico.”

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Accessibility note: This program contains loud and sudden sounds.

Raven Chacon was born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation in 1977. Since 1999 he has toured the United States with various solo and group projects, composed chamber works, and developed a curriculum for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, an education initiative to mentor young composers on the Navajo, Hopi and Salt River Pima reservations. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); amongst many others. He has performed or had works performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2013); Borealis Festival, Bergen, Norway (2021); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2022); the Perelman Performing Arts Center, New York (2023); Holland Festival, Amsterdam, NL (2023); and Ostrava Festival, Ostrava, CZ (2023); in addition to hundreds of concerts over the past 25 years. In 2022, Chacon received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass, and in 2023 he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship.

Self-styled Music Research Strategist Marshall Trammell is a US-born, California-based Experimental/Creative Music percussionist, conductor, and Digital Community Archives Project Manager and Curator. A founding member of White People Killed Them (SIGE Records), Trammell performs with a number of Creative Improvised Music outfits. He is currently a resident artist at the Sonic Acts Biennale (Amsterdam) and ArabAmp/Temescal Art Center (TACmusic) in Oakland, CA.

John Dieterich is a Minnesota-based guitarist and composer in the band Deerhoof, which he has been a member of since 1999. In that time, Deerhoof has released 25 critically acclaimed albums, toured extensively throughout the world, collaborated with jazz luminaries (including Wadada Leo Smith and Nels Cline), physicist James Beacham (as part of the first musical performance at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider), Konono No. 1, and created an original score to Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic. In addition, John has been or continues to be a member of a number of collaborative groups, including Endlings, White People Killed Them, Claire Cronin, Gorge Trio, Powerdove, Colossamite, Natural Dreamers, his duets with guitarist Mary Halvorson and Tashi Dorji, and many others. He also works as a musician, producer, mixer, remixer and/or collaborator with a diverse array of artists, including: Juana Molina, Sufjan Stevens, Half Japanese, Phew, Das Racist, Mike Watt, Danielson Famile, Xiu Xiu, Lucas Santtana and Busdriver.