Lazyhorse

For TOPOS, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and visual artist Raven Chacon sheds the gravitas of the art world and returns to one of music’s most raw and immediate forms: the band. Drawing on his roots in noise, thrash, and metal (Tenderizor, KILT, White People Killed Them), Chacon channels that energy into an exploratory, almost meditative excavation of American musical traditions: country, folk, and their haunted echoes.

Lazyhorse marks the latest chapter in Chacon’s nearly decade-long collaboration with The Living Earth Show (percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews). Known for transforming the chamber ensemble model into a platform for genre-defying invention, The Living Earth Show builds immersive sonic worlds with their collaborators. After their lauded piece Tremble Staves, Chacon and the duo return with a new vision, this time centering songcraft, improvisation, and the unruly edges of music.

At its core, Lazyhorse is haunted by the spaghetti western—a film genre that injected moral ambiguity into the clean-cut heroics of the American frontier myth. In Chacon’s hands, these disillusioned antiheroes become sonic archetypes, spectral guides complicit in westward violence, leading us through a landscape where distortion, silence, and satire collide.

Commissioned by EMPAC, Lazyhorse assembles a powerhouse lineup: Mali Obomsawin (bass), Miriam Elhajli (vocals, guitar), Steve Hammond (lap steel), Chacon (keys/guitars), and The Living Earth Show. Together, they form a genre-exploding band that dissects and reconstructs the mythology of Americana, stitching together songs that are as biting as they are hauntingly beautiful.

This is no nostalgia trip: Chacon’s topos is resistance. Lazyhorse confronts the violence of empire through sound, turning the stage into a site of reckoning, reclamation, and radical reimagination.

The Gasholder House is located at 113 Jefferson St. in Troy, NY.