Lazyhorse

For TOPOS, prolific composer-visual artist Raven Chacon turns away from the gravitas of the art world and returns to one of music’s most immediate, elemental forms: the band. Though well-versed in the terrain—having played in metal and thrash groups like Tenderizor, Kilt, and White People Killed Them—Chacon now channels the raw energy and aggression of these genres into an exploratory, almost meditative excavation of American musical lineages: country, folk, and their haunted echoes.

At the heart of this new work lies the cultural artifact of the spaghetti western—a genre of mid-20th–century films shot cheaply in Italy and Spain that infused moral ambiguity into the mythic binaries of the American Western. Its drifting antiheroes, complicit in an empire's dogma and implicated in the violence of westward expansion, serve as spectral guides through Chacon’s sonic landscape.

With the EMPAC-commissioned project Lazyhorse, Chacon assembles a fearless cohort of collaborators. Miriam Elhajli (vocals, guitar), Raven Chacon (keyboards/guitars), Mali Obomsawin (bass), Steve Hammond (lap-steel guitar), and The Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews, guitar and Andy Meyerson, percussion) form a band that dissects and reimagines the mythology of musical Americana, composing a sprawling mosaic of songs that are as biting as they are beautiful.

Chacon’s topos is a political one: a soundscape of critique and reckoning, where satire cuts through silence and each note resists the myth of the West.

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