Prolific composer-visual artist Raven Chacon (Navajo Nation) 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 country western music. Teamed up with bassist/composer/singer Mali Obomsawin (Abenaki First Nation), folk singer/composer/improviser Miriam Elhajli, lap-steel player Steve Hammond, and The Living Earth Show, the band Lazyhorse brings experimental noise into the realm of spaghetti western.
At its core, Lazyhorse is in conversation with the western movies and music—injecting its own mythologies and moral ambiguities into the clean-cut heroics expected in American frontier stories. In Lazyhorse’s hands, its disillusioned antiheroes become sonic centerpieces leading us through landscapes where distortion, silence, and satire collide. Spaghetti westerns may conjure images of isolated frontier towns overrun by warring factions of gangs and outlaws, caricatures of Manichean forces of good and evil. The term may also call to mind wanton violence: dueling firearms, fistfights, and flying arrows. Underlying the spectacle lies the unsubtle fact of Lazyhorse exerts what feels like violent intensity within its starkness— music simmering just on the edge of the known world.