It’s not every day you get to project your film at high elevation. With composer and frequent coconspirator Deantoni Parks, Lucy Raven will present her 2025 work Murderers Bar, surrounded by the slopes of the Maroon Bells, for Aspen Art Museum’s 2026 AIR festival this year. The film and performance is the final installment of the Arizona-born artist’s “The Drumfire” series, exploring infrastructure under pressure, here chronicling the largest dam removal in American history, near the California-Oregon border. (Parts one and two focused on a concrete plant and an explosives range.) In Aspen, Murderers Bar will be accompanied by a newly commissioned score from Parks, played across strings, percussion, and wind instruments.
Ahead of the performance on July 28, Raven and Parks sat down with CULTURED to talk about their communication style, Aspen’s extremes, and starting over.
How did you start collaborating?
Lucy Raven: We met through a series that our mutual friend, Jason Moran, was putting together at the Park Avenue Armory called “Artists Studio” that Deantoni and I had taken part in. I was attending Deantoni’s performance with the late great Milford Graves and I was totally blown away by what he was doing with TechnoSelf, a brilliant project of his I really connected to.
I had reached out about an artists on artists presentation at Dia for Walter De Maria. That was my first engagement with Dia. I asked Deantoni to join because I knew that Walter De Maria had been a drummer for a proto-Velvet Underground band called the Primitives. I was really interested in focusing on the role of percussion in his work, thinking about repetition and interval and violence. When I reached out to Deantoni, it turned out by coincidence he was, and is still, a drummer for John Cale, who was part of the Primitives. We had that unexpected connection right away.
From there we did that piece together, and then as my involvement with Dia continued, they commissioned and premiered Ready Mix, the first part of “The Drumfire.” Deantoni did a brilliant score for that. We’ve worked together on all the subsequent works, Demolition of a Wall Album One, Demolition of a Wall Album Two, and now Murderer’s Bar, and have had the opportunity to do a number of live events, but nothing quite like this.
How did Murderer’s Bar and the Aspen performance come about?
Lucy Raven: The piece that became Murderer’s Bar was part of the set of ideas that spurred this whole body of work that coalesced around cycles of material transformation and deformation, particularly as exerted through force and pressure, whether geologic or man-made or historic or economic, and the cycles of development, redevelopment, demolition, and violence. Water pressure always had a role in thinking about that, for me, particularly as it relates to the Western United States. We thought about some of those themes really early on, but with each installment of “The Drumfire” we were able to explore a different territory sonically. Once we really approached this material in Murderer’s Bar, it built on the other works, both visually and sonically.
Deantoni Parks: It is built on what we’ve done previously by really playing the line between Foley and composition. We like to blur that so it’s not outright obvious and you start to see the subliminal qualities over time. This is the most orchestral out of the collection, where the sound design was all to mimic an orchestra in flow state. We didn’t start with narration or notation. I was just reading what Lucy placed on film in a way where the music was just there to support it, but also suggest identities at certain points. We’re still blurring the line, even in Murderer’s Bar. It’s almost the inverse of an orchestral piece. We wrote a piece that was then gutted and inverted to just reflect this chaotic and indeterministic style of water. It’s gonna be fun presenting that live with a small group of strings and percussion and clarinets and winds to replicate this live and in real time. We’re building that out right now, and it’s the most overtly classical out of the whole collection of score.
Raven: It’s interesting what you said about it having a kind of inverse relationship to orchestral music because, as you noted, there was no notation to begin with. You are working on a kind of notation for other people to be able to get involved. There’s a sort of retroactive insertion of that process, even though, as I understand it, the notation is gonna be a little bit unconventional.
Parks: Only because we are trying to create a graphic score, and there’s a time code involved.
When it comes to collaborating, do you often work in an improvisational way?
Parks: I wouldn’t say improv. It’s still a composition. It is a bit of a design process. We’re building things, throwing things out, keeping things. We’re really communicating the whole way through.
Raven: For each piece, we end up developing a verbal language to reflect what the song language of the piece is going to be. Having worked together over these last years, that process gets more refined, but I think also in certain ways is reinvented from project to project. That’s been one of the really exciting parts about working together.
Parks: Early on, we established an ethos where we’re a band. It set the tone for how we’ve been operating and creating.
How are you thinking about staging Murderer’s Bar in Aspen?
Raven: Its main life has been as an indoor installation. In Aspen, the screen is going to be about twice as wide and thus, twice as tall. It’s quite massive, staged among a row of Aspen trees. The vision was to do something we haven’t had the opportunity to do, which is to stage the sound live with an ensemble.
Parks: We have a great group of musicians coming with AIR. [The Aspen performance is produced in collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival and School.] Right now, they’re spending time with the film and getting familiar with the language.
Have you ever done something like that before with other musicians involved in a live orchestration?
Parks: Yes, I have a project called Procession. I actually did it with Hanna Benn, a fantastic composer. We did it with a small kind of chamber ensemble, which is not far from this setup here. We performed in Western Australia, but we also did one or two shows in the States. That’s the latest close situation to this one, but this is super unique because of the way it was composed and the way that we’re all going to have to rise up to what was created in the score. I think we’re going to be able to do that.
Lucy, much of your work engages with the American West. Aspen is a unique place to put forth work in that vein.
Raven: I’ve long imagined “The Drumfire” presented outside at night, and this will be the first time actually seeing that at scale. Seeing the monumentality of that on this ranch in Aspen will be pretty interesting. It’s got all these Aspen trees. It’s looking at this massive mountain, Pyramid Peak. There’s a river running through it. There’s a giant irrigation pipe along the meadow where everyone’s sitting.
Aspen has such a rich history. It’s got an extreme altitude. It has an extreme economy. It also has all of this natural beauty all around it. It’s a version of a place in the West that’s a nucleus for all of the contradictions that I hope become present through the work.
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