Staging Murderers Bar
by Mariana Fernández

A monumental curved screen rises from a high alpine meadow beneath Pyramid Peak, where Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar (2025) loops across its surface as spectators slowly gather under the darkening sky. Below it, a small ensemble of strings and woodwinds tunes alongside composer and percussionist Deantoni Parks in preparation for the evening’s performance.

Murderers Bar (2025) is the final installment of Raven’s Drumfire series (2021–25), an ambitious multiyear body of work examining how large-scale engineering projects in earth, air, and water continually reconfigure the landscape of the American West. Centered on the removal of Copco 1 on Northern California’s Klamath River, part of the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history, Murderers Bar examines the reciprocal histories of infrastructure, ecology, and image-making that have shaped the region. In its site-specific staging in Aspen, the temporary timber structure supporting the screen enters the meadow—another engineered intervention, built by Colorado timber framers to stand for a single night before being dismantled and its lumber returned to circulation.

Sitting beneath the electric glow of a full moon, we begin with a jolt. The film’s opening frame flips once, twice, before coming into a glide just above the surface of a reservoir. A low electronic drone swells underneath, mingling with the sounds of the orchestra settling into the performance. Raven rarely uses establishing shots; she drops us directly into constructed environments built in unexpected cuts, rotating aerial perspectives, and alien soundscapes that subvert the drama and grandeur of her lush images.

Deantoni Parks, Raven’s collaborator across the entire Drumfire series, here composes with drones, percussion, electronics, and prolonged transitions that stretch and blur the sounds of a landscape in transition. As the camera plunges beneath the reservoir’s surface to reveal an abstracted underwater topography, for instance, abrasive, sandpaper-like textures circle the meadow through the quadraphonic speaker system, as though the audience were dragging its ears across the bottom of the riverbed. The sequence foregrounds mediation at every level: a submerged landscape rendered through digital animation, translated into sound through electronic processing, and experienced through the acoustics of the open meadow, where pockets of reverb bounce from the surrounding trees and dissipate into the evening air.

The dam arrives as an overwhelming mass of concrete pressing down on the river below, its immense weight matched by a melody that climbs toward a dizzying crescendo before falling away into silence. Stretched across the towering screen, its scale dwarfs the audience, a feeling of human insignificance heightened as tiny figures emerge on screen, descend the dam’s face, and disappear into tunnels to prepare the demolition charges. The score recedes, leaving only machinery, distorted voices, and the cavernous acoustics of concrete echoing across the meadow. Raven’s cut to another group of onlookers scattered along the opposite hillside folds our own spectatorship into the scene: one audience watches another, both gathered in the landscape, both suspended in anticipation of an engineered event, both waiting for the blast.

When it finally comes, the subwoofers send a low shock through the ground before the blast reaches the ear. Water and earth erupt simultaneously as a century of accumulated sediment is expelled through the tunnel in a single explosive surge. The surrounding aspens seem to tremble in the meadow, and on screen, dark silt surges into the river, roiling its clear waters. At that moment, the string ensemble enters. “Be the crest of the waterline as it touches dry objects,” Parks’s show notes direct. The musicians follow the advancing edge of the current, sounding the river’s encounter with rocks and debris. 

The entire performance hinges on the unusual coexistence of moving image and live music. Parks’s musical score is pulled out of the film’s soundtrack and reconstituted as a live performance that unfolds alongside a meticulously choreographed environment of prerecorded explosions, machinery, water, Foley, and electronic textures. The ensemble moves through this shifting sonic field guided by timecode and performance instructions, which function as a blueprint for how the music should feel (in that space, in that moment), rather than just how it should sound. The result is a continually shifting conversation between live musicians, moving image, prerecorded sound, and the acoustics of the high alpine meadow, all giving four-dimensionality to the changing materiality of water, sediment, and concrete on screen.

Experienced beneath an open sky, the projected landscape takes on a new immediacy. It’s seductive—sometimes too much so—to see the river wind through the undulating hills and sequoia and redwood forests of Northern California under the gaze of a helicopter. The sequence brings surveillance, pursuit, into tension with poetry and beauty, as well as with the cinematic grammar of the Western, where landscape is staged as both spectacle and target and sometimes site of ruination. In this film-performance, those histories unfold within another American tradition: the communal spectacle of gathering outdoors around a projected image. It recalls drive-in theaters, baseball stadium scoreboards after dark, summer music festivals, where the act of viewing extends beyond the screen to encompass architecture, landscape, weather, and the gathered audience.

Raven’s imaging of the West belongs to this history of spectacular looking, but repeatedly frustrates the mastery that those views seem to offer. Her camera refuses any stable horizon or fixed vantage point from which to survey the landscape as it carries us out over the Pacific Ocean before veering sharply back upstream. The music from the string quintet ends in a distorted crunch as color drains into black and white and we are thrust upriver through churning water, the camera surfacing only briefly for air before being swallowed again by the current. Below the surface, sound compresses into a relentless hydraulic roar. Water, debris, and scattered flecks of light churn across the frame, reducing the image to a turbulent field of shifting abstractions.

When at last we break the surface, the cello drone reappears. The dam returns with it, but transformed. No longer an imposing feat of engineering, it hangs in the frame as a strange grayscale relic already receding into history. As the camera lifts above it, color gradually returns—albeit muted—to reveal a drained reservoir and miles and miles of mudflats cut through by the river’s new path. A faint bass drum registers beneath the moving image like tectonic movement. Then the camera accelerates, flips, and throws us back to the beginning, where the familiar drone folds back into the orchestra’s opening tuning, the temporary screen into timber, and the river into its looping course. 

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Lucy Raven and Deantoni Parks’s Murderers Bar premiered at the T-Lazy-7 Ranch on July 28, 2026, as part of AIR 2026: Figures in a Landscape. Learn more about the performance here.

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