Imperial Valley, II

350gsm gatefold sleeve.
CDR with printed surface.
Typed information sheet.
Folded Time ephemera in manilla envelope.
Music download card.

 

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Soundcloud excerpts.

 

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Tracklisting:

 

1. Towards the gold rock, Hedges, 4.20pm, Oct 29, 1929
2. ‘Rain follows the plough’
3. Labor camp, north-east of Calexico, Apr 18, 1938
4. Folded time/sermon in the dust, ‘behold the bridegroom cometh’, 6am, May 6, 1929/79
5. Outlook over Graffiti Mesa, 11am, Feb 2, 1944
6. Tortuga, towards Salvation Pass, Aug 7, 1939
7. ‘Ditch-bank blues’
8. Approaching storm, north-west of Yuma, 8pm, Apr 14, 1945
9. ‘A thousand acres’

 

Cover image: "Imperial Valley, California. Old Mexican laborer saying 'I have worked all my life and all I have now is my broken body'" by Dorothea Lange, 1935. Library of Congress Reference: LC-USF34-001618-C. 

Second in a series of recordings for Imperial Valley, an area of Southern California that adjoins Mexico. These soundworks were assembled from public domain period recordings, ranging from TV & radio broadcasts to documentary and oral history sources. This found material was then extensively reworked and manipulated before being blended with contemporary recordings of acoustic instrumentation to create a richly layered aggregate of ‘folded time’.

Credited to CF Moore and first released on the Other Forms label on December 3, 2021, the original press release went as follows: ‘Imaginal field recordings of Depression-era Imperial Valley, CA, USA. Dust-bowl tonalities. Retrograde tape hiss. Projective ethnography. Auditory nitrates after the work of Dorothea Lange.’

Imperial Valley, II was subsequently reissued on CF Moore’s research imprint Folded Time on March 13, 2024. At the same time, due to administrative complications brought about by a move from the UK to Ireland, CF Moore was revealed to be an alias of Richard Skelton. The reissue contains the additional, previously unreleased recording, ‘A Thousand Acres’.