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Artist
Imperial Valley
12+ albums
dark ambient
about
Imperial Valley is a project by British artist, writer, and composer Richard Skelton . His work often evolves from sustained immersion in specific environments and wide-ranging research incorporating toponymy and language, archaeology and geology, folklore and myth. Imperial Valley, California, was the site of many labour camps for migrant workers escaping the dust-bowl famines of the 1930s. Some of these camps were documented by photographer Dorothea Lange. Her 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson at the Nipomo camp in California came to symbolise the plight of migrant farmers across the country. The ‘Imperial Valley’ project began in 2020 as a series of soundworks inspired by Lange’s photographs. They were described as ‘auditory nitrates after the work of Dorothea Lange’. Originally released via the cult underground label Other Forms of Consecrated Life, Imperial Valley migrated to Skelton’s own Folded Time imprint in 2022, allowing him to expand the project to incorporate his own ‘revisioned’ editions of Lange’s public domain photographs. Reproductions of Lange’s work were rephotographed and then superimposed to create ghostly double exposures that evoke the foreboding sense of unease of the Imperial Valley recordings. Two special editions have now been released that collate these experiments along with found texts from the 1930s, collaged from FSA reports, labour camp newsletters, posters and broadsides. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Common
top songs
1
American Memory, I
432American Memory, II
383‘This machine and power age’
344After the tent revival, 5pm, Mar 7, 1937
325Sand Hills outside Mesquite, heading south, 7am, Jan 21, 1934
306To safeguard a nation
277Towards the gold rock, Hedges, 4.20pm, Oct 29, 1929
268Labor camp, north-east of Calexico, April 18, 1938
259Tortuga, towards Salvation Pass, Aug 7, 1939
2510Outlook over Graffiti Mesa, 11am, Feb 2, 1944
24
