Imperial Valley, I - IV (2020-2024)

This quartet of albums is a series of ‘imaginal field recordings’ of Depression-era Imperial Valley, California, USA. These ‘dust-bowl tonalities’ 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’.

Imperial Valley itself 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. Lange’s work has served as an ongoing inspiration for Skelton — so much so that he terms these recordings ‘auditory nitrates after the work of Dorothea Lange’.

The first two albums in the series were published via cult underground label Other Forms of Consecrated Life. The entire series is now available on Skelton’s own Folded Time imprint.