American Memory by Imperial Valley

It’s 2025. A fledgling dictator is seated in the Oval Office. There is talk of trade wars, of mass deportations, of reduced reproductive rights for women. In southern California a lone field recordist roams the Mexican border, cataloging the sounds of the desert. Glamis, Acolita Sand Hills, ghosts of Obregon.

Outside Yuma the power lines hum a lonesome ditch-bank blues. On the dustroads off the I-8 the car’s radio skips between stations. Amid the music and the static there are voices from a different century, but the fears they speak of are timeless. Isolation, deprivation, powerlessness...

[ Recorded by CF Moore, winter 2024/5 ]

Tracklist

1.	American Memory, I	22:00

2.	American Memory, II	22:00

Credits

released March 1, 2025

Cover image: “Untitled photo, possibly related to: Sonoma County, California.” by Russell Lee, 1942. LC-USF34- 071313-D.

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[ Folded Time | 1st Mar 2025 | FT/004 ]

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“An alternate reading of US musical history, soundtracking the memory holes and totalitarian creep with blown-out bluesy post-rock, sandy drones, field recordings and radio excerpts. Like Terrence Malick’s ‘Days of Heaven’ soundtracked by Dylan Carlson or ‘Dead Man’-era Neil Young.” (Boomkat)

“Seemingly without hope… a tapestry of voices in fog… the drone, like a buzzing in the mind. By continuing to give his narrators a voice, he highlights the need to listen to today’s lost, indigent and poor.” (A Closer Listen)

“Those documentary voices grant fragmentary glimpses of gritty truths and harsh realities, suspended — it seems — within the haze of a collective hallucination.” (The Wire)

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