The world seen from above… Like Drive-by, but from the air.
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Promised Land
Go to video page…: Promised LandPromised Land, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death. California, 2020.
Promised Land probably comes closest to summarizing a lot of what I ambivalently feel about humans and the Californian deserts, and it does it to a gorgeous soundtrack by local Bay Area industrial ambient noise band (and personal friends) Relay For Death. It’s also my longest video, and was shot in a bunch of locations stretching from east of Amboy, CA, in the Mojave Desert, through the Trona area, to the northern bits of California’s Owens Valley during the Covid era. I spent a lot of time thinking very broadly about where I was going to shoot before I went out and just did it over a week or so of shooting, but (of course) I mostly ended up making it up as I went along, using all the bits of the Mojave and the Owens Valley, etc., I’ve grown so familiar with over the last several decades. I didn’t mean to make it this long when I started it, but there was a lot of footage that sort of flowed naturally together, and the soundtrack — Relay For Death’s “Intone The Morph Orb” — turned out to make the length just right.
Soundtrack: Relay For Death, “Intone The Morph Orb”, © Relay For Death, 2019.
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Lone Star
Go to video page…: Lone StarLone Star, a video by Hamish Reid;
soundtrack: Blood Count (Billy Strayhorn), performed by Duke Ellington.The old Lone Star concrete plant, West Oakland, California, from above in 2023.
A video shot in 2023 above and around the old (but still active) Lone Star concrete plant in West Oakland. Like thousands of other people, I’ve driven past this strange-looking and seemingly on-the-verge-of-decrepit building regularly over the decades, and always wanted to capture how it both fits into and stands out from its industrial surroundings. I used the beautiful Billy Strayhorn composition “Blood Count” (as performed by Duke Ellington) for the soundtrack — I’ve had that tune rattling around in my mind for a long time waiting for something like this where I (obviously) want to make some sort of contrast with the familiar beaten-up old facade being swooped slowly around.
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Over Owens Lake
Go to video page…: Over Owens LakeOver Owens Lake, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death. Owens Lake, California, 2024.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Owens Lake in California’s Owens Valley was a large 100 square mile blue-water saline desert lake fed by mountain streams and rivers. Then Los Angeles’s thirst took over, and as part of the California Water Wars, by the 1930’s the Owens Valley had been bled dry to help feed Los Angeles’s relentless expansion (LA is about 175 miles to the south).
As a result, Owens Lake was turned into a toxic dust bowl, with alkali dust storms blowing up from the dry lake bed. By 2013 it was the largest single source of dust pollution in the US. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) has lately been forced by legal action to try to mitigate the worst effects of its hundred years of deliberate neglect. The LADWP’s attempts don’t appear to have a lot of effect, and have resulted in bizarre landscapes in and around the lake.
I first saw what was left of Owens Lake in the late 1980’s, I think, when it was much worse than it is now — the LADWP mitigation efforts over the last few years have had some impact on air and ground quality, I guess — but even still, the current state of Owens Lake generally has to be seen to be believed. There’s really no lake left, just various expanses of flat dusty poisonous wasteland, with, to the LADWP’s tiny credit, pockets of green here and there where birds seem to be thriving in the (tiny) wetlands again (the restored bits are maybe 1% of the original lake’s area, I believe). I’ve long felt a stupidly burning desire to show the world (or Californians, at least) what the lake really looks like, to show a view that’s generally hidden from the public (you’re only allowed on a tiny, very closely-curated bit of the old lake nowadays; the rest if off-limits by order of the LADWP). So here’s my attempt to give you some idea what’s behind the wire fences and “Trespassing Prohibited” signs.
This video was taken from above and shows the bizarre landscape that’s the result of the LADWP’s mitigation efforts — a bunch of things like sprinklers or ditches or weird little islands in shallow ponds of strangely-colored water, or matting, or small flooded areas. Everything you see in this video should be under water — a lot of (mostly blue) water.
Soundtrack © Relay For Death; used by permission (despite YouTube’s stupid content ID flagging this as a copyright hit…).
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Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)
Go to video page…: Water Park (Post-Apocalyptic Version)Water Park, a video by Hamish Reid; soundtrack by Relay For Death. The derelict Rock-A-Hoola water park in the middle of the Mojave Desert, east of Barstow, California, 2020-2023, with a post-apocalyptic Industrial soundtrack by Relay For Death.
This place has always fascinated me over the decades — it used to be an actual water park, big water slides and pools and all, right there next to Interstate 15 in the middle of the boiling hot, stone dry Mojave Desert, a little east of Barstow, California. I remember it being full of people… sometimes. Other times it was closed. It had a troubled history, and has been derelict continuously now for many years. Naturally it’s been heavily graffitied and there’s always someone strolling furtively around in the ruins taking photos (I’ve even seen self-consciously Punk fashion shoots there) or doing donuts on the broken concrete; it’s a real ruins porn magnet for more serious photographers. This is my contribution to the genre, done over a couple of years and a few of my own furtive run-and-gun sessions…
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Machine Mood 6: Siding
Go to video page…: Machine Mood 6: SidingMachine Mood 6: Siding; video by Hamish Reid, sounds by Relay For Death taken from “Mutual Consuming”, used by permission. Both a Fly-By and a Machine Mood… with this one I wanted a wall of sound effect, and I think I got it. I reused some older RFD stuff and added the voice of a local Latino street preacher way down in the mix, and, along with the short clip of a lonely desert railroad siding I’ve wanted to do exactly this to for maybe five years, here it is.
There’s a manipulated Ultra-High-Glare version as well that more effectively conveys the stinging washed-out desert light that’s the reality in places like this, but it loses the detailed colors I like so much in the original. Maybe I’ll put it up some day as an alternative version (I don’t know).
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Train
Go to video page…: TrainTrain: a video by Hamish Reid. A Fly-By I made recently from a raw clip I actually took a few years ago (2020) in the Mojave desert. The soundtrack’s an excerpt from György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, performed by Cappella Amsterdam & Daniel Reuss (2008). The soundtrack’s supposed to give the whole thing an ethereal tinge as a counter to the more angular and rough surfaces, colours, and geometries of the train and its surroundings, but I could have gone the other way instead, and tried a much more Industrial track (from the usual suspects) before I settled on Lux Aeterna (one of my fave Ligeti pieces).
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Unnatural Landscapes 1: Lake
Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 1: LakeUnnatural Landscapes 1: Lake — a video by Hamish Reid. The first in a new series, Unnatural Landscapes, which focuses on California and Nevada landscapes typically scarred by (or at least deeply affected by) human work. In this case, it’s my old favourite, Owens Lake (with the LADWP playing its usual role of walk-on villain) and some unusually difficult-to-decode artificial landforms. The wonderful soundtrack is a collaboration with Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe), an old friend of mine in Australia, who’s basically responsible for all the music in this and most of the rest of the current series. Yes, some of this footage has appeared before, but I wanted to reuse it in a different sort of (dreamier) setting — and with a very different soundtrack (thanks Garry!) — so here it is.
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Unnatural Landscapes 2: Quarry
Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 2: QuarryUnnatural Landscapes 2: Quarry — a video by Hamish Reid. Number two in the Unnatural Landscapes series, a short overhead view of a quarry or open cut mine in a volcanic landscape done in California during 2025. As with most of the other videos in the series, the soundtrack’s by my friend Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe) in Sydney.
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Unnatural Landscapes 4: Lakebed
Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 4: LakebedUnnatural Landscapes 4: Lakebed — a video by Hamish Reid. Another Unnatural Landscape, another Owens Valley fly-by… definitely a more languorous take on the subject than most of my jeremiads about the LADWP, but still intended to hit home (albeit softly). As with most Unnatural Landscapes, the soundtrack’s by Garry Manley (Tactics, Popular Mechanics, Saturday Maybe).
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Unnatural Landscapes 5: Salt Flats
Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 5: Salt FlatsUnnatural Landscapes 5: Salt Flats — a video by Hamish Reid Built from footage I took on a trip to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah early Spring, 2024, and continuing a fascination I have with vehicle tracks carved into desert landscapes. In this case those tracks are hard to miss (I wanted to call this video NASCAR Lines, but I thought no one would get it), but I very nearly did miss them due to the terrible weather while I was in the area (it snowed on me at least once a day, and rained about half the time, and the wind was fierce). I need to go back out there and do it properly again. This is also so far the only Unnatural Landscapes to use a soundtrack that isn’t by Garry Manley — instead, it’s an old fave of mine, John Adams’s China Gates (performed by Nicolas Hodges), which I’ve wanted to use for something like this for a long time. And no, the clip’s not done in monochrome (as is obvious towards the end); the Flats are just like that when the skies are unbrokenly grey and rainy…
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Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road)
Go to video page…: Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road)Unnatural Landscapes 6: Desert Sunrise (Trona Road) — a video by Hamish Reid. A very smoky sunrise captured from above off the Trona Road on my way from Barstow to Trona way back in 2020. It took me years to get around to editing this footage up into a finished clip, but I’ve wanted to get the combination of soft early morning light (with the smoke from the bush fires in another part of the state making itself felt even here) and a badly scarred desert landscape criss-crossed by ATV and other tracks. As usual, Garry Manley’s soundtrack really helps make this clip work.