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.