American Memory (Imperial Valley) (Collector's Edition)

The Collector's Edition comprises an archival dossier containing:

- Ten 'revisioned' A5 reprographic prints from the FSA archive.
- A typed and initialled colophon page, detailing CF Moore's journey in southern California.
- Five index cards with typed excerpts from CF Moore's field journal.
- A mounted excerpt from a 1953 map of the Acolita Sand Hills.
- A typed excerpt from James Rusling's 1877 description of the southern California desert.
- Limited edition of 10.

 

*

 

- View photographs of this edition here -

American Memory is the sixth album in the Imperial Valley series of recordings by semi-fictional archivist CF Moore. Following last year's Imperial Valley, V (released to coincide with the US elections and warning about the dangers of despotism), American Memory presents itself as a kind of imaginary postmortem field journal:

​

“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...”

​

American Memory is available as a limited edition audio cassette published by CF Moore's Folded Time imprint. There is also an extremely limited Collector's Edition, which includes an additional cassette of a new, exclusive album-length recording, Remote etheric dowsing, Acolita Sand Hills, December 31st, 2024. Both cassettes in the Collector's Edition feature individually typed labels and are recorded directly from the masters in realtime. As is now customary with Folded Time, the Collector's Edition features an archival dossier of material relating to the history of Imperial County. Each of these paper artifacts is unique, being either individually typed by CF Moore or printed using old, failing reprographic equipment, which produces aberrations that further transform the image.