“In the desert I am reminded of something quite different — the bleak, thin-textured work of men like Berg, Schoenberg, Ernst Krenek, Webern and the American, Elliott Carter. Quite by accident, no doubt, although both Schoenberg and Krenek lived part of their lives in the Southwest, their music comes closer than any other I know to representing the apartness, the otherness, the strangeness of the desert. Like certain aspects of this music, the desert is also a-tonal, cruel, clear, inhuman, neither romantic nor classical, motionless and emotionless, at one and the same time — another paradox — both agonized and deeply still.” – Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. (I have tried over the years to imagine an appropriate soundtrack for Death Valley, Arizona’s Painted Desert, Utah’s Canyonlands, and some other of my favorite places in the Southwest, indeed the world. I go back to feedback-heavy and industrial types of rock; Abbey has the right idea.)