“Salton Sea Echo” is a modern-day requiem: a sculptural/sound installation set to progressively fail. Its main function is to publicly mourn/honor recently departed friends from the Bombay Beach community—the Salton Sea’s progressive shrinking functioning primarily as a backdrop.

“Salton Sea Echo” is a sound installation that opened at Sunset during the first day of the 2022 Bombay Beach Biennale. It was the last act of a candlelit memorial service dedicated to El and Shig, two artists who lived in Bombay Beach, CA and who both committed suicide during the COVID-19 lockdown.

“Salton Sea Echo” is a sort of “requiem” for them, as well as a requiem for a shrinking, toxic sea that is only awaiting for its rebirth.

The installation was welded in site by Bombay Beach-based steel artist Sean Guerrero. It employs as sound materials a number of recordings of El’s voice taped by her boyfriend Cody Orrell, which I edited and mixed with an orchestral composition of mine (Recitativo e Aria, 2000).

This work is conceived with in mind the eventuality of a counterpoint of these recorded sounds + mechanical sounds (the installation includes two wind chimes and one Tibetan bell) + sounds of the environment (wind, waves, birds).

At any given point, all (or none) may be present.

The solar-powered speaker can be activated by pressing and holding the button to the right on the speaker’s unit. This installation is designed so that the viewer may need to get both feet wet in order to activate the speaker sound. This design aims at creating an uncomfortable tension: the viewer/listener would have to physically come to terms with the magnitude of Salton Sea’s environmental catastrophe.