The official soundtrack of summer just dropped, courtesy of .
The city utility and its first-ever artist-in-residence have released 鈥淢onsoon Mixtape,鈥 an online collection of six original songs by local musicians designed to welcome and celebrate our summer storms.
The compilation, , covers a range of styles, including R&B, rap and electronica.
Each track incorporates the distinctive, Sonoran sounds of actual storms captured during last year鈥檚 epic monsoon season. Toads squawk, thunder rumbles, doves coo and trains wail as rain pelts down in the background of songs with such evocative titles as 鈥淗eavy Falling鈥 and 鈥淗allelujah Havoc.鈥
鈥淭he monsoon rains are a communal experience of water,鈥 said 蜜柚直播 Water artist-in-residence Alexandra 鈥淎lex!鈥 Jimenez, who commissioned the diverse slate of mixtape musicians.
Jimenez also spent last summer collecting field recordings of monsoon storms around 蜜柚直播, with the help of fellow artists Logan Phillips and Enrique Garcia Naranjo.
Those recordings, along with audio clips submitted by the community at large, have been edited together to create the Chubasco Channel, a nearly three-hour soundscape of summer rains that premiered on YouTube last month.
A still image from an animaton created by 蜜柚直播 Water artist-in-residence Alex! Jimenez for her Monsoon Mixtape and Chubasco Channel audio art projects.
The mixtape, with the tagline 鈥淐alling the Rain Through Sound,鈥 debuted on on June 17, the day before the local office of the National Weather Service recorded the season鈥檚 first monsoon moisture.
Jimenez created the animations that play along with the songs and the soundscape聽鈥 an irregular loop of clouds gathering and curtains of rain falling on a hand-drawn city skyline viewed from the top of "A" Mountain. The only thing that鈥檚 missing is .
鈥淲hen I saw the outcome, my heart soared,鈥 said Kelly Wiehe, who oversees the artist-in-residence program as project manager for 蜜柚直播 Water鈥檚 Public Information and Conservation Office. 鈥淪he hit the nail so much on the head of what this was supposed to be. There鈥檚 so much community in this.鈥
蜜柚直播 Water celebrated the release of the Chubasco Channel and the 鈥淢onsoon Mixtape鈥 with a one-time-only, site-specific art installation beneath the Cushing Street Bridge on the west bank of the Santa Cruz River last Friday.
Jimenez said the event was designed to be a 鈥渃omplementary experience鈥 to last Friday鈥檚 , the annual celebration of the start of monsoon season hosted by Mission Garden and the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association.
蜜柚直播 Water's artist-in-residence Alex! Jimenez created the cover art for "Monsoon Mixtape," a new six-song compliation of original music by 蜜柚直播 artists. Jimenez also commissioned the musicians and helped produce the online mixtape.
Wiehe acknowledged how 鈥渢otally unusual鈥 it is for a public utility to have its own artist-in-residence, but 蜜柚直播 Water saw it as a unique opportunity to engage with its customers and neighbors.
鈥淲e wanted Alex! to help us think of new ways to excite the public,鈥 she said.
The utility is especially eager to improve its engagement and collaboration with residents on 蜜柚直播鈥檚 south and west sides, where a history of contamination problems and other issues have eroded trust in the department.
Wiehe said a couple dozen artists applied for the residency. The project has been so well received, there is talk of creating a permanent artist-in-residence program of some kind at 蜜柚直播 Water, budget permitting, she said.
The current position was funded with a $20,000 matching grant from the nonprofit U.S. Water Alliance, which selected 蜜柚直播 Water and three other utilities nationwide in the fall of 2020 for its inaugural .
Jimenez said she applied because she values the desert and shares the Water Alliance鈥檚 holistic approach to resource management. But what really drew her to the residency was its emphasis on connecting with people in the neighborhoods where her family has lived for four generations.
鈥淭his is totally my project,鈥 she said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a community that I鈥檓 a part of and I get to make art about.鈥
When she was selected, the muralist and visual artist said she had no clue she would end up collecting field recordings of nature sounds and curating a music compilation.
鈥淚 had no preconceived ideas. It kind of all unfolded,鈥 she said.
The region鈥檚 record-dry monsoon of 2020 weighed on Jimenez鈥檚 mind as she set out to document the 2021 season. Early on, she said, she would race out of her house with her recorder any time it rained, just to make sure she gathered enough sound.
鈥淓very storm that came I thought it might be the last,鈥 she said.
That led to a few unexpected experiences, even for a 蜜柚直播 native who grew up playing in the bed of the Santa Cruz.
One night last year, Jimenez was recording along the river near Drexel Road when she came upon the flashes of fireflies, something she didn鈥檛 even know existed in the 蜜柚直播 area.
She also encountered less magical things聽鈥 like the urban drone of airplanes and air-conditioning units 鈥 that crept into her recordings. Some of those noises ended up in the finished soundscape, along with police sirens, cooing doves, buzzing cicadas and squawking spadefoot toads that provide a sense of place to the symphony of weather.
To Jimenez, is more than just soothing background noise to be enjoyed by expatriate desert dwellers. It鈥檚 a historical record of a weather phenomenon that could be upended by human-caused climate change.
鈥淚t was important to me to create an archive of a monsoon and to capture an experience that might become more and more rare in the future,鈥 she explained.