A desert storm comes to Natasha Marin first through scent. “The creosote bushes, they emit that special oil,” she says. Color is next: After an enveloping darkness and deluge, out come “the oranges and purples, layers of different shades,” ending in a startling burst of sunshine. The musician then translates all she has sensed into electronic sound: an underlying ominous, repetitive bass progression, followed by plunked-out individual notes that grow wild as the dynamics rise. Ascending and descending violin scales add a shower of chaos. When the sun pops out, the sound resolves in a shimmering major key.
“Storm” is one of the mesmerizing tracks from Marin’s instrumental album Songs of the Desert, her sonic interpretation of the California desert she now calls home.
“I love Joshua Tree because it is so moody,” she says. “The storms are epic.”
Marin and her husband, actor-comedian-art collector Cheech Marin, married in 2009 and have lived in the desert part time for about seven years, dividing time between L.A. and Joshua Tree. The area’s gnarled trees, errant winds, glittery dark skies, and otherworldly geological features are her musical muses.
Marin, a classically trained pianist, has a firm foundation and training in the traditional canon, with recordings and performances of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, et al., a key part of her repertoire. Songs of the Desert is her first electronic recording, and she is particularly proud of the album, which was submitted for Grammy Award consideration in the Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album category.
In her native Russia, Marin attended a music school for gifted children, and although she followed a traditional curriculum, she found ways to be creative — and incorporate nature. The first piece she composed, in elementary school, she says, was “a suite about mice and cats.”
She attended St. Petersburg State Conservatory in Russia, then studied at UCLA and USC, where she earned a doctorate of musical arts, majoring in piano performance with minors in early music (she also plays the harpsichord), electroacoustic composition, and music education.
“Electronic music can be literally shapeless, with no development or continuity,” she says. “With a lot of ambient music, people just click a button and use some pre-made patch for a 10-minute track, upload it, and there you go. My electronic sound is completely at the service of composition techniques that have been developed over centuries.”
Her philosophy of music gives sound both mass and life. “All humans have the capacity for music-making, and our material for what we make is sound,” she says. Acoustic and electronic sounds, she says, follow different trajectories. “Acoustic sound is born from silence, then develops, dies out, and disappears into silence. It’s like a metaphor for human life.” Electronic sound, however, produces the opposite effect: “We’re able to manipulate every aspect of the sound. You’re like a god, and your sound doesn’t have to die. It’s taking us into a kind of post-human phase.”
Marin pondered creating an electronic album around the time she and Cheech, during the pandemic, spent most of their time in Joshua Tree, and as she searched for a theme, her surroundings were a natural inspiration.
“Every aspect of life [in the High Desert] has something to offer,” she says. “The calm, the stargazing, the wind, all the seasons.”
She notes that the title is not Songs from the Desert but rather Songs of the Desert. “It has a different feeling,” she says. “Like I’m in this location and sending you something, with the desert riding through me.
“Acoustic sound is born from silence, then develops, dies out, and disappears into silence. It’s like a metaphor for human life.”
The first piece she composed for the album, “Integratron,” was inspired by a visit to the Integratron in nearby Landers. The white domed attraction, listed in 2019 on the National Register of Historic Places, was created by George Van Tassel in the 1950s, supposedly after extraterrestrials instructed him to do so. Located at the intersection of three underground rivers and three geomagnetic lines, the wooden structure was supposed to allow for time travel and human rejuvenation.
“I’m not sure about the time travel,” Marin says, “but it’s definitely healing.” During sound baths inside the structure, where a practitioner creates resonant sounds, “you feel that sound and vibration going through your body.”
“Integratron” is the most complex piece on the album, she says, made entirely from custom patches, user-created settings used in music software. “Integratron” integrates water-like sounds (to represent the rivers) with chirps, beeps, and bells creating alien background voices.
For another track on the album, “Flying Over,” Marin viewed drone footage of the desert that exposed her to the area’s expansiveness and changing landscapes, from fields to mountains and trees. “You feel you’re on a different planet altogether,” Marin says. As she composed the music, she thought of the phrase “as the crow flies,” and how she would see the space if she flew alongside a bird.
Other tracks on the album include “Awakening,” “Daydreaming,” and “Evening Star.” The album is only 31 minutes long but takes listeners through a full spectrum of desert impressions.
Marin continues to build a diary of desert sounds. Her next album, however, might explore Joshua Tree’s human-driven oddities. She is obsessed, for example, with the King of the Hammers off-road race in nearby Johnson Valley. “We were given a ride in one of those trucks, which was awesome,” she says. “It just calls for dubstep.”
