The official soundtrack of summer just dropped, courtesy of Tucson Water.
The city utility and its first-ever artist-in-residence have released “Monsoon Mixtape,” an online collection of six original songs by local musicians designed to welcome and celebrate our summer storms.
The compilation, now streaming for free on YouTube, 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’s 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 “Heavy Falling” and “Hallelujah Havoc.”
“The monsoon rains are a communal experience of water,” said Tucson Water artist-in-residence Alexandra “Alex!” Jimenez, who commissioned the diverse slate of mixtape musicians.
Jimenez also spent last summer collecting field recordings of monsoon storms around Tucson, 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 Tucson Water artist-in-residence Alex! Jimenez for her Monsoon Mixtape and Chubasco Channel audio art projects.
The mixtape, with the tagline “Calling the Rain Through Sound,” debuted on Tucson Water’s YouTube channel on June 17, the day before the local office of the National Weather Service recorded the season’s first monsoon moisture.
Jimenez created the animations that play along with the songs and the soundscape — 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’s missing is the smell of wet desert.
“When I saw the outcome, my heart soared,” said Kelly Wiehe, who oversees the artist-in-residence program as project manager for Tucson Water’s Public Information and Conservation Office. “She hit the nail so much on the head of what this was supposed to be. There’s so much community in this.”
Tucson Water celebrated the release of the Chubasco Channel and the “Monsoon Mixtape” 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 “complementary experience” to last Friday’s Día de San Juan Fiesta, the annual celebration of the start of monsoon season hosted by Mission Garden and the Menlo Park Neighborhood Association.
Tucson Water's artist-in-residence Alex! Jimenez created the cover art for "Monsoon Mixtape," a new six-song compliation of original music by Tucson artists. Jimenez also commissioned the musicians and helped produce the online mixtape.
Wiehe acknowledged how “totally unusual” it is for a public utility to have its own artist-in-residence, but Tucson Water saw it as a unique opportunity to engage with its customers and neighbors.
“We wanted Alex! to help us think of new ways to excite the public,” she said.
The utility is especially eager to improve its engagement and collaboration with residents on Tucson’s 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 Tucson 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 Tucson Water and three other utilities nationwide in the fall of 2020 for its inaugural Water, Arts, and Culture Accelerator program.
Jimenez said she applied because she values the desert and shares the Water Alliance’s 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.
“This is totally my project,” she said. “It’s a community that I’m a part of and I get to make art about.”
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.
“I had no preconceived ideas. It kind of all unfolded,” she said.
The region’s record-dry monsoon of 2020 weighed on Jimenez’s 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.
“Every storm that came I thought it might be the last,” she said.
That led to a few unexpected experiences, even for a Tucson 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’t even know existed in the Tucson area.
She also encountered less magical things — like the urban drone of airplanes and air-conditioning units — 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, the Chubasco Channel is more than just soothing background noise to be enjoyed by expatriate desert dwellers. It’s a historical record of a weather phenomenon that could be upended by human-caused climate change.
“It 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,” she explained.
