Washoe

Most of the sounds used in this track were recorded in Bodie, a former gold mining centre east of the Sierra Nevada that turned into a ghost town. Bodie, located in a very remote valley, became a boomtown in the late 1870s with a population of approximately 8500 people and more than 2000 buildings including 60 saloons and dance halls and several hundred people from China who created their own town within the city. However, more promising mining booms happened elsewhere and so five years later Bodie’s population had decreased to about 1500 people. 

"Washoe" makes use of the sounds of several artefacts, former inhabitants have left behind in Bodie: rusty tools and machines, barrels and broken furniture – objects that turn into haunting instruments when used at night. The track’s overall atmosphere is a transposition of the high noon feeling of the past when Bodie was so lawless, a brochure of the California State Parks knows, that in 1881 Reverend F.M. Warrington described it as "a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion".