The highest mountains are no closer than the deepest valleys to the sky. — Wislawa Szymborska
The song “midnight mesa” came into this world in one of our get-togethers. We all had a few days in between obligations and found ourselves at Eli’s. We’d plunk around with ideas and coffee during the day, then go driving and walking around the desert at night, musing about constellations and Native American spirits.
Arizona’s nights hold spectacles far more grand than its sun-baked days. The infinite tapestry of stars makes you feel closer to the sky. Under that infinite tapestry of stars, it’s like the highest peaks and lowest valleys are all the same distance from the sky; everything feels equally close to the sky. Ancient mesas and mountains become silent, majestic sentinels. Looming, watching. In the distance, Phoenix was like a shimmering constellation on the horizon, far enough away to keep our night sky pure. We’d try to bring a little of that magic back into Eli’s little studio.
One night, while we all still had the stars in our eyes, Bly grabbed some shitty speaker and put on some beats she had been playing with. Eli found a little red boombox and plugged in some of his own beats from across the room. After some stops and starts, they kinda sounded cool together. I sat down at an old baby grand that was missing a few keys and started this chord progression I had been following around the desert. Bly sat behind a little electric piano and found her inner Herbie Hancock. Eli started humming what he heard as strings, but what I heard as a solo Gregorian chant.
Early on, there were french horn parts and the well-timed ding of a toaster, but they were darlings we had to kill for the shadow version. A friend heard an early mix and said it sounded like the theme song to a detective cartoon. That led to ideation around a cartoon mystery set in the desert, which led to the “midnight mesa” video, a little fable about vanishing and returning.
Because the song felt like a transmission you stumble on at midnight, we felt the video should feel found—not engineered. We wanted a deliberate step away from slick, keeping wabi-sabi as our guiding light. Instead of chasing realism, we used Sora kind of like a charcoal stick. Smudgy, suggestive, imperfect. We leaned into the wobble, prompt drift, and fuzzy edges, so the flicker and jitter are part of the design. The result feels like a 1950s cocktail cartoon found in a time capsule buried in the desert.
—Moss
PS The b-side of “midnight mesa” single is “arizuma”, the first song birthed by Foulk Davis. Here, Bly tells the story of how that song came to be.
