Daniel Menche’s newest album, Rhyolite Ghosts, emerged from his first artist residency at Goldwell Open Air Museum’s Red Barn Arts Center in Rhyolite, Nevada, just outside of Death Valley National Park.
This page documents Daniel Menche’s first artist residency at Goldwell Open Air Museum’s Red Barn Arts Center in Rhyolite, Nevada. The residency led to Menche’s release Rhyolite Ghosts and also became part of In Relative Obscurity III, Brian Gibson’s ongoing audio visual series rooted in improvisation, field recording, and site specific work in the Mojave Desert just outside Death Valley.
It offers fuller context for why Menche came to Goldwell, how the work developed on site, and why the Red Barn continues to matter as a space for experimental artists. It also includes the related sunrise recording made by Gibson and c. under the name Obscured Relativity, a 30 minute guitar and field recording composition organized into five movements within a single continuous piece.
The Red Barn Arts Center
The Red Barn matters not only because of its location, but because it is genuinely usable as a sound space. Donated by Barrick Gold, it stands as a practical example of patronage that continues to shape artistic activity in Rhyolite. Its concrete floor, open structure, and weathered tin roof create a strong acoustic environment for musicians and sound artists.
The Red Barn also sits within Goldwell Open Air Museum’s broader stewardship of Albert Szukalski’s legacy. Szukalski and his circle helped establish the desert as a place for experimentation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the nonprofit that followed has worked to preserve that history while remaining open to artist driven projects in the present. When Brian Gibson joined Goldwell, reviving residency activity at the site was a recurring topic, and early conversations with Suzanne helped strengthen his view of the Red Barn as a place where artists could work with unusual freedom, concentration, and distance from mainstream visual influence.
How the Residency Came Together
The residency did not happen by accident. Gibson had met Daniel Menche for coffee two years earlier during Menche’s previous time recording near Death Valley, and it was then that he first told him about Goldwell Open Air Museum and the Red Barn. In January 2026, Menche asked Gibson about the possibility of performing at the museum, and Gibson then prepared a formal proposal for the Goldwell board that explained who Menche was, who he was, what In Relative Obscurity had already become through earlier work at the Red Barn, and what the expected outcomes of a short residency could be.
The proposal was reviewed and approved by the board in February, making it possible for Menche to come to Rhyolite for what he later described as his first artist residency experience. That timeline was tight, but it worked. It also gave the project a useful degree of structure from the beginning. The original plan included Menche recording a minimalist release on site while Gibson documented the process and performance for the third installment of In Relative Obscurity. The proposal also identified the broader cultural value of establishing Rhyolite as a creative landmark through artist driven work at relatively low cost.
Daniel Menche in Rhyolite
Menche was an especially strong fit for the Red Barn because his work has long been shaped by direct contact with environment, material, and location. The residency proposal described this clearly, noting his long recording and touring history and his tendency to gather sound from specific places through wind, storms, water, architecture, and other site responsive methods. That approach made Rhyolite a natural extension of his practice.
What felt most distinctive during his time at Goldwell was how completely immersed he already was when filming began. His work at the Red Barn was immersive, highly textural, physical, resonant, and at key moments minimal in a way that allowed the space itself to remain audible. He seemed to disappear into the process almost immediately. By the time the others arrived, Menche was already hours into recording what would eventually become Rhyolite Ghosts.
One of the most striking setups involved a single wire stretched from the barn out toward a found chrome piece lying outside, roughly twenty to thirty feet away. Behind that, microphones were placed at a distance, creating a vast but fragile system in which tension, air, resonance, and space all became part of the composition. Menche credited Neil Young for the idea of placing microphones at such a great distance from the sound source.
He also worked with rocks, bottle elements, wind, and sustained electronic tones from his Arturia oscillator, layering these approaches into a long form record that moves through droning continuity, physical sound, and recurring tones that feel at once strange and comforting. Throughout the roughly 40 minute piece, there is a consistent tonal center and a weaving of textural sounds over warm, lingering tones.
What Took Place During the Stay
On Friday afternoon, Gibson, c., and Holly Lay arrived in Beatty, Nevada, and prepared to meet Menche at the Red Barn. The expectation had been that there would be set times and some degree of collaboration, but that assumption shifted almost immediately on arrival. Menche was already deep into the work, having tied rocks with wire and begun constructing sound setups around the space. Rather than directing the situation, the others found themselves witnessing an unfolding process that was already fully in motion, so Gibson began filming.
That first evening set the tone for the residency. Menche’s approach was loose in structure but laser focused in execution. Gibson has compared it to the kind of intense concentration that can take over when an idea is fully alive and already months in the making. Menche even remarked that he had been dreaming about this for months. Afterward, the group got pizza at a local bar in Beatty and continued talking, including conversation about Menche’s recent touring in Europe opening for Sumac and playing with Austerity Program.
The next morning, after coffee, Gibson and c. set up their guitar rigs and played at sunrise in Rhyolite. Their performance became the basis of an Obscured Relativity recording, a 30 plus minute composition built from guitar drones and field recordings captured during the set, later paired with sunrise footage from the Red Barn and broader views of the valley. Though simple in structure, the improvised drone based composition emerged boldly, with five internal movements contained within one uninterrupted recording.
The visual documentation around the residency became important in its own right. A friend, Lisa, drove out from Las Vegas with a drone to capture aerial footage. Jordan Hendricks served as videographer and conducted an interview with Menche at the end of the stay. Holly Lay documented the residency through still photography, producing vivid behind the scenes images on a quick turnaround that captured both the atmosphere of the Red Barn and the surrounding area, including buildings in Rhyolite that carry their own pop cultural associations. The proposal’s original emphasis on documentation, audio excerpts, and visual materials as part of the project’s measurable outcomes was more than fulfilled.
In Relative Obscurity III and Obscured Relativity
In Relative Obscurity was built from improvisational guitar, field recordings, video documentation, and repeated returns to Goldwell Open Air Museum’s Red Barn Arts Center in Rhyolite, Nevada. Created by Brian Gibson, the series, funded in part by the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, has grown from collaborations with local Las Vegas artists into work with experimental and avant garde musicians drawn to the possibilities of such a unique location. This residency gave In Relative Obscurity III a clearer purpose by expanding the series into a broader framework for documenting artists working directly in relation to site.
Menche’s Rhyolite Ghosts became one result of that process. The sunrise recording by Gibson and c., under the name Obscured Relativity, became another: a 30 minute guitar and field recording composition organized into five movements within one continuous piece and paired with sunrise footage from the Red Barn and the wider valley.
A Wider Context
The residency demonstrated that the Red Barn can support serious experimental work, including finished recordings, visual documentation, and public facing materials. It also reinforced Goldwell’s willingness to support artist driven projects that remain in dialogue with the site’s history and Albert Szukalski’s legacy.
The experience has already shaped what comes next. Gibson has submitted another residency proposal for late June and early July that would bring Jessica Ackerley to the Red Barn for four days to create audio and visual work informed by the environment. More broadly, the Menche residency helped clarify In Relative Obscurity as a more focused and organized series, with plans to continue proposing stays/performances such as this.
Credits
Page text by Brian Gibson
Photography by Holly Lay
Documentation developed through In Relative Obscurity III
Goldwell Open Air Museum, Red Barn Arts Center, Rhyolite, Nevada
Special thanks to Lisa Grenier for Drone Videography, Jordan Hendricks for Interview & Videography and to Goldwell Museum’s Board of Directors and to the Verbeke Foundation, for releasing that book about Albert that set me off on this whole adventure. Everyone involved really gave it their all with very little to gain. I’m hoping this project gets seen so we can do more like it in the future, I love meeting artists and documenting their first encounters with this space in Rhyolite, Nevada.