The Compositional Journey: How Desert Landscapes Shaped Joachim Garraud’s Latest Album The Compositional Journey: How Desert Landscapes Shaped Joachim Garraud’s Latest...

The scene opens with a vast desert landscape, dry but for a smattering of hardened shrubs. Several dirt tracks and a stark white road stretch towards parched mountains in the distance. A beat begins, a bus comes into view, and the voice of French music composer, producer, and DJ, Joachim Garraud begins the latest episode of The Artists of Sound. “It’s magic to see how you’re going to be inspired by different locations…” he says. “I have one particular sound that really inspires me. This is the silence. And here: pure silence.”

Musicians of every variety have been inspired by the spaces in which they live and work. Queen, The Rolling Stones, the Pet Shop Boys and countless others have sought out manor houses and farms in which to write. Some of the Beatles’ work was so influenced by Abbey Road Studios in London that it became part of their creative identity. Berlin had a profound impression on David Bowie in the late 1970s. Cities like New Orleans, Nashville, Havana, Kingston and Buenos Aires have been muses to so many musicians that they’ve developed their own distinctive sounds.

“The environment is a critical part of the creative process,” says Garraud. “As a musician, what and how you compose is directly influenced by your state of mind, and that state is not the same if you’re working in a busy downtown area or the middle of a desert salt lake.”

Seeking Silent Spaces

Garraud lives in Los Angeles, and has fallen in love with the landscape beyond the city: the endless nothingness that is so different from his native France. In recent months, he has spent time in the desert regions of Soggy Dry Lake and Sawtooth Canyon in California, and further afield, in the deserts and forests of Arizona. In these remote places, it’s silence that is his greatest pursuit. 

“For me, silence is an absolute luxury. We are constantly immersed in noise. The literal noise of vehicles, planes, refrigerators, and air conditioning units. And the mental noise that comes with the pressure to consume an enormous amount of information every day. Listening to an album without scrolling through our phones or taking a call has become an impossibility. Finding and appreciating silence even more so.”

This passion for silence led Garraud to develop his own mobile recording and mixing studio — a custom-designed bus that has been his refuge during his time in the desert. 

The genesis of this idea is some 25 years old. On the eve of the millennium in December 1999, Garraud took his complete set of Pro Tools to the Pyramids of Giza, where he was in charge of the audio production and live broadcast of Jean-Michel Jarre’s The 12 Dreams of the Sun. It was the first time he had set himself up remotely in this way, and a crucial moment in realizing that his life as a composer and creator could exist outside a recording studio. 

Today, technology has made it infinitely easier to work nomadically. And in his bus, Garraud has been able to travel to the spaces that so inspire him, and to compose and mix within these environments. His latest album, OVP — Oscillation, Vibration, Pulsation — is the product of this journey. In his collaboration with L-Acoustics and his use of L-ISA Spatial Audio Tools, he has been able to create an album that matches the vast spaces that inspired his music in the first place.

Oscillation, Vibration, Pulsation

“OVP is a trilogy, broken down into three distinct volumes,” explains Garraud. “It shows the evolution in my use of space: from a single point, widening to a larger array, and finally expanding into a truly three-dimensional environment.” 

OVP 1 is a tribute to the purity of monophonic sound. OVP 2 is an opus dedicated to maximum stereo width. And OVP 3 uses spatial audio mixing techniques to encompass all of the available audio space.

OVP 1 demonstrates what it meant to Garraud to compose with silence in mind, paring his music down to its most essential component. It uses silence liberally, showing how quiet moments highlight the sounds that come after them, and how silence can influence the rhythm of the listening experience, encouraging listeners to become more attentive.

By the time listeners reach OVP 3, which was mixed in L-ISA, they’re in a sonic environment that is fuller and more immersive — as wide as the California and Arizona deserts in which they were imagined.

“Working in L-ISA on OVP 3 was a revelation because, for the first time, I had a sonic space that was so much wider than stereo. It finally allowed me to command an entire sound spectrum that was precise not only in terms of frequency but, more importantly, in terms of spatiality.”

In providing a space in which to arrange sounds in three dimensions, Garraud says he found a more natural and expressive way to compose. “The moment you move beyond a simple two-speaker limitation, you gain an immense amount of sonic real estate. It makes the composition feel boundless, which ties directly back to my inspiration from vast, open landscapes. The experience was the very definition of freedom.”

Listen Carefully

In his creation of OVP, Garraud responded to a compulsion: to travel to the spaces he so loves, to listen to the silence they hold, and to use these experiences to fuel the tempo, rhythms and melodic development of his album. 

The result is a journey through space and sound, through open plains, deserts, forests, oceans and overcrowded cities. “Listen to it carefully,” he advises. “Mentally place your own images onto the different tracks and feel the different atmospheres that draw from both sound design and sound synthesis.”

OVP 3 is now available on Garraud’s website as a collector’s double vinyl edition. Listeners will also receive a download link for the digital version at the same time. The spatial audio digital version of OVP 3, recorded and mastered in L-ISA, will be available on streaming platforms in 2026. 

The Artists of Sound – Joachim Garraud is now available in full on YouTube.