Fred Drake and David Catching opened Rancho De La Luna in 1993 in a compound near Joshua Tree, California. The aesthetic they created was deliberate: weird and wonderful but functional. Vintage gear beside new idiosyncratic equipment. A raw desert vibe. A drum room that engineers consistently describe as the best they have recorded in. Drake died in 2002; for two years afterward, collaborators Tony Mason, Ted Quinn, Dean Chamberlain, Billy Bizeau, and Fred Burke helped keep the studio running. Then Catching took over entirely, turning the studio into his home as well as his workplace — serving as engineer, producer, guest musician, and chef for the artists who came.

The studio is best known as the birthplace of the Desert Sessions, a long-running collaborative recording project organized by Josh Homme that has drawn an extraordinary cross-section of musicians to the desert. Sessions have included Homme, PJ Harvey, Iggy Pop, Queens of the Stone Age members Troy Van Leeuwen and Nick Oliveri, Dave Grohl, Les Claypool, Billy Gibbons, Mark Lanegan, Kurt Vile, Twiggy Ramirez, Brant Bjork, Daniel Lanois, Band of Horses, the Arctic Monkeys, and dozens of others across more than two decades. The logic is the same as the studio: remove the musicians from their habits, put them in extreme heat and open space, give them unusual instruments, and see what happens. David Catching summarized it: "There is something about this studio. Everyone that's been here and recorded here, including me, feels it."

The studio's reach extends further than its catalog. The Foo Fighters filmed an episode of their HBO series Sonic Highways at Rancho De La Luna. Anthony Bourdain brought his No Reservations crew for the thirteenth episode of the seventh season. The documentary American Valhalla, which follows Iggy Pop's Post Pop Depression album and tour, centers heavily on recording here. In 2016, Catching and Bingo Richey released a Rancho De La Luna-branded mezcal, which is either the most on-brand or least surprising thing to happen at a desert recording studio that looks like a grenade launcher. The studio continues to operate, visited by musicians who want what the desert offers: silence, distance from expectation, and the best drum sound they have ever gotten.