Bringin' the Dawn In #3 - From the Roadhouse
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❛ᴗ❛As the days grow shorter and colder, I find myself wandering toward David Lynch’s 'Twin Peaks'.
Like many small towns in this country, Twin Peaks’ sweeping vistas, beautiful women, and damn good / hot cups of coffee are designed to hide insidious secrets: every closet has skeletons, and American suburbs are built on cemeteries. This idea – of an American ugliness, a deep sense of moral decay concealed and perpetuated by systems and figures out of our control – proves central to the Lynch oeuvre. His visual language is striking: horrifying, paranormal, exceedingly violent images placed alongside the most base, mundane images of modern American life. Within this contradiction lies a sense of heightened, altered reality, of surreality. His sonic language – the sound design, scores, and soundtracks he uses – follows this, too.
And it’s not just sound or music in the abstract, intangible, that serves as a throughline through Lynch’s work – he also places emphasis on the spaces in which we listen to music, often communally, and the transformative power that lies therein. Lynch’s nightclubs and bars are portals to another dimension where the surreality is heightened, where time flows at a different speed, where his characters experience significant metamorphoses; the songs performed within these walls carry rich subtextual meaning, often forming thematic anchors for these films.
'Mulholland Drive' reaches a climax when Naomi Watts’s & Laura Harring’s characters arrive at Club Silencio and bear witness to a haunting rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”; Isabella Rossellini sings “Blue Velvet” as part of her nightclub performance in the film of the same name – it serves as a sort of seductive force that drives Kyle Machlachlan deeper into the criminal underbelly of his slice of suburbia; Bill Pullman’s tenor sax freakout in Lost Highway’s Luna Lounge foreshadows the horror lurking inside his home and inside his wife.
But nowhere is Lynch's focus on music-listening-as-a-communal-act more pronounced than in the Roadhouse from 'Twin Peaks', the bar that affords the series’ complex network of characters an opportunity to gather, commune, recuperate. So sacrosanct is this place of music worship that a nominally minor occurrence at any small town bar – a fistfight – quickly becomes representative of an act of reprehensible evil, a serious moral failing aligned with the workings of the original series’ antagonists.
More than any other of David Lynch’s clubs, the Roadhouse is a place outside of time, outside of reality, where dream logic replaces the real: for the denizens of Twin Peaks, it’s the rare place where they can escape the horrors the town is descending into; for the audience, the scenes in the roadhouse are a respite from the driving plot behind the story. This is especially true in the third series – which aired in 2017, almost three decades after the show’s initial run – where Lynch has artists like Chromatics, Sharon Van Etten, Nine Inch Nails, Eddie Vedder, and Julee Cruise perform (Cruise also performs at the roadhouse in the original run). Often – especially in the third series – scenes in the Roadhouse are relatively disconnected from the plot of the show, and are instead an explicit effort of worldbuilding, of aligning the aesthetic aims of these artists with those of the show.
In 2022, we lost two of the most important people in the approach to building the sound-world of Twin Peaks: Angelo Badalementi, who composed the series’ score (as he did for many of Lynch’s films), and Julee Cruise, who sings the vocal version of the series’ title theme, “Falling” (in fact, Cruise’s album 'Floating into the Night' represents a significant collaborative effort between the three artists: Lynch is the sole credited song-writer, Badalamenti the sole credited producer/composer, and Cruise the singer).
Recently, the fantastic record label Sacred Bones re-issued Julee Cruise’s 'Floating into the Night', and because I have minimal self-control, an infatuation with Lynch, and a credit card, I bought it. And then I watched Lost Highway for the first time, which has a killer soundtrack (featuring Lou Reed, Trent Reznor / Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson (he is cancelled, but his cover of “I Put A Spell On You” is pretty transcendent. Sorry.), Rammstein, the Smashing Punkins… it’s nuts).
All of this is to say: I really like David Lynch. I really like the intentionality & execution of his approach to world-building through sound. And this set is going to be vaguely inspired by his films. Expect a lot of dream-pop, trip-hop, vaguely psychedelic stuff, music that comments on the Great American Sickness / #society in general, and any sorts of sounds that walk that tightrope between the dream and the real. In more concrete terms: Julee Cruise, This Mortal Coil, Beach House, Sharon Van Etten, Radiohead, Perfume Genius, Moses Sumney, etc.
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