David Lynch, to whom the entire cinema world pays tribute the day after his death, was not the type of artist to choose a furrow to plow from evening to morning. On the contrary, he believed that cinema, a total art, could only be enriched through contact with the visual arts and music. A look back at sixty years of an electric passion.
If your child has difficulty falling asleep and you only have two records on hand to try to soothe him, one David Lynch album and another, some advice: take the other.
Not that the sound level of the jack-of-all-trades artist’s random recordings is particularly shrill or deafening; but let’s say that even at low volume, we have experienced more warmth, more tranquilizing, than these electric guitars which sometimes sound like a lumberjack’s saws and these sets (these tortures?) of cymbals evoking the crunch of a coin that we would rub along an enameled plate devoured by rust in the humidity of the Mississippi.
In terms of the ability and pleasure to manipulate sound materials (not only from musical instruments, but also from everyday objects, tools and utensils, megaphones, old transistors, children’s toys, don’t throw them away), sound adventurer David Lynch would almost make kids like Tom Waits and Don Von Vliet, from Captain Beefheart, seem like friendly Sunday handymen.
That’s it, is your child sleeping? So let’s take a closer look (listen). And first, let’s start by recalling that the young David Lynch (25 years old at the time) who began working on Eraserhead from 1971, six long years before the film’s theatrical release, was a pure product of American art schools.
We know that in Great Britain, art schools have given birth to generations of non-aligned artists, from Keith Richards to Morrissey via Syd Barret and Mark E. Smith; we also know that this type of potentially non-rigorous, even frankly folkloric, training is generally little appreciated by American parents, and that only the truly atypical (and gifted?) kids get their ticket to the adventure.
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This was the case for the adolescent Lynch, accustomed since his childhood to changing cities each time his father, a senior official within the US Department of Agriculture, was transferred to a new region.
We must believe that the future artist retained a great sense of fidgeting, or an inability to settle down somewhere, since becoming a Fine Arts student, he changed schools several times, from Washington to Boston, then New York ( at Cooper Union, which he hated) and finally Philadelphia, upon returning from a disappointing trip to Austria: he had dreamed of meeting his idol there, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, but he never responded to his requests.
The filmmaker who dreamed of being a musician…
At university, Lynch met all kinds of musicians, rock but not only. He even shared his dorm room with Peter Wolf, future lead singer of the successful J. Geils Band.
From his first short films and small animated films, the former scout, particularly gifted for resourcefulness, decided to write the music himself and create the “sound design” (a term that is undoubtedly an improper term given the modesty technical means employed).
For the soundtrack of The Alphabet (in 1968), David Lynch took great pleasure in tampering with the voice of his very young wife, Peggy, by passing the magnetic tape through a tape recorder with a half-damaged motor. Anyone else would have thrown the pitiful device in the trash. Lynch made it an instrument for his unbridled imagination.
The aspiring filmmaker would undoubtedly have liked to have ten lives for the price of one. But once he settled in Los Angeles in 1970, he had to devote much more time than expected to the production ofEraserheada very complex and laborious project (like all his films, moreover, perfectionism has a price) and was therefore forced to postpone his dreams of guitar music until later.
This did not prevent him from assiduously frequenting rock and folk venues, the Troubadour, the Roxy, as well as a few more or less secret places where West Coast jazz crossed swords with music from far away (Brazil, Africa). …).
-In a playlist published on Spotify, we can discover the selection that Lynch prepared a few years ago, in response to the question: what are your favorite songs of the 21ste century ? There we find Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, but also the Platters, Otis Redding, Booker T. and the Mg’s, or even more recent gems, such as a song by the very estimable New York combo TV On The Radio. Musically, just as in his choice of film subjects (and aesthetic treatment adapted to each), David Lynch has never been a man of chapels.
…but also photographer, visual artist
He called himself an artist above all. Jack of all trades refusing to be a member of any club. Photographer, visual artist, painter, sound designer, decorator, and even owner of a night bar in Paris. And then a musician, yes, but with this handicap weighing on his daily life until the 2000s: lack of time.
It was therefore only in 2001, at the age of 55, that he was finally able to embark on a cycle of three studio albums: BlueBOB (co-directed with his friend John Neff), Crazy Clown Time Then The Big Dreamuneven attempts to reinvent a fairly classic American rock harmonically (we think of The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and to a lesser extent the brilliant Pixies), but particularly harsh in terms of sound material.
It is when thinking of these records, and for example of the corrosive and vicious blues of Bad Nightthat we advise you not to use it in your offspring’s bedroom (you will see, the albums of Don Pedro and his Dromedaries are much more suitable).
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But let’s go back two decades. In the mid-1980s, the musical flow delivered by the fertile brain of David Lynch, mainly monopolized by the 7e art, needed another human to reach our astonished ears in recorded form. The Brooklyn composer (of Sicilian ancestry) Angelo Balamenti was this vector, this bearer of messages.
The two men met in 1985, when the California-based filmmaker was beginning post-production on Blue Velvet. Mutual love at first sight, and the start of a superb artistic connection: together, they would design several particularly sophisticated soundtracks (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive…), but also an almost hit, the Twin Peaks Themecredits of the series available in Falling with the mesmerizing Julee Cruise behind the microphone.
Falling : a slow and obsessive refrain, all the more remarkable since in its entire first part, its main salient point (we won’t dare call it a “gimmick”) is made up of a very basic bass guitar motif played in an amp powerful and a reverb pedal: three elegiac notes, a unique rhythmic cue in a bubble of synthetic sounds. Falling will also be the standard meter of aesthetics « Badalamenti meets Lynch » throughout their employment relationship.
This mystery, this roundness, these women’s voices floating between the world here and an uncertain elsewhere (fantasy, nightmare, beyond?), the two partners and artists will always seek to make them shine. More than a trademark: a true fixed idea. Even if it meant sometimes being a little heavy-handed, when recording in the studio, with effects such as chorus and reverb (“cathedral sound” option), which tended, in the long run, to give a too haloed, too watery character to their melodies.
Before forcing a little too much on metallic sounds in the years 2000-2010 (for our taste in any case), the painter and visual artist had focused a little too much on turquoise blue and purple during his years of complicity with Badalamenti. – even quite focused on the colors of spleen. “ Too many colors distract the viewer? »
He was also a producer serving others…
David Lynch seemed to cope very well with the spotlight conferred by his career as a successful director; but he also liked to put his ideas (and the money generated by his films) at the service of his musician friends. Most generally, this took place within the confines of the beautiful recording studio that he had built on the ground floor of one of his villas purchased over time, a sort of bunker hidden in the hills overlooking Hollywood.
Located at 7017 Senalda Road, the ‘Asymmetrical Studio’ (what a brilliant name), featuring a 5 meter wide cinema screen installed in the control booth, has hosted recording sessions by artists such as the singer Zola Jesus, the Jaye Jayle group, the Polish pianist Marek Zebrowski, or more recently the musician and composer Chrystabell – whose haunted universe is reminiscent of that of a certain Julee Cruise. This same studio where he artistically met his friend Badalamenti for the last time for a duo album, in 2018, under the title of Thought Gang.
In most cases, David Lynch, always accompanied by his youth friend John Neff behind the mixing console, not only attended the recording sessions, but also paid for their cost, as well as the making of the records that were made from them. from. In Chrystabell’s case, the understanding was so perfect that the 77-year-old retired filmmaker ultimately co-signed the album’s songs Cellophane Memories. A perfect title to bow out…
