David Lynch on music, innovation and his future as a filmmaker: “I like to call it experimentation”

It sounds like a scene from Twin Peaks. On a starry night, David Lynch was taking a walk through the dark woods when he witnessed a flood of bright light coming over the tops of the trees. The otherworldly vision was the seed for Cellophane Memories, his new album with longtime collaborator Chrystabell; the dazzling light transmuting into the ethereal wash of her haunting voice.

“That’s kind of a horseshit kind of thing,” Lynch admits, breaking the spell of the album’s fanciful publicity blurb. “It was inspired by experimenting and it all came out of experimenting. In the beginning, we didn’t know whether it was absolute rubbish or something good. And the more we listened to it, we said, ‘Wait a minute, this is really beautiful.’”

So there was no walk in the woods? No ecstatic vision? “I do walk in the woods in my mind,” he replies.

For half a century, viewers, critics, fellow filmmakers and musicians have all been walking in the woods of Lynch’s mind – a dense, profoundly disorienting thicket where baleful rumbles and the perpetual occult crackle of electricity soundtrack a world of zigzag carpets, depraved violence and nightmarish surrealism. But it’s a half century that, from today’s vantage point, looks to have been meaningfully split in half by the moment when, in 1997, Lynch realised a longstanding dream to complete his “set-up” and build his own recording studio at the modernist compound where he lives in the Hollywood Hills. “At that point,” the journalist Kristine McKenna wrote in Lynch’s co-authored 2018 memoir Room to Dream, “he began living in an environment where he could develop pretty much any idea that came to him without leaving home, and the urgency surrounding film deals diminished.” 

While the internet hangs on whispers of a new Lynch film or TV project, by 2024 we have to acclimatise to the fact that over the past 25 years – though Mulholland Dr. (2001), Inland Empire (2006), the 18 hours of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) and countless short-form video experiments ought to be enough for anyone – the scales have tipped decisively in favour of his reclusive adventures in music. 

Like Prospero, he lives and works on an isle full of noises, his outpourings during his home-studio period including a 1998 album of versions of choral music by the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen, sung by Jocelyn Montgomery; the lurching industrial blues of his 2001 album BlueBOB with John Neff; the chilly avant-classical of 2007’s Polish Night Music with composer Marek Zebrowski; the lovesick nocturnal weird-pop of his solo albums Crazy Clown Time (2011) and The Big Dream (2013), with warbling, pitch-shifted vocals by Lynch himself; two albums and an EP with Chrystabell; and a 2018 album, Thought Gang, made with the composer whose brooding, heart-tugging instrumentals define Lynch’s onscreen universe: the late Angelo Badalamenti.

Speaking about his early youth in Spokane, Washington, Lynch has recalled an imaginative, muddy-kneed boyhood where his territorial range was no bigger than a couple of blocks yet seemed to contain huge worlds. “You can live in one place and have everything,” he says in the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. At his Asymmetrical Studio he’s found a comparable sandbox in which to live out his later years, a walled-in sanctuary from where he can pursue his artistic experiments in the select company of his creative friends and with the chipper work ethic of an Eisenhower-era salaryman. “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space,” another Shakespeare character claimed, “were it not that I have bad dreams.” Happy in his Hollywood haven, Lynch seems to have solved Hamlet’s problem by transmitting the bad dreams outwards, using his art to broadcast his subconscious conjurings and let the rest of us deal with them.

***

In a 2009 interview in this magazine, at the time of Dark Night of the Soul, an album by Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse on which Lynch sings the two dreamiest numbers, Lynch told James Bell, “I’m not a musician, but I play music. I started doing it just to make sounds, experimental sounds, and it’s led to something.” When he joins me on a video call from his bolthole, many records later, I ask Lynch if he’s sticking to this description. Does he still claim to not be a musician? “Yes, I do in a way,” he says, “because I’ve seen people that you could really call musicians and there’s a long gap between me and them.”

Lynch’s comments suggest a kinship with another self-described ‘non-musician’, Brian Eno, who similarly overcame his limited traditional capabilities by modifying instruments, wielding his synthesiser like a tone-bending ray gun and using studio tools to open up new sonic realms. Indeed, at the same time that Eno was first formulating his conception of ambient music with the opalescent calm of his 1978 LP Ambient 1: Music for Airports, Lynch and sound designer Alan Splet had arguably jumped ahead to an evil sibling genre with their industrial soundscapes for Lynch’s 1977 feature debut Eraserhead.

The aberrant masterpiece of a painter trying out filmmaking, Eraserhead built on his earlier short films to establish Lynch as a director for whom sound and image were on equal footing (“I always say cinema is sound and picture moving together in time”). For the dread environment of young Henry Spencer’s courtship and cursed parenthood in a dark-glass reflection of the industrial Philadelphia where Lynch had lived as a young man, he and Splet pieced together an intricately terrifying squall of blasted winds, infernal factory noises and coal-smeared atmospherics. It was a sound track rather than a soundtrack, but was nonetheless issued for home listening on vinyl in 1982, and the negative space it mapped out proved foundational for the emerging ‘dark ambient’ genre defined by projects like Brian Williams’s Lustmord and the Newcastle-based Zoviet France, in which Eno’s lucid room tones were reimagined as sinister, sepulchral topographies (Eno went ‘dark ambient’ in 1982 too, with Ambient 4: On Land).

It wasn’t music when Lynch and Splet made their Eraserhead recordings in 1977, but it sounds like music now – the first example of something from the sound world of David Lynch signposting new byways for other musicians to explore. “I didn’t think of [these experiments] as music,” Lynch tells me, “but I thought of them as building a world. It’s more like room tones, tones of an industrial city, tones of a room in a certain kind of apartment building. Tones that paint a picture of how it is there in that factory area.”

This ability to hear tones in non-musical sounds can be traced all the way back to that idyllic childhood in the post-war years, when the young Lynch would vibe to the rumbling drones of B52s crossing overhead in the skies above the Pacific Northwest. “These B52s would fly in a squadron, but they’re propeller planes and they were flying lower than a jet. They have a drone, and with all of them together the drones are kind of in harmony. It’s the most beautiful sound. And they’re not travelling so fast, so it takes a long time for them to travel across the sky: it’d be a summer day with drones of these giant B52s, and it’s just a beautiful, almost cosmic, dreamy mood.”

A cosmic, dreamy mood is certainly what you get in Cellophane Memories, the title of which hints at its diaphanous sound. With lyrics and production by Lynch and vocal melodies by Chrystabell, the album breaks step with his previous collaborations with the Texas-born singer, 2011’s This Train and the 2016 EP Somewhere in the Nowhere, in abandoning beats altogether. Instead, it drifts by with dewy webs of guitar reverb, moonlit synths and Chrystabell’s multi-tracked voice overlapping itself to create a hall-of-mirrors effect. Its secretive domain shares something with the porous, bottom-of-a-well ambience of artists like Grouper and Julianna Barwick.

Lynch’s lyrics read like fragments of film scenes: “She crouched low behind the table / In the reflection she could see a figure moving / A beam of light came and she realised the / Darkness would not hide her for long” (‘Reflections in a Blade’). I ask if his songs come to him in images, in a cinematic way. “I do picture them as they come out,” he says. “A lot of times it’s like the picture is there and my hand is writing as fast as possible because I see the talking, I see the moving when ideas come.”

His love of enveloping sonics and glimpsed melodrama also goes back to the start: to his youthful affection for the reverb-heavy pop of Phil Spector and Roy Orbison and their cathedrals of teen heartbreak. A 1983 song would hit him with similar force: the spectral cover of Tim Buckley’s 1969 ‘Song to the Siren’ by the 4AD dream-pop supergroup This Mortal Coil, with evanescent vocals by Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. Famously, Lynch tried to license it for use in Blue Velvet (1986), where it would have enjoyed soundtrack space with Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’. It was 4AD’s refusal that led to Lynch’s first collaboration with both Badalamenti and singer Julee Cruise, who together attempted to replicate the song’s air of gravity-defying yearning for Blue Velvet’s ‘Mysteries of Love’ and, as their alliance evolved, the immortal ‘Falling’ theme from Twin Peaks.

Even after he later successfully booked ‘Song to the Siren’ for the soundtrack to 1997’s Lost Highway, the track’s influence has run like a vapour trail through the Lynch cosmos. Chrystabell, who also played FBI agent Tammy Preston in Twin Peaks: The Return, tells me about a recording session during her first years working with Lynch in the early 2000s, before they’d released anything together. It was at the end of a long day’s session and Lynch handed her some poetic lyrics. “I didn’t fully grasp what the lyrics were, but I would learn later they were very potent,” she says. “I was nervous because I couldn’t really hear the chord changes. And at that time, you go a little out of body because you’re in this state-of-the-art recording studio. I’m in a booth, I’ve got the headset on. David’s in the riser seating, cigarette, large and in charge, engineer’s doing his thing. And it’s like, ‘Go. Do it.’ And you just have to give it away. You have to surrender to the moment, see what comes.” 

What came was ‘Polish Poem’, which borrows from This Mortal Coil’s oceanic tristesse to provide a crack of sublimity at the poignant climax to Inland Empire. It wasn’t intended for the film – both David and Chrystabell had forgotten the recording even existed. But Dean Hurley, Lynch’s sound engineer at Asymmetrical, found it on a hard drive during the film’s lengthy production. “David called me at some point from LA, and said, ‘Chrystabell, there’s this beautiful, beautiful song that Dean found, and I want to put it in Inland Empire.’” (The track later also ended up on Lynch and Chrystabell’s album, This Train.)

The sprawling length of Inland Empire, at 180 minutes, and then Season 3 of Twin Peaks, which was originally announced as nine episodes before doubling somewhere along the way, makes me wonder whether Lynch’s hermit life of studio experimentation has had the knock-on effect of making him a looser, more improvisational filmmaker. But the I-word hits a bum note. “The ideas dictate everything,” Lynch says. “So I don’t really believe in improvisation – like say, ‘Let’s just wing it and whatever goes.’ That is total bullshit to me.

“You have an idea, it has to be a certain way, and then you get everybody that’s working with you along that same path dictated by the idea, and it pulls together if everybody’s going down the same road. It’s not an ego thing, it’s to be true to the ideas. As soon as someone veers off, it breaks the thing.”

But we later circle back to the subject of improvisation. “I guess in a weird way, I’d say improvisation is something I don’t use in film, but I definitely use in music,” he says, “especially with this album that Angelo and I did called Thought Gang, where I would talk to these very great studio musicians and I’d tell them a story, a picture to think of, an event to think of, a sequence to think of, and to play that. And let’s go right now, and to just kick it. I’d say ‘It starts off quiet, then it goes from there. You guys just take it.’

“Unbelievable experiments like this can conjure so many fantastic things. Then you might say, ‘Well, let’s work on this part of this magic right there, and go from there.’ And you can build into something incredible, which is improvisation or experimentation. I like to call it experimentation.”

***

Interviews with Lynch at the time of Inland Empire – which, depending on whether or not you subscribe to the virally controversial idea that Twin Peaks: The Return is a movie, may or may not be Lynch’s final feature – are full of his bright-eyed, gee-whiz talk of ‘happy campers’, of idea-hunting as ‘catching the big fish’ and of his evangelism for the consciousness-expanding power of Transcendental Meditation. All these years later, his carefully curated transmissions from Casa Lynch – from the daily weather reports that he broadcast from his home from 2005 to 2022, to his gnomic teaser message for Cellophane Memories (“Something is coming along for you to see and hear…”) – still lean firmly into the Jimmy-Stewart-from-Mars oddness that’s expected of him. But to talk to him today is to talk with an artist rather than an eccentric. There’s no hint of self-parody or wind-him-up-and-watch-him-go weirdness. He speaks with warmth but seriousness, and is happiest talking about the nuts and bolts of art-making; the creativity that still keeps him so busy.

I ask him if his relative isolation at home makes the idea of going back on to a film set feel daunting. Does he want to do it again? “No. I’ll tell you, I’ve gotten emphysema from smoking for so long, and so I’m homebound whether I like it or not. I can’t go out. And I can only walk a short distance before I’m out of oxygen.

“Smoking was something that I absolutely loved but, in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit it.

“And now, because of Covid, it would be very bad for me to get sick, even with a cold. So I probably would be directing from my house. And because of Covid, they’ve now invented ways where you can direct from home. I wouldn’t like that so much. I like to be there amongst the thing and get ideas there. But I would try to do it remotely, if it comes to it.”

The news would seem to quash perennial internet rumours that Lynch is at work on something called ‘Wisteria’ or ‘Unrecorded Night’ or even a new series of Twin Peaks – unless he can find a way to direct them remotely. And we may never see his unproduced screenplay Antelope Don’t Run No More, written post-Inland Empire and – according to Room to Dream – “one of the best scripts Lynch has ever written”. “Well, we don’t know what the future will bring,” Lynch says of this one, “but we remain hopeful.”

In the meantime, he’s directed four new videos to accompany Cellophane Memories. Two have gone live at time of writing: the strobing ‘Sublime Eternal Love’ and the eerie handmade animation ‘The Answers to the Questions’, with a red-dressed avatar of Chrystabell standing at the threshold of a black-and-white room that looks very like the surreal Fireman’s house in Twin Peaks: The Return (“It looks sort of crude, but that’s the way I wanted it”). “There’s two more films coming. One is called ‘The Moon’s Glow’, and the other one I’m working on right now. I don’t know the name of that, but it’s a promo. So those might be fun to see,” he says, charmingly asking me to let him know what I think once I’ve seen them.

He’ll go straight back to work on that after our call, but tends to break around 4pm for some meditation. “Then around six I go and sit outside for a little bit and do some walking.” Sometimes he works in the evening too, “but a lot of times I watch crime shows at night. I like to think and watch TV at the same time. I’ve seen many Forensic Files [1996 to 2011]. I’ve seen probably all of them, but I like to see them over and over again. And apparently, so do other people; they’re like friends.

“It’s really fun to watch these crime shows – a lot of studies in human nature, and then the horrible things that humans can do to one another; it’s amazing. And the fantastic scientists and detectives who uncover the killers.”

As a lifestyle of retreat, it doesn’t sound so bad. But if Lynch has perfected the art of transmitting his bad dreams to the outside, which anxieties creep back in over the walls? The decline of theatrical viewing? He’s spoken out about people watching films on phones, but has also said that he has started to find the traditional length of cinema films too restrictive for his ideas. “The optimum viewing conditions would be the largest screen you could get in your house and the best quality sound you could get in your house. And to turn your phones off and the lights down so you have an opportunity to go into another world.

“But this is not really the way people are looking at films these days. They watch a film – if they have to go to the bathroom, they put it on pause, they come back to it, maybe something else interrupts. Maybe they don’t come back to it for a couple of days and pick it up where they left off. It’s not the same as going to the theatre and sitting there for the whole film like in the old days, but it’s the reality just the same.”

Artificial intelligence? He’s always been seen as someone who embraces new technologies. “I think it’s fantastic. I know a lot of people are afraid of it. I’m sure, like everything, they say it’ll be used for good or for bad. I think it’d be incredible as a tool for creativity and for machines to help creativity. The good side of it’s important for moving forward in a beautiful way.” But does he acknowledge the threat it poses to creative industries? “I’m sure with all these things, if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror. But I’m hoping better times are coming.”

On that subject, what’s his perspective on the coming election? We speak just days before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, who – at a rally in 2018 – tried to claim Lynch as a supporter by taking a Guardian quote from him out of context; a claim Lynch then refuted. “Oh, I don’t really want to go there,” he says, before proceeding to go there: “Right now, the world is so divided. And what I am for is for peace. In real peace, all diversity is appreciated fully. And right now – other people have said this too – it’s like a football game. You root for your team and they’ll work for their team. The Republicans hate Democrats. And the Democrats hate the Republicans. This is the same country, the same countrymen hating one another. And a nation divided is going to fall. It’s just crazy.

“We could be loving one another, having so much fun together, and going forward in life, making life better and better for everyone. Wouldn’t that be a better scenario than this bullshit? It’s just insane what’s going on. Absolutely fucking insane. And it doesn’t have to be this way. Grow up! Get a fucking life!”

The question appears briefly to have darkened the skies over that nerve centre of the Lynch universe near Mulholland Drive. But the storm passes, the clouds move on. He’s much happier talking about death, and his idea of consciousness continuing into the beyond. He likes to talk of abandoning our aged bodies like clapped-out cars at the wrecking yard, and us drivers simply getting out. “The physical body drops off, but we’ll all know each other again… Enlightenment is stepping off the wheel of birth and death into immortality, total fulfilment, total liberation.”

Looked at like this, time appears boundless, but even at 78 Lynch seems to want to cram every moment with getting ideas and making experiments. He wants to push his car to its limits. It puts me in mind of one of my favourite curios in the Lynch canon: his time-warping seven-minute video Boat (2007). In this unlikely offering – in blown-out, daylit images and to a whispered narration that anticipates another sonic trend, the rise of ASMR – we see shots of a motorboat moored on the edge of a lake before a skipper gets on board and takes the boat out. 

The boatman is Lynch himself, who sets the throttle to gather speed over the open water, turns to the camera and says: “We’re gonna try to go fast enough to go into the night.”

Cellophane Memories is out now on Sacred Bones Records. Read more from Lynch in the December 2024 issue of Sight and Sound.