#Background Music - Penderecki: Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima

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Tokyo

1954

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Twin Peaks: The Return

Originally published in The Wire 405, November 2017

“Listen to the sounds”, the Giant (Carel Struycken) tells Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in the first moments of Twin Peaks: The Return. A scratching like an oversized cricket or a malfunctioning electric motor stirs in the horn of an old Victrola. A hum at the very edges of the stereo picture. “It is in our house now.” Eighteen hours later, two of the protagonists stand outside a house: lights burn and gutter as a scream overwhelms the Foley track. The soundtrack tells a story that the actions the characters live through can't straightforwardly propose, because it isn't one that can be neatly resolved: you can't go home again.

It's a critical commonplace that Lynch directs like a musician: as cinematographer Peter Deming put it, in Lynch's work 'adding sound to picture is one plus one equals five'. But his evolution as a director and sound designer seems to have involved overturning the rules that fence in even such 'visual music'. The first two seasons of Twin Peaks used the technical limitations of television, with its tinny, imprecise sound, as part of their poisoned charm: Angelo Badalamenti's score, which ran through every form of deep artificiality from dark to seraphic, plastered over each crack in screentime, made lustrous its aesthetic borrowings from primetime soaps like Dynasty. Lynch gave his own sonic signature to the episodes he directed, most obviously in the backwards speech that punctuated the bottled silences of the Red Room that sits in an alternate dimension to the town of Twin Peaks. But these were additions to a fabric increasingly pre-made by the ABC execs.

The difference of The Return is clear in Anthology Resource Vol. 1, the album of cues and effects from the series by Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley released this August. The themes resemble nothing so much as excerpts from the catalogues of Kevin Drumm or Failing Lights, AMM or Chris Watson, Grouper or Graham Lambkin: enormous gouts of static, high atonal strings processed into a layered blur, a one-chord blues played beyond an impenetrable wall, warping drones whose timbre and spatial placement is hard to hold in mind from one second to the next. Behind all of this is the sound of electricity, which becomes in Hurley and Lynch's hands a passage between nature and technology: following on from Fire Walk With Me, all of the series's world seems to participate in the buzzing, hissing, interference and migraine-halo hums they represent it with. Sound technology becomes the conduit of Lynch's bleak pantheism: every sound, instrumental or natural, flows into and back out of this immaterial background.

The effacement of any difference between music and sound correlates to a breakdown of distinction between fiction and its storytelling techniques. The viewer can never be sure whether what they're hearing belongs to Twin Peaks's fictional world. This too was a principle of experimental music from Luigi Russolo onwards, which brought the noise of the 'real world' of machines, telecommunications and urban life into the concert hall. Hurley and Lynch's sound is an elaborated version of the excessive room tone that Philip Brophy calls 'the sound of nothingness', omnipresent in Lynch's films going back to his experiments with composer and sound designer Alan Splet on Eraserhead (1980).

The refusal to distinguish between diegetic sound and soundtrack isn't new, even in prestige TV. The Sopranos, for example, followed Martin Scorsese's 1970s dramas in making its soundtrack the instrument of fantasy, dream and psychosis. But Lynch pushes it to an unprecedented extreme. Apart from the heavily demarcated performances at the Roadhouse at each episode's end, there's nothing but the fluctuations of a fictional world at once darkly unstable and utterly banal. The thrumming, purling drones, inexplicable echoes, backward notes that crowd around the image like noxious fog suggest that the fiction before us is disintegrating, even as it gives it a fatal unity. The strange porous spaces that frame the series's cosmology, through which Cooper make his metaphysical journeys, overlap with dank alleys and basements with poor wiring and strange acoustics, sometimes too echoey, sometimes unnvervingly dry. It was this full, variegated, deeply cryptic sense of space that Michel Chion identified in Lynch's work, using the physical heft of Dolby sound hardware to concentrate 'not only on the very large but also the very small… effects close to silence', repeating the 'low, sinister, held notes which link up the different worlds edited in parallel' in Wild At Heart (1990).

These passages of sound burning eternally at the threshold of attention across the series's eighteen-hour span are a counterpoint to the sonic cataclysms that blast its fabric. Lynch has always disavowed any interest in underground music – the drones, as with many aspects of his oeuvre, allegedly come from his time living in the factory districts of 70s Philadelphia – but episode 8 is structured around Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima (1960). Just as Lynch's 80s and 90s films absorbed the aesthetic of perfume adverts, so his late films seem to incorporate both the high-concept music video and, in parodic form, the nexus of avant-garde film and modernist represented by Maya Deren or Jordan Belson. The swarms of abstract imagery that fill the screen for the next 10 minutes are the apotheosis of the uses of recorded music in his films, with its burden of strange nostalgia, from Dean Stockwell miming to Roy Orbison's “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet (1986) to the apocalyptic karaoke video set to Nina Simone's “Sinnerman” that closes Inland Empire (2007). When, late in the episode, The Platters's “My Prayer” breaks into the soundtrack, only to be replaced by the scratching of a stylus against a turntable, it feels like the most visceral dramatisation of Twin Peaks's use of the artificial to confront the viewer with the primal, and vice versa. If – no spoilers! – Lynch's series is ultimately a tragedy, it still articulates the pleasures and horrors of its bewildering, pliable stretch of time through perhaps the most extreme sonic experiments ever let loose on television.