Angelo Badalamenti & David Lynch
Fire walk with me (Soundtrack)

Already I can see some heavy and red velvet curtains, the stripy floor, the white horse that appears in the bedroom; the smell of sawdust and the knowledge of hard and alarming drugs gather somewhere in my memories of the film, and in my half-seen memories of the bits I half-saw…

I would like to know more about Twin Peaks – I grew up with Chris watching it a lot, talking and thinking a lot about it. I feel like I’m aware of the strands of story, as you grow up aware of King Lear, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catch 22. Never having read any of those though.

The music is lovely, stripped away from the film, it always was. The theme from Twin Peaks was almost everywhere at one time. This is very much wallpaper music, and the muted trumpet solo reminds me so much of Chris, not just him-as-trumpet-player, but it’s his style all over – there is a beat in there, some form of control and organisation, but it’s very hidden in layers of smoke and wandering.

It’s so stylized, but I guess that’s the point – let’s tie up the strands I remember from the movie, it’s very much set in a redneck/American Dream brace-neck of industrialised but never-quite-made-it, everyone is tired and beneath the chintz and wall-to-wall carpets and high-school sweaters is some weird shit going down, whether it’s all those trips to the lodge with the wee midget guy, or a simple matter of nasty S&M parties with smeared lipsticks and negligent angels – it still looks damn 80s. But then 80s mixed with a film noir sensibility…certainly that’s where the jazz-lite music would appear to come from…there are vibraphones, ride cymbals shuffling along nicely and meandering fretless bass solos everywhere…it must be said that I have limited patience for this kind of music…they have a boring kind of theme, which begins to get somewhere, then they improvise, again it starts to get interesting then they finish on a 6th chord…

Thankfully here comes the “Sycamore Tree” song. Here, still, are elements of chance, spontaneity outside the printed page of music (oh god, those bass tremolos kill me), but it’s within some discipline…and you imagine that the music will last outside of the performance (could do without the fat saxophone solo though, it’s already been said, hasn’t it?)

I was starting to get a little tired of this already, thinking that without the movie the music didn’t seem to be much…but I’m liking “The Black Dog runs at night”, not as a piece of “music” to listen to, not as an adjunct to the movie but as art to listen to…there’s not much in it but it seems to have a little more discipline in it than some of the “This is what I like the sound of “ jazz stuff that was going on earlier…as I said, I have a limited tolerance of jazz, it’s not quite as bad as the way I feel about Christians and Hippies, but it’s somewhere shortly afterwards…

I don’t know what I think about this, I started it thinking a higher opinion of the music than I do now, but I’ve had a few peaks and troughs within listening to it, just as it starts to irritate me and I think about wishy-washy jazz-backgrounds, something interesting happens and changes my mind. Maybe that’s the trick David Lynch plays with all of his films, they nearly tiptoe into cliché so easily, and just as you think aha…cop show/sex scandal/murder mystery…I’ve got your number, something happens to make you put those thoughts down and stamp on them.