David Lynch, without any slow-motion twang guitar.
Photo: dpa
The filmmaker and visual artist David Lynch is one of the few likeable and artistically interesting esoteric weirdos in the world. Since the end of the medium-budget US auteur film sometime in the noughties, Lynch has been making very special short films and video works. He is also committed to spreading the teachings of “Transcendental Meditation” and “Yogic Flying”. And he makes music too. Taken together, this creates a wonderfully crazy universe whose excesses and manifestations, to stay with the style, never have the aesthetic impact of Lynch’s feature films and the “Twin Peaks” series, but are never boring either.
The album “Cellophane Memories” is Lynch’s third collaboration with singer Chrystabell. You can hear ambient surfaces, all of them in a very mystical mood, the voice always disappears into the off or is collaged one on top of the other in a beautifully counter-intuitive way. Sometimes David Lynch plays a slow-motion twangy guitar, and on two or three tracks (you can’t really tell them apart in your memory) a studio musician gently taps away on a drum kit. This music sounds even more beautiful when you know that some of the sound legacies of the composer Angelo Badalamenti, who died in 2022, were processed here.
As in the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack produced by Lynch and Badalamenti together with the late singer Julee Cruise, this music also looms mysteriously, combined with the ethereal, floating voice that keeps drifting away and then returning again.
The story imagined for the album goes accordingly: David Lynch walks through a forest at night and a vision takes possession of him. Above the tops of the tall trees, the light of the moon transforms into the voice of Chrystabell to reveal a secret to him. We don’t know what it is, but that would be even nicer. Esotericism that was not secret knowledge but transparent would, by definition, no longer be an esotericism.
And “Cellophane Memories” is above all that: esoteric music. Which in turn hides the fact that Lynch, when he doesn’t do a cinematic psychoanalysis and/or an intuitive analysis of male violence with the camera, is already producing very regressive images. In this case it is the disembodied woman floating above the treetops as a medium for the secret knowledge of a male shaman. The collaboration between David Lynch and Chrystabell joins the long line of disembodied-sounding and appearing indie singers, from the Cocteau Twins to Mazzy Star to Joanna Newsom. All great voices, but they are connected by the promise of safety to the male listener.
In any case, the songs on “Cellophane Memories” sound extremely beautiful, regardless of ideology criticism, and nobody can help their regressive dreams.
Chrystabell & David Lynch: »Cellophane Memories« (Sacred Bones / Cargo)