This 20 minute mood piece composed of clips from films by or about David Lynch plays out like one long extended epiphany. Lovingly put together by Richard Vezina.
Music : Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch : Questions In A World Of Blue, The Pink Room, Into The Night, Mysteries of Love
Vocal : Julee Cruise
Films:
Inland Empire, Mulholland Dr., The Straight Story, Lost Highway, Fire Walk with Me, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, Dune, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead, The Grandmother, The Alphabet, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, Blue Velvet - Mysteries of Love: Documentary
This is taken from today’s Guardian newspaper’s Film & Music section, which has been guest edited by David Lynch, and it makes for one of the most bizarre “music” interviews ever published:
Gibbons and Lynch – but mainly Gibbons, with the occasional “Doggone right” and “Exactly right, Billy” from Lynch – are talking about the beauty and power of industry. About the roar of factories, the growl of engines, about how the clang and clank speak to something within us. We’re meant to be talking about the block and tackle pulley system, but it’s pretty clear from the start that none of us can sustain a conversation about that, and so the block and tackle is just the key that starts the motor that in turn drives our discussion down the highway.
For Lynch, in any case, the block and tackle seems to be as much metaphor as literal device. It’s a system of pulleys, designed to enable a person to lift a greater weight than they could unaided. The pulley was invented around 2,400 years ago by the Greek philosopher Archytas, a scientist of the Pythagorean school (he’s also thought to have been the first person to invent a flying machine. Bright boy; his mother must have been proud). Then Archimedes realised the simple pulley could be expanded into something with even greater power – the block and tackle system, which he designed to help sailors lift ever greater loads, according to Plutarch. Thousands of years later, the basic system is unchanged: the block is the pulleys – the more pulleys you put in the block, the less the force you need to apply – and the tackle is the rest of the of the apparatus.
“I heard about the block and tackle and I’ve seen it work and it seems so magical,” Lynch says of his fascination. “It’s connected in my mind with the American car” – one of its common usages is to lift the engine block from the body of a vehicle – “and it’s kind of perfect that Billy talks about it. Billy had got a kind of guitar power – I always like the idea that his guitar is gasoline-powered.” That’s not quite the only reason Gibbons is joining us today. When Lynch originally asked for a piece about the block and tackle in this week’s Film&Music, we pointed out that the section dealt with film and music, rather than physics and mechanics. Lynch, though, was insistent. OK, he said, if you’re only going to do it if it’s got a film or music angle, then you can have ZZ Top talking about the block and tackle. And here we are
The new David Lynch album Crazy Clown Time is exactly what you would expect from America’s greatest contemporary surrealist: crazy clown shit.
Moody, sexy, spooky and hypnotic, this is perfect Halloween music. I fucking dig the way the country-noir voodoo merges with Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation mind trips, riffs on dental hygiene, melting slide-guitars, funereal drum beats and rinky-dinky new wave rhythm tracks that would sound absolutely corny without Lynch’s serial killer vocals. I’m looking for an adjective to describe this tantalizing mix of the ordinary with the mad and all I come up with is “Lynchian.”
It’s streaming right now at NPR. Turn down the lights, pour yourself a glass of wine or fire up your favorite herbal blend and let Doctor Lynch perform his psychic surgery on your frontal lobes.
Fans of Johnny Dowd should really dig the fuck out of this. I’m guessing Lynch has heard a fair share of Dowd.
Crazy Clown Town will be released in the USA on November 8.
He’s at it again: David Lynch releases his first solo album Crazy Clown Time next month, and if you want to get an idea of what it’s going to be like, then take a listen to the title track, which has been uploaded onto You Tube.
It’s what you might expect from Mr Lynch, strange, weird, and somehow compelling - though personally, I’d like to see some pictures to go with it, and maybe some beer and popcorn too.
Robert Conroy has the voice of an angel - an angel who’s lived a season in hell.
Conroy is one half of the exquisite pop duo, Misty Roses, whose beautiful and ethereal voice is married to the dramatic and mesmeric music of Jonny Perl. From when they first met, they understood each other. Call it synchronicity. Call it good taste.
Together they are Misty Roses - the most startlingly original and brilliant group of the past 5 years.
In an exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Misty Roses, Conroy and Perl, explain the who’s, what’s, why’s and wherefores of their music.
Robert: ‘I met Jonny in late 2002, when he was still living in Brooklyn. We had a mutual friend and, in passing, I mentioned to that mutual friend that I was obsessed with Scott Walker and Julie London. To which he said “There is only ONE other person ON EARTH who is obsessed with Scott Walker AND Julie London! That’s this English guy I know, Jonny Perl!” And I found out he was a musician, and I was intrigued - so I got Jonny’s number and I called him. We met soon afterwards, and we just realized very quickly that we were on very similar frequencies. I mean, after our first rehearsal - which was three hours long, maybe - I think we came away with working demos of three or four songs that ended up on our first LP. We understood each other - musically - from the get-go.’
Born and raised in NYC, Robert had performed with a range of bands “post-punk, goth, electronic” over the years, and says he “was lucky enough to have a front row seat for a lot what happened musically over last decade or two.” The range of experience only confirmed his talents and focused his ambitions.
Robert: First and foremost, I am a singer - I’ve trained with some serious vocal coaches, in my day. And I like a lot of different kinds of music. So if I dig the people and I dig how they write songs and they dig how I write songs, then I’m game.’
British born Jonny has always been musically gifted, as a child he learned to play the cello, piano, and saxophone. Before Misty Roses he had played in a variety of combos, and was playing with a surf band in NYC when the conversation about Julie London brought him to Robert.
Jonny: ‘The synergies between our musical interests seemed so strong that we both figured it was worth giving it a shot.’
Together, they create music that is the perfect fusion of cabaret and cinema, of torch song and widescreen. You are listening to the score for a dream by Kenneth Anger or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk or David Lynch.
Robert: ‘We have been described as Lynchian - which we take as a great compliment. (And we did cover a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti song on our disc Komodo Dragons - so it sort of fits, don’t it?) But we both love the way Mr. Lynch takes something seemingly innocuous and pretty - such as a song like “Sixteen Reasons” or “Blue Velvet” - and discovers all these inherently disturbing elements beneath its surface. I hope we create a similar kind of frisson with our best songs.
‘Musically, we are deeply influenced by non-rock popular music from the later half of the Twentieth Century. Soundtrack composers like Ennio Morricone, John Barry and Jerry Goldsmith, exotica, bossa nova and tropicalia records, dub and a lot recordings of jazz and vocal standards - Ellington, Julie London, Peggy Lee, Nina Simone and such like.
‘Likewise, the work of people we like to call “middle-of-the-road mavericks”- artists who were able to create music that was both very accessible and deeply idiosyncratic and more than a little odd. People like Scott Walker, Serge Gainsbourg, Bacharach and David, Dionne Warwick, Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra, Dusty Springfield, Jimmy Webb, Bobbie Gentry, etc. And these influences get filtered further through the “rock” music we like, which is primarily the “artier” end of the spectrum. Stuff like the Velvet Underground and its alumni, Bowie, Roxy Music, Sparks, Joy Division, The Banshees, The Associates, Soft Cell, The Smiths, The Pet Shop Boys, Suede, Broadcast, Goldfrapp, etc.
‘Jonny described our sound as “glamorous easy listening music” initially. I loved that. Jonny and I are really attracted to glamorous sounds. We love orchestrations - strings sections, and french horns and flutes. We dig those gleaming, cold textures of synthesizers from the 1970’s.
All the things that you’re supposed to reject if you’re into music that is “true” and “real”. We dig artifice.’
Jonny: ‘Yes - we had pretty much all these things in common as interests from the start. I will never shake off the Smiths/Postcard/C86 influences I had when I started to play guitar, but there has always been cross-fertilization - from playing in orchestras and ensembles to collecting old easy listening, Latin and Brazilian records.’
Robert: ‘And our music tends to drift into the shadows, as it were. Traditionally - until the last century, really - “glamour” was an occult term. Its a synonym for “spell”. One casts a glamour. And that connection to magic also suggests a sense of mystery - I think. Nothing can be truly glamorous without an element of darkness or strangeness. All my favorite music has some eerie, even creepy, aspect. And I find a lot of classic horror and science fictions films - like Forbidden Planet or Suspiria or The Bride of Frankenstein - wildly glamorous. Star Trek and Space: 1999 likewise.’
Their first performance as Misty Roses took place in an old East Village Buddhist tea house. Jonny played guitar and backing tracks, while Robert “channeled Dusty Springfield”. For both, it was a moment of magic, and the promise of greater things seemed almost within reach. Almost….
”Starry Wisdom” from ‘Villainess’ by Misty Roses
More from the fabulous Misty Roses, plus bonus tracks, after the jump…
British animator Lee Hardcastle excels at getting to the very essence of a film (usually a horror film) with his 60-second claymation reenactments of movies like The Exorcist, Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Here’s Hardcastle’s take on David Lynch’s cult classic Eraserhead. I love the Northern accents, all done by Hardcastle himself. His accent ups the funny factor considerably.
See more of his Done in 60 Seconds with Clay webseries at Lee Hardcastle.com
Two sixty-second versions of David Lynch’s Eraserhead: one by Lee Hardcastle; the other by Martin Funke, which was made for the Jameson Empire Done in 60 Seconds competition.
It takes Lee Hardcastle 10 days to make one of his 60-second claymations, as he told Don’t Panic magazine:
I have some shortcuts, biggest ones are within the story – keep characters/locations down to a minimum because that stuff takes the most time to create. Something I learned over time is that whatever you do, do not skip out on the animation. People watch a video for animation, not a static image or boring moving graphics.
I re-use materials like cards & clay. Once in a blue moon, I’ll invest in something, last year I bought & made three armatures at £70 a pop. If I need something, I’ll search the apartment for props/materials. Check out my Eraserhead claymation, the bed sheet they’re sleeping in are in fact the underpants am wearing right now. It’s just the rent I have to worry about.
Lee has made a variety of other great 60 seconds films, including Evil Dead and The Exorcist, all of which can be found here.
Martin’s Eraserhead was one of the 10 shortlisted finalists, and more of his work can be found here.
The plot of the Grandmother centers around a boy who, looking for an escape from his abusive parents, grows a grandmother to comfort him. “There’s something about a grandmother…It came from this particular character’s need - a need that that prototype can provide. Grandmothers get playful. And they relax a little, and they have unconditional love. And that’s what this kid, you know, conjured up.”
The film has little dialog and combines animation with film, in its exploration of the “myths of birth, sexuality and death.”
[David] Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream her niece had during which she was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, then woke up and starting bouncing around repeating it. Lynch took this idea and ran with it. First he painted the walls of his upstairs bedroom black. Lynch painted Peggy’s face white to give her an un-real contrast to the black room, and had her bounce around the room in different positions as he filmed. This footage was edited together with an animated sequence where the letters of the alphabet slowly appear and a capital A gives birth to several smaller a’s which form a human figure.
The rest of ‘The Grandmother’ plus Lynch’s ‘The Alphabet’, after the jump…
David Lynch is releasing two singles Good Day Today and I Know on the UK independent label Sunday Best, as he told the Observer his first solo release Good Day Today came to him unprompted:
“I was just sitting and these notes came and then I went down and started working with Dean [Hurley, his engineer] and then these few notes, ‘I want to have a good day, today’ came and the song was built around that,” he said. Unlike his famously ambiguous and non-linear films, the song is accessible and, he readily admits, has a catchy “feel-good chorus”, with undertones of angsty electro-popsters Crystal Castles or veteran dance act Underworld. Why did he turn to electro for his first solo single? “Well, I love electricity so it sort of stands to reason that I would like electronics.”
The full interview with David Lynch can be heard here.
Actress Sean Young’s Super-8 film footage offers a fascinating glimpse behind-the-scenes on the set of David Lynch’s Dune. See craft services, Sting, Kyle MacLachlan, David Lynch and Sean Young goofing around.
Hausu (House), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, is the kind of movie that sends a writer scrambling for adjectives in an attempt to christen a new film genre. You pound your frontal lobes in the hope that you’ll dislodge some electrifying catchphrase that will be absorbed into film geekdom’s lexicon. I’ve been trying to come up with something hooky to describe the virtually indescribable mindbender that is Hausu. It’s not a J-horror film, it’s not a head film, it’s not some avant-garde psychological torture test, it’s not a cult film with an ironic smirk, it’s not…Well, I’m telling you what it is not. Let me try to wrap my brain around this and tell you what I think it is: Hausu is to cinema what a dream is to reality. It’s not just a simple record of events, it is the event itself. Hausu refers to nothing outside itself.
Though a mashup of pop memes, Hausu exists in a world of its own, devouring “reality” and puking it back up in glorious Technicolor. It’s a mixtape compiled by a demented Carl Jung - immersive, repellent, hysterical and visionary - forging a new consciousness composed of scraps of dead worlds.
Hard as it is to believe, Hausu was made in 1977. It feels as fresh and looks as startling experimental as anything being made by David Lynch or Guy Madden…except wilder.
Oh, the plot is about a demon possessed house, but that’s not important.
As for my new catchphrase, it’s a play on hypnagogic, that state between being awake and falling asleep. Hausu is hipnagogic.
Hausu will be released by Criterion in August on DVD.
David Lynch’s Interview Project has recently and quietly come to its scheduled end. The well-produced online-only project comprises a full 121 video interviews with random people, shot by Lynch’s team (led by his son Austin) on a year-long road-trip around the United States.
Lynch and co. manage to tap deeply into the wealth of personal stories in the great American working class that was first mined by the likes of oral historian Studs Terkel. But Interview Project filters Terkel’s ultra-earnest approach through the post-thereputic present, often getting a surprising amount of confessional material from a literal stop-and-talk encounter.
