Angelo Badalamenti - An angel for Lynch

Main Theme

It's more than established, taken for granted even, but it bears repeating. Angelo Badalamenti's foundations are those of the musician tout-court, before - and more than - those of the film-score composer and great aural vehicle for the cinematic aesthetic of David Lynch. Only this explains the authorial weight of his music, the depth of his melodies, and the charm - simple, almost elementary, yet impossible for anyone to replicate or even imitate - of his timbres and atmospheres.

His is a composite eclecticism that harks back to the legendary ones of Stan Kenton and Martin Denny, and he makes himself their ideal heir. So, from the standpoint of method, in Badalamenti the classical pianist, the arranger, the orchestra conductor and the jazz ensemble leader all coexist. From an aesthetic standpoint, the bard of the synthesizer alternates magically with the editor of electronic rhythm tracks, and with the fierce, unsettling experimenter of anti-musical sound effects. And from each of these skills just as many personalities emerge: the painter rapt in endless melancholy, the researcher obsessed with religious choral music of the Baroque era, the seducer with a passion for retro, the visionary who blurs the line between dream, nightmare and reality. And still others.

Prehistory

Angelo Badalamenti (of obvious Sicilian descent) was born in Brooklyn in 1937. A remarkably precocious musical ear of classical lineage, as well as a tinkerer at piano sonatas, he had a brilliant academic career that took him all the way to a master's degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music. His formative years were split between teaching music and playing piano for entertainment in the outlying theaters of his native city, while his earliest creative work included arrangements and song-writing for pop singers. It was precisely in this field that he met Jean-Jacques Perrey, sound engineer, experimenter and the French half of the duo Perrey And Kingsley, the most famous act of the mid-60s proto-electro-pop scene. Perrey introduced Badalamenti to electronic keyboards, and our man fell in love with them. A small collaboration soon sprang up between the two (with Badalamenti temporarily rebranding himself as Andy Badele), leading them to co-write "Visa To The Stars" - one of the highlights of the legendary "The In Sound From Way Out" (1966) - and, later on, the vaudeville piece "Danielle Of Amsterdam". The following year, another collaboration, this time with John Clifford, led him to write "I Hold No Grudge" (1967) for Nina Simone.

Badalamenti, though still working behind the scenes, already had part of the road paved ahead of him. His first job as a film composer came right in the midst of the exuberant blaxploitation wave, with Gordon's War (1973) by Ossie Davis, credited as Badder Than Evil, alongside another mentor, Al Elias. The very next year came Law And Disorder (1974), lighthearted, and still in the vein of Perrey's original style. These are scores of real merit, perfectly attuned to the images and, above all, to the mood of the era. But once that trendy wave died down, the composer too was left in its shadow, filed away as just one of many. The anonymity he was forced into over the following years nonetheless allowed him to keep pursuing his research into sound.

Angelo and David

Badalamenti's career truly began with David Keith Lynch, one of the greatest American directors of the post-hyperrealist late 70s. The two would influence each other, help each other broaden their respective artistic ranges, eventually shaping - though not always in a uniform way - an iconic alchemy second in importance only to those forged between Leone and Morricone, and between Fellini and Rota. For his part, in contact with Lynch's perverse dreamlike atmospheres, Badalamenti would literally unleash his talent, giving life to that unique signature style that sublimates noir and whimsy, gloom and sweetness, nostalgia and decadence. Lynch is, moreover, whether knowingly or not, one of the first non-musicians foretold by Brian Eno. In his earliest underground productions, especially in his first feature film Eraserhead (1977), the filmmaker does almost everything himself - aided by the skilled consultancy of Alan Splet - carving out a diseased path through musical engineering, breaking it down into muted industrial delirium, electroacoustic effects and, in general, genuinely unhealthy acoustic set-pieces. In this, Badalamenti's contribution would be not only the cultured, musical expansion of this vocation, but also, and above all, a true second expressive channel in its own right.

The most glorious, decisive proof of this contribution came in 1985. Lynch was in the recording room with Isabella Rossellini, his new muse: in one sequence of the upcoming film she would play a chanteuse tackling "Blue Velvet", the song made famous by Bobby Vinton in 1963. The actress, a complete novice at singing, needed a coach to quickly pave the way for her performance. Badalamenti himself was chosen for the job. After long sessions, the song and its arrangement (a decadent piano-bar blues) were ready to be slotted into the film score's editing. Lynch was struck by the maestro's professionalism and elegance, by the "velvety" quality of his interpretation, and sensed a kinship with him; he therefore decided to entrust him with the film's entire score, namely Blue Velvet (1986).

Badalamenti draws on nothing less than Shostakovich's Fifteenth, taking cues from the second and fourth movements. Another reference, albeit archetypal and therefore already more indirect, is surely the Miles Davis of “Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud” (1958). What results is one of the most wide-ranging and disturbing soundtracks in the history of film music, a kind of orchestral homage to late Romanticism, yet entirely oblique and postmodern. From the mournful legato of “Main Title,” a perfectly traditional introduction, we move to the vast adagio of “Night Streets/Sandy And Jeffrey,” brimming with woodwind dissonances, cavernous, demonic chords suspended in a void. In “Frank,” which opens with a grave phrase for strings alone, dizzying ostinatos culminate in brass screams, a hymn to the darkest tension, and so does “Jeffrey’s Dark Side,” another terrifying surge of orchestral dynamics. “Frank Returns” is a noir piece, in the best tradition of Bernard Herrmann, which magically morphs into a piece of classical music: ferocious howling chords, violent staccatos, malevolent tremolos. The technique turns mixed for the dark allegretto of “Lumberton Usa,” literally swallowed by a sordid vortex of sound effects. In this maelstrom of perdition, the sacred air of “Mysteries Of Love” arrives like an angelic blessing.

The entire score does not merely accompany, admirably, the grotesque mood swings and abrupt shifts of atmosphere in Lynch's film, but also forms a further layer of meaning, or rather a connector between the film's images and the viewer's reaction.

Once this symphonic nightmare has passed, the collaboration between the director and the composer becomes symbiotic: the two write and compose side by side, with Lynch explaining the scene or character to be scored, and Badalamenti responding directly at the piano. Thus, the music for the TV series Twin Peaks (1989) falls back more amiably on hazy melody; the construction of the themes turns the expressionist thickets of Blue Velvet into simpler refrains with rising emphasis, and the sound even becomes new age. Yet it is a highly particular lyricism, grounded in the glassy timbres of electronic keyboards (the “Twin Peaks Theme,” generated from just two touches of the baritone guitar, an apotheosis of joyous melancholy) that perhaps contribute even more sharply to establishing the composer's universe.

The continuous-loop sadness of “Laura Palmer’s Theme” and the “Love Theme” – its variation for transverse flute – a perpetual motion of dark notes rearing up into a mannered saraband, is an immediately gripping hymn. The same sweetness also pervades the little cluster of shuffles, a stylistic strand barely glimpsed in Blue Velvet but here taken to the utmost levels of catchiness: the jaunty steps of “Freshly Squeezed,” with xylophone, and “Audrey’s Dance” (also based on the “Love Theme”), built on wisps of clarinet and a Broadway-style horn section, the bluesy acrobatics of the sax in “Dance Of The Dream Man,” also find an unsettling expansion in “Night Life,” a dark oasis where stray horns are forced to squeal dissonantly, in a deathly swing cadence.

The project's success will be immediate, global, and even intergenerational, and the cult status of both the TV show and its music will become a genuine mythology.

Forced by the producers to wrap it up early, Lynch will immediately set to work on a massive project to adapt it for film, to be structured as a trilogy of three movies. Only the first, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), will see the light of day. Compared to the TV series score, this is more a mature work of composition than a sublime audiovisual geometry. The funereal, Miles Davis-like muted tone of the main “Theme” (partly indebted to the standard “Summertime”), “Pine Float,” “Moving Through Time” (an extreme variation on “Laura Palmer’s Theme”) and “Don’t Do Anything” are digressions worthy of a refined jazz ensemble, more than components of a soundtrack. And with the crystalline enchantment of “Voice Of Love,” Badalamenti also attempts a personal, kitsch reinterpretation of a Bach chorale.

On the other hand, tracks like “A Real Indication,” almost in the vein of Morphine, and the brief avant-garde gangsta-rap nugget “Black Dog Runs At Night,” credited to Thought Gang (nothing more than the Badalamenti-Lynch duo under a fictitious name), along with “Pink Room,” an anxiety-inducing slow blues penned by Lynch alone, raise the bar on the standards of contemporary commercial music. This jarring dichotomy, interesting even if unable to repeat the magnetic magic of the first Twin Peaks, will not win over the public but definitively establishes Badalamenti as the genius loci of the new universe created by the saga.

The complete Thought Gang recordings will see the light of day almost thirty years later on Thought Gang (2018). It's a surprise: the collection goes far beyond “A Real Indication,” expanding the experimental horizons barely glimpsed in “Black Dog Runs At Night,” and devoting itself entirely to an irrational form of free-form composition, as exemplified by the prelude “Stalin Revisited.” Their passion for big-band jazz suddenly emerges in thundering, whirling jams like “Logic And Common Sense” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships,” the latter unfortunately marred by distorted spoken-word stretched too thin. “Jack Paints It Red,” on the other hand, pushes vocal treatment into apocalyptic nightmare territory, mangling its features with electronics until it becomes pure unpleasant, unwieldy, dissonant sound, a post-avant-garde number that would sit comfortably on Twin Infinitives. “A Meaningless Conversation” is another brutal spoken-word piece, limping and Dadaist over a brutal brass march and dark deformities. Then there's the sound-collage side, introduced by a reprocessed shuffle overlaid with unsettling industrial rumbles and pierced by a smeared, dissonant guitar twang, “Multi-Tempo Wind Boogie.” The nearly seventeen minutes of “Frank 2000” offer an exercise in ambient-industrial harshness, split evenly between Lynch's sound effects and Badalamenti's synthesizers, followed by a jazz-rock improvisation that follows the same dictates of dynamic instability and extreme dissonance, even repelling the listener. They are consistently followed by the nine minutes of “Summer Night Noise,” an even more compact sonic body (that is, more ragged here) made of drum-cymbal touches and sinister cavernous reverb, which explodes into terrifying avalanches. Freed from the logic of the soundtrack and venturing into composition pure and simple, the duo finds its definitive and most authentic free-jazz, avant-garde brilliance.

Instead, the staggering popularity sparked by the two scores will reap a growing number of fans, year after year. Thus, missing fragments from the two soundtracks will surface in archival releases, Twin Peaks – Season Two And More (2007) and above all the massive Twin Peaks Archive (2011-2012), released only online. It turns out that some of Badalamenti's harshest, most twisted and difficult pieces were about to disappear along with the official releases. Bach is again the model for the nine minutes of “Dark Mood Woods/ The Red Room,” a masterpiece of muted electronic fibrillation and prolonged torture by swing guitar work. An old-school new age mastery emerges in the dissonant theme of “Birds In Hell,” a “gestural” jazzman's mastery surfaces in the clarinet solos of “One-Armed Man” and “Jean Renault’s Theme,” and a prodigious imitation of Penderecki surfaces in the first part of “The Culmination.” The eight minutes of “24 Hours” and the twelve minutes of “White Lodge Rumble” are extremely dark meditations that, moreover, reveal a few of the composer's tricks of the trade (the “slow speed orchestra” device), while the slow dance of “Half Heart” is perhaps the most poignant melody of his entire career, and – a masterstroke – the eleven minutes of “Circumference Of A Circle” are simply his most extreme synthesizer delirium. But in the films, many of these pieces are often used as fragments and mixed together.

Badalamenti also turned some motifs from his golden period into pop songs, completed with sentimental little poems penned by Lynch, and then entrusted to an angelic voice, Julee Cruise. The two become her producers for two albums, Floating Into The Night (1989), the most influential in launching this stretched-out, ultra-ethereal, even Gregorian mutation of female dream-pop (“Into The Night,” “Floating,” “Falling”) and of the old-school girl-group sound (“The Nightingale,” “The World Spins,” “Rockin’ Back Inside My Heart”), and The Voice Of Love (1993), still bolstered by the cosmic psalmody of “Questions In A World Of Blue.”

Cruise would later break free of Badalamenti's influence, turning into a vamp and reinventing herself as a singer-songwriter of late-period trip-hop, but The Art Of Being A Girl (2002) shows almost nothing but embarrassing limitations. My Secret Life (2011) is a collaboration with Dj Dmitry. She passed away in 2022.

The alchemy between oppressive synthesizers and noir-jazz from Fire Walk With Me also carries over into the score for another of Lynch's TV ventures, the miniseries Hotel Room (1993).

For Wild At Heart (1990), its spin-off, the anti-musical Industrial Symphony no. 1 (1990), and Lost Highway (1997), the collaboration between Lynch and Badalamenti is not as tight-knit. Amid sound fragments curated by Lynch himself, non-original music or pieces by other artists (including Barry Adamson), the composer contributes only pieces still in the Twin Peaks style (“Coot Cat Walk,” “Dark Spanish Symphony,” “Dark Lolita,” “Up In Flames”), but also miniatures of jam fusion (“Red Bats With Teeth,” “Dub Driving”) and new ambient phantasmagorias (“Haunting And Heartbreaking,” “Fred’s World,” “Pinky’s Bubble Egg”). The Lost Highway CD, moreover, leaves out a daring experiment on string tremolo with the City Of Prague Orchestra, Penderecki-style, used for one sequence in the film.

The symbiosis resumes for The Straight Story (1999). Despite the filmmaker's drastic change of direction (it's his most upbeat and linear film), Badalamenti's musical response adheres to it without the slightest flaw. In this case, then, it's an acoustic, rural, delicate accompaniment, a mimicry of bluegrass that almost entirely deactivates the sonic ambitions of a decade earlier. In the simplicity of “Laurens Walking,” a continuous fiddle flourish over just a couple of guitar arpeggios, or of “Country Waltz,” in the aching beauty of “Sprinkler” and the harp singing of “Rose’s Theme,” the composer's sensitive side reaches an intimate level. New melancholy surfaces in “Final Miles” and “Crystal,” for string ensemble, while electronics return on tiptoe in “Nostalgia,” spreading out once again like a church organ.

Mulholland Drive (2001), the last great collaboration between the two, is the most unsettling score since Blue Velvet, a new orchestral free-form – again with the City Of Prague – able to amplify its sense of anguish to (literally) unbearable levels. The entire score is littered with densely subliminal noise textures. The brief opening dance of “Jitterbug” is already inspired, an illusionistic overlay of a big band and one of his mournful classical string adagios, and the main theme is one of his finest, an ideal melodic extension of Klaus Schulze's “Irrlicht.” Then come the showpieces, abstract sketches that produce an asphyxiating string of grim chills: gongs, timpani and quavering dissonances for “Rita Walks,” a pianissimo that explodes into a terrifying flash in “Diner,” an unreal electronic oasis (perhaps his darkest ever) in “Mr Roque,” which then dissolves into a heavenly synthesizer fantasy, a New Orleans-style blues turned into a gothic lament in “Silencio” (shriveled echoes of “Dance Of The Dream Man”). And, dulcis in fundo, come the twelve minutes of “Dwarfland/ Love Theme,” the finest continuation of the muted nightmare of Twin Peaks's “Dark Mood Woods,” a whirlpool of very low frequencies and organ oscillations that unleashes fresh deflagrations of cacophonous strings.

The CD is rounded out by other forays into modern blues by Lynch under the Bluebob name ("Mountains Falling", "Go Get Some"), and unfortunately leaves out the closing "Mood Dark/ Ending", a saraband of atonal pulses in the void that seems to hint at new visions to come.

After Inland Empire (2006), in which Lynch once again rediscovers himself as a self-sufficient non-musician, there follows a decade-long period of silence, broken only by side projects and music video direction.

Meanwhile, though, the clamor of Twin Peaks fans had grown so intense that it pushed the director to continue the story he had left hanging two decades earlier, calling Badalamenti back in and dusting off the same two-man composing method: Lynch describing the scene, the maestro responding in kind (though this time the work was done via Skype). The result, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), features new churchy digressions in the style of "Voice Of Love" – "Accident/Farewell Theme", "The Fireman", "The Chair" –, a new cavatina for piano and synth, "Heartbreaking" (partly lifted from his own "Haunting And Heartbreaking" from Lost Highway), but also one of his touches of enigmatic genius, "Dark Space Low". This time, then, the maestro's contribution is limited: the rest of the score is entrusted to his spiritual pupil Dean Hurley, later released on Anthology Resource vol. 1 (2017), alongside Johnny Jewel of Chromatics and Lynch himself. His very last recordings are the strings underpinning Cellophane Memories (2024) by Crystabell and Lynch.

The Others

Far less well-known, and generally less distinctive, is Badalamenti's film work outside of Lynch. In practice, only two directors captured and made their own the same atmospheric force the maestro had crystallized in his work for the Montana filmmaker, attempting to personalize and expand on it: Paul Schrader and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

For the former, the key work is above all Comfort Of Strangers (1990), a sort of concerto grosso for orchestra and "desert" instruments, clearly indebted to Blue Velvet itself, but partly influenced too by Sakamoto's work on "Sheltering Sky". The other attempt, Witch Hunt (1994), painted in tear-jerking synthesizers and smoky jazz, is a score that is almost textbook Lynch-ian.

But the boldest operation lies in Jeunet's masterpiece, City Of Lost Children (1995), a memorable excursion into magic and grace, steeped in a Morricone-like tonal particularity that ranges from the barrel organ in waltz time, to the slow cadences of harp and winds, to new experiments on the contours of electronic keyboards.

The second chapter of the collaboration, A Very Long Engagement (2004), instead falls among the more classic, ponderous, heavy symphonic fantasies typical of big-budget cinema.

For years the maestro ran his auteur work for Lynch alongside commercial projects. Only Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987) by Norman Mailer contains orchestral experiments that recall Blue Velvet ("Infinity City", "Cacophonic Bugs", "A Thousand Locusts"). Arlington Road (1999), directed by Mark Pellington, and The Beach (2000) by Danny Boyle instead try to inject new vocabulary – industrial stylistic devices ("Bloody Boy"), his typical dreamlike-symphonic deflagrations, electronic rhythms, surprise dissonances ("Bizzarre City", "Vision Of Fantasy", "Blue Sex") – into the traditional Hollywood wall of orchestral sound. And in Jane Campion's Holy Smoke (1999) he in fact revisits the atmospheres of the contemporaneous Straight Story tradition, essentially a concerto for classical guitar and orchestra, with a fondness for South American tones.

Once these scattered, leopard-spot experiments were behind him, finally in the first half of the 2000s the composer managed to assert his own grammar. With Nicole Garcia's The Adversary (2002), Badalamenti is at his best, conjuring a new fantasia of dark polyphonic synthesizers, steeped in a sadness that makes Twin Peaks sound positively cheerful by comparison, and even a Morricone-style number with soprano trills, "House Of Silence". Similar but lighter in spirit is the score for Evilenko (2004), directed by David Grieco, one of his most ethereal scores, made of simple ambient phrasing improvised live (the soundtrack CD overlays spoken excerpts onto the music, ed.).

Steven Shainberg's Secretary (2002), in the style of Comfort Of Strangers, absorbs ethnic elements and instruments (flamenco, gypsy dances, Middle Eastern cadences, African timbres etc.). Walter Salles's Dark Water (2005) is then a grand-scale return to the expressionist noir of Blue Velvet, amplified with gruesome sound effects, and David Cage's Fahrenheit (2005), one of his best non-Lynch compositions, does even better: here you can once again truly appreciate his gift for treating the orchestral mass like plasma, like an extension of his keyboards. Slower and more melodic, by contrast, is Wicker Man (2006) for Neil LaBute, here and there dense with sounds from a macabre little theater in the style of City Of Lost Children ("Cycling Into A Nightmare", "The Rose And The Daydream", "Flashback Memories").

From here begins the downward arc, with lesser, far less ambitious work, down to Fedor Bondarchuk's Stalingrad (2013), perhaps his lowest point, alongside an anthology of dreadful orchestral reworkings of his themes, Music for Film & Television (2010). The exception is The Edge Of Love (2008), for John Maybury, a little carnival of retro atmospheres, partly entrusted to a small cast of singers (Keira Knightley, Suggs, Beth Rowley, Madeleine Peyroux, Patrick Wolf, even Siouxsie Sioux), from which the composer also crafts a small gem of sound editing, "After The Bombing/ Hang Out The Stars In Indiana", and partly pastiche pieces that recreate the dark recesses of Mulholland Drive ("Underground Shelter", "Love Me").

The maestro passed away in 2022 at the age of 85.

End Credits

Badalamenti's extra-cinematic activities, essentially productions for new pop artists (Pet Shop Boys, Dolores O'Riordan, Marianne Faithfull) or even collaborations with electronic acts (Orbital), actually amount to a return to his never-forgotten beginnings with Perrey, even if naturally now stripped of their mythically pioneering edge, and instead updated to a contemporary reality that he still manages to shape according to his own dictates.

Badalamenti, then, has by now become a kind of soul rather than a cold theoretical model — a sort of hologram that inserts itself between inspiration and realization in the creative spirit of the most atmospheric artists. That "elevator muzak" label, slapped on the Twin Peaks score by certain critics, is of course a derogatory and wildly reductive definition — on a par with the accusations of glibness that the stuffiest conservatory-trained purists level at Morricone's music — one we'd rather forget, yet one that, unwittingly, helps clarify something deeper about his art. It's an art that, by definition, synthesizes. First of all in the literal sense, not for nothing entrusted, winking and velvety, to an instrument that says it all in its very name: the synthesizer. Then in a broader artistic sense, when it brings together and at times intersects old and new stylistic devices, from seventeenth-century counterpoint to twentieth-century soundscapes, to free jazz, from chamber music to ambient, to minimalism. And finally, it's capable of synthesizing the very terms of musical language, partly caressing them and partly scrambling them, to find the most direct shortcut to the heart of listening. Several of Badalamenti's pieces would make an excellent case study in a music education class, or a lesson in how to listen. Not a reclamation of consumer music, but its spiritual elevation into an emotional totem.

Angelo Badalamenti died at the age of 85 on December 11, 2022. The news was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, which noted that the American pianist passed away at his home in New Jersey.

Announcing her uncle's death, Badalamenti's niece Frances also recalled his work on "Blue Velvet", "Cabin Fever" and "Nightmare On Elm Street 3", as well as his relationships and professional collaborations with David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Nina Simone, Julee Cruise, Isabella Rossellini, Dolores O'Riordan, Anthrax, Dokken, Eli Roth, and of course David Lynch. Frances Badalamenti pointed out that Angelo had always stayed true to his roots: he never left New Jersey for Los Angeles.

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