Angelo Badalamenti

Writing a review of the “Twin Peaks” soundtrack is anything but a simple task. First of all, because of the status of its direct source: the only television work by the laconic American director David Lynch, written in collaboration with Mark Frost, the two-season series — never completed due to low ratings at home, caused by a shift in its broadcast time slot — marked an entire generation of Italian viewers, so much so that even today “Twin Peaks” remains the most-watched TV show in the history of our country.

But the affection for that masterpiece of television serial art would still be a surmountable obstacle. Rather, it's having followed the intricate, dark events of that American small town in the mountains of Washington State that stamps the listening experience of the soundtrack with an atmosphere of reminiscence: it seems literally impossible, after watching the show, to separate the music composed by Angelo Badalamenti from the visions, the faces, the images of the show it was tied to. Far from being a flaw, this is actually one of the work's greatest strengths. It is, in fact, equally impossible to picture the scenes filmed by Lynch and Frost without the unmistakable stamp of the Italian-American composer's intense music.

In this pairing of film author and score author — already a winning combination in the earlier “Blue Velvet” as in the later “Lost Highway,” “The Straight Story” and “Mulholland Drive” — it seems that each side is capable of illuminating the other, almost as though they had been born of a single act of creation.

This hall-of-mirrors effect isn't limited to a simple one-to-one relationship between a given theme and a given scene. Since the series ultimately ran to over 30 episodes and each theme naturally accompanied different moments in the unfolding plot, the kind of memory evoked by the “Soundtrack From Twin Peaks” could hardly be so straightforward.

Confirming the intense creative exchange between the visual and the auditory, the soundtrack itself at times seems to develop the same sense of narrative found in the show, as well as the same variety of registers the director employs.

In “Twin Peaks,” a police procedural and a small-town soap opera intertwine with unsettling visions and tales of supernatural forces, where every plane is subject to the constant possibility of slipping into and overturning into the other; the affairs of individuals — or, more often, of those couples steeped in deep melancholy — may seem unrelated when they first appear, but over time end up bound to one another, continually shifting in nature. The overarching plot, which begins by throwing us into the middle of events already underway and illusorily promises to eventually reveal all the “secrets of Twin Peaks” (the Italian title), in truth only grows more complicated: every event that occurs in that small town seems to open up a multitude of other paths that could lead to dozens of other, different events, without ever really making clear where we've arrived or where any given path will lead. All the more so since, over the course of the episodes, we discover that the story is advancing in a manner quite unsuited to the logic of “our” world: Special Agent Dale Cooper — introduced almost as an eccentric supporting character and later revealed to be one of the leads — conducts his investigation guided by what grotesque figures suggest to him in his dreams, by seemingly outlandish methods of Zen divination involving throwing rocks at bottles, or by revelations delivered by the most improbable characters (see the “Log Lady,” an elderly woman who acts as intermediary for the divinatory messages dictated by the piece of wood she carries in her arms).

Outlandish and improbable, perhaps, to some hypothetical outside observer; even the expressionist, terrifying scenes so dear to Lynch's art, generously scattered throughout the episodes, seem to be part of that same reality being depicted. Far from providing answers or explanations for what happens, “Twin Peaks” is a direct immersion into an immanent reality, where the real and the imaginary, far from being separate, ceaselessly interpenetrate and transform into one another.

In the same way, Angelo Badalamenti's musical work moves at tempos and registers different from those of either a conventional album or a conventional soundtrack. It would have been too easy, after all, if the reality created by Badalamenti — like that of Lynch and Frost — had, by virtue of its elusiveness, come across as entirely devoid of form, connections and temporal progression. Almost ironically, the album begins and ends with the same theme, that of the opening titles — once in its instrumental version, once with the voice of Julee Cruise and titled “Falling” — as if to underline that the album ends where it began, though not in the same way it started.

Badalamenti's delicate, minimalist noir atmospheres open cracks onto a dreamlike reality, laying bare the porous surfaces of the unconscious image with every melodic turn. Once you hear the first Morricone-esque guitar twang of the “Twin Peaks Theme,” swept along by the stirring electronic orchestrations and the ever so delicate hiss of drums in the background, you've already entered a time different from everyday reality, a time where speeds slow down only to grow more intense, immersed in the pacified senses of this splendid small-town reality of the American Northwest.

But the journey is anything but blissful: the following “Laura Palmer's Theme,” driven by that unsettling synth motif that will color the whole show with its heavy tones, is a mark of that persistent dramatic darkness whose tension is never resolved, not even by the melancholy piano melody, which keeps resolving back into those four sustained notes in the slow reiteration of the motif.

None of these tracks lets you think that things have a solution. Badalamenti churns out a set of unforgettable themes, dark refrains that always carry with them a terrible sense of mystery, the anxiety of an answer that never seems destined to arrive. And even when you hope you can forget it all with the next track, the same musical themes keep resurfacing: if in the smoky, oblique, seductive nocturnal jazz of “Audrey's Dance” the slow walking bass, the brushed drums, the crooked, hammering vibraphone and the absurdist bursts of horns à la Lounge Lizards finally seem to have made you forget the bad moments gone by, in the end the notes of Laura Palmer's theme come back once more to haunt the conscience like an indelible leitmotif.

That same vibraphone from “Audrey's Dance,” like a recurring dream, resurfaces sped up to double time after the solo in “Dance Of The Dream Man,” though stripped of the seething undercurrent of sonic events that ran through the first piece.

Not content with the few areas they've already occupied, the bass and drum figures from “Audrey's Dance” return once more within the swirling, colorful western of “The Bookhouse Boys,” blending with the synths of “Laura Palmer's Theme,” yet again in the sparser, calmer vibraphone solo of “Freshly Squeezed,” and once more still in the seething pastiche of vibrating molecules that is “Night Life In Twin Peaks” — a track that, incidentally, exemplifies the eclecticism of a mature composer capable of moving effortlessly from avant-garde sonic layering to the catchiest of melodic refrains.

Perhaps only the tracks featuring Julee Cruise escape this compulsion to repeat: her seraphic, distant, reverb-drenched voice suits the dreamlike atmosphere of the whole work, and, with both the luminous “The Nightingale” and the crepuscular (and aptly titled) “Into The Night,” gives life to two tender ballads of rare, melancholy enchantment.

But moments of peace are few and illusory, and with the penultimate track Badalamenti sets up his strongest act of displacement and condensation: in “Love Theme From Twin Peaks,” the stormy cloud of Laura Palmer's theme dissolves into a lyrical, heartfelt song, worthy of the most desolate Tom Waits; a soliloquy in the silence of the night, hushed and sadly resigned in tone, almost funereal in its terrible sense of inevitability. It is the solitary song of those unhappy lovers who populate Lynch and Frost's small town, those couples for whom the fragility and instability of life seem to have permanently stripped away the ability to have a peaceful relationship and look forward to a future of serenity. Not even love, it seems, can allow them to escape the guilt that marks them to their core, or the hardships of existence, caught up as they are in something greater than themselves, in a terrible fate that seems to gradually drag every inhabitant of the town into its vortex; they sing alone, in the now faint hope that someone, out there in the surrounding night, might one day answer their tragic laments.

A work of masterful tension, able to explore those liminal zones where the logic of the ordinary world thins out into the night; suspended between noir, ambient, cool jazz and western echoes, the "Soundtrack From Twin Peaks" remains a fascinating gem in the world of film scores, in all its unfathomable, crystalline darkness. No resolution for Badalamenti and Lynch: only one long, shadowy, unfathomable enigma.

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08/11/2007