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David Lynch likes to say that “intuition is the key to everything”. In his films, artwork and music, the 78-year-old auteur follows his instincts through loops of dream logic, baffling and beguiling the rest of us. His third collaboration with 46-year-old Texan singer and audio engineer Chrystabell is a continuation of this subconscious unspooling, destined to delight fans and irk those in quest of crisp tunes and clear narratives.
It’s an enigma wrapped in a synth, tied up with reverby electric guitar and left on your doorstep at dawn with no return address, just the bittersweet perfume of Chrystabell’s breathy vocals hanging in the air.
Apparently, the idea for the record popped into Lynch’s head during a nighttime walk in a forest of tall trees with a bright light shining over them. That said, more concrete inspiration emerged when he found some old recordings he had made together with some music left behind by the late Angelo Badalamenti, who composed the haunting soundtrack to Lynch’s creepy classic Twin Peaks.
Badalamenti, who died in 2022, was a master of electronica that seems to levitate and glow with the same crepuscular sense of hope and dread inherent to Lynchian storytelling. He is credited on the first two of Cellophane Memories’ 10 tracks: “She Knew” and “The Sky Falls”. The synth lines he left behind seem to reach out like benign tractor beams from a flying saucer hovering just above a suburban back garden. Chrystabell’s voice is layered, lowered and collaged so that one can only catch snatches of Lynch’s quickly jotted lyrics: “She would never see... no reason.... kiss of death…” It feels like being a kid on swing overhearing snippets of your parents’ private conversations: you tune in and out – secure and unsettled by turns.
Lynch’s trademark guitar appears on the third track, as if echoing through the landscape of a roadhouse in the 1950s. Its drowsy glissandos like the top of a vintage convertible coming down as Chrystabell’s gently bruised voice runs in reverse. She sings of a helicopter, and later on the album, a truck. As in Lynch’s films, travel is conjured and reduced to an eerily stationary state. The tracks all blur into one, snatches of melody scudding past like clouds.
I have found the perfect conditions in which to hear this record: driving from darkness to sunrise as my passengers slept. Their stirrings and muttering wove themselves into what Chrystabell describes as “mood music”. Her engineering splices in all kinds of subtle creaks and gums, which ensure the tracks seep into one’s environment, blurring the boundaries between the images the lyrics throw up and your own memory banks. The horizon lightened almost on cue with the blissed-out optimism of the final track: “Sublime Eternal Love.” It often comes as a surprise that despite the disturbingly weird and violent worlds that Lynch creates, there’s often a trippy sense of transcendence. Even joy.
As somebody who has at various times found myself irritated by Lynch’s gnomic statements, I was unsure how I would feel about this record. Especially after I read that Lynch wanted us to hear it while mulling the earnest teenage stoner’s question: “What is a mystery?” At times it does play like the soundtrack to a rather pretentious spa – but Cellophane Memories snuck up on me with its subtle, synthy scrapbooking. Slyly seductive stuff, if not Peak Lynch.
