Julian Kindermann

The Black Lodge

From David Lynch's Twin Peaks.

Re-scored by Julian Kindermann

At its airing in 1991, this was one of the most disturbing and avant-garde sequences seen on American television. This scene follows detective Dale Cooper as he seeks to bring back his girlfriend, Annie, from an evil alternate world called the ‘Black Lodge’. Lynch constructed this hellscape to be without time. He directed the actors to perform both forwards and backwards so he could later reverse the playback of the film to create otherworldly dialogue. To incorporate this sense of non-linearity in my score, I looked to Chion’s writings on temporal vectorisation in film. If sound grounds film in time because of its clear temporality, I utilized drones and sounds with obscured decays. For the main melodic motif, I wrote it as a palindrome playable both forwards and in reverse. This enhances Cooper’s internal narrative as he becomes overwhelmed with fear and confusion. All sounds were recorded and edited by me. Many of the guitar and drum samples were taken from live sessions I engineered for Great Blue Heron’s EP, Estuary.