“The love of experimenting with sound and music is what was driving this boat,” explained the self-taught ‘non-musician’. “All of the songs on the album started as a jam. The jams eventually found a form and lyrics appeared.”

Lynch recorded Crazy Clown Time over several months at his own Asymmetrical Studio with engineer Dean Hurley, who contributes guitar and drums to several songs. The recording process, Lynch recalls, was filled with happy creative accidents. “There were so many accidents; this album should be in the hospital.”

The result is a collection of dark songs Lynch has described as “modern blues.” Filled with foreboding soundscapes, hypnotic rhythms and enigmatic lyrics, Crazy Clown Time will surely resonate with fans of Lynch’s films, but should also appeal to listeners who appreciate gloriously daring and quirky pop music.

Issued in a heavy cardboard sleeve including a 16 pages book.

All songs written and performed by David Lynch and Dean Hurley, except "Pinky's Dream" written and performed by David Lynch and Dean Hurley and Karen O.
Published by Bobkind Music Inc, administered by Universal Music Corp. (ASCAP)
Except "Pinky's Dream" published by Chrysalis Songs (BMI) and Bobkind Music Inc, administered by Universal Music Corp. (ASCAP)

℗ 2011 Sunday Best Recordings
© 2011 Sunday Best Recordings

Barren train stations, Polish factories at night, and silent hotels where lonely travelers meet. These are the images and suggested narratives that pervade the spirit of Polish Night Music, the musical collaboration between American filmmaker David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Eraserhead) and Polish concert pianist and composer Marek Zebrowski.

Zebrowski and Lynch first met during the Camerimage Film Festival in Lodz, Poland, and started to work together during the organic evolution of Lynch’s Inland Empire. Originally, Zebrowski served as a translator for the shooting of several Lodz-based Polish scenes in Empire, but upon discovering their shared interest in musical experimentation and improvisation, Lynch invited Zebrowski to his Los Angeles studio to participate in a series of musical experiments. From these initial collaborations, inspired by their unique and distinct connections to Poland, emerged a tangible mood and distinctly modern texture that became Polish Night Music.

“(Poland) is a landscape that continues to remain at once familiar and completely alien to me,” Zebrowski explains. “Every time I am there, I am surprised by some- thing, and I think for David, Poland certainly represents the process of discovery.”

“We don’t know what will happen,” says Lynch, simply. Somewhere in this not- knowing exists the experience of a Polish night, and this album is its soundtrack.

“Has that Twin peaks sound at it’s heart… A treasure” 4/5 The Evening Standard

“A dreamlike, woozy take on “modern blues”, where Tom Waits, Jack White, and some of Alan Vega’s more sentimental moments colide” 4/5 Saturday Times

“Beautifully Twisted” Daily Telegraph

“Killer Tunes” Independent on Sunday

‘The Big Dream‘ sees Lynch returning to primary songwriting and performance duties, writing 11 out of the album’s 12 tracks. Also included in the lineup is Lynch’s signature take on the Bob Dylan folk classic ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown’. ‘The Big Dream’ was recorded over several months at Lynch‘s own Asymmetrical Studio with engineer Dean Hurley, who also contributes production and instrumentation to the album.

Describing his style of music as “modern blues“, Lynch says the songwriting process for his new album was similar to his debut. “Most of the songs start out as a type of blues jam and then we go sideways from there. What comes out is a hybrid, modernized form of low-down blues.”

Double heavyweight gatefold LP, which includes 7" David Lynch & Lykke Li - I'm Waiting Here.

The origin of Chrystabell and David Lynch’s album Cellophane Memories comes from a vision that David experienced during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light. As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him. It is from these mysterious convergences of light and sound, day and night, starry sky and black forest that Chrystabell and David’s collaboration has continued to blossom.

For Cellophane Memories, the two have traveled through different portals. Fittingly, many of the songs are set in fairytale forests, mountain peaks, swimming holes, crepus-cular highways and darkened bedrooms. These are the abodes of both loneliness and romance, the sorts of sublime landscapes where people often travel alone in search of a wayward lover. But they are also shapeless atmospheres—of color, weather and breath: blue and white skies, red roses, darkening thunderheads, swirling winds and summer perfumes, which quickly immerse the traveler in the supernatural sensations of other worlds.

Time is a mercurial creature in Chrystabell and David’s songs. The characters are little more than oblique sketches of time’s quotidian melodramas: people arrive and depart as strangers, strangers fall into despair and love, lovers part at the crossroads and re-unite in a dream. In this quantum matinee of everyday life, each character is both a star and a background extra. Elisions in time reappear over and over within Chrystabell’s vocals, which emerge and dissolve and loop back in layers of harmony and history. They are mantled by David’s, and late composer Angelo Badalamenti’s, orchestra of waldeinsamkeit-inspired strings, oneiric guitar glissandi and clouds of reverb, whose melodies are like the sensation of time pausing for a first kiss.

As with much of Chrystabell and David’s work from the past, Cellophane Memories returns us to a central question: what is a mystery? Alas, the riddle remains unanswered. But all mystery contains slivers of those conceits and feelings described above: the departing and the coming-back, the landscape, atmosphere and breath, the topsy turvy mechanisms of time, memories of the bygone, a distant light radiating from darkness, music within silence, love.