The tenth annual New Music America series, where the audience is urged to expect nothing but the unexpected, opened in November at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (and various participating locations around Manhattan and Queens) with an appropriate "difference." Audiences were shunted between there theaters in the BAM complex in one evening to see and hear a triple bill of Kip Hanrahan's Look, the Moon, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy performing 23 Facts in 2 Acts, and David Lynch's and Angelo Badalamenti's Industrial Symphony #1.
Now, to these eager ears, the main event promised to be the latter. And it definitely was. David Lunch may be the most interesting and intriguing director working in this country right now, and Blue Velvet (which won the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Film of 1986) was the most wildly innovative movie to make it to the screen during the last decade. It was for Blue Velvet that Angelo Badalamenti wrote the score and he has also composed music for Lynch's current TV series, Twin Peaks.
Industrial Symphony #1 begins, not unexpectedly, with a film clip of Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern (who both appear in Lynch's upcoming film, Wild At Heart), caught in a lovers' tangle of words. He's trying to tell her he wants to break it off and she doesn't want to hear it. "There's nothing wrong with you," he explains, bringing the banal conversation to its conclusion. “It's just us."
But, as David Lunch understands, there's a lot of truth in the banal and, as Blue Velvet suggested, Lynch enjoys the banal as much as he is fascinated by it, as if by a hypnotically insipid tune. (He understands the potency of cheap music.)
Industrial Apocalypse
But - wham! - the complacent atmosphere of the film clip is followed and destroyed by screams and sirens as lighting suddenly reveals a stage rigged for apocalypse. Smoke belches out of a big stack. Spotlights hunt down dark pockets all over the stage. The chrome of an old car - a fifties model, it looks like - gleams in the dim lighting. On a hospital gurney stage center a thing lies waiting.
You can't quite see what it is, which succeeds in creating the kind of dread Lynch is so good at conjuring (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man). It does, however, appear to have antlers. Miniature airplanes dangle from wires in the grey, sooty sky. In the same sky, a man and a woman float above the wasteland below.
Clearly, this is not your ordinary symphony.
Then, descending like an angel into this obscured - and obscure - landscape is singer Julee Cruise dressed in a white, or perhaps soft pink, prom dress, singing in her teeny-weeny voice, to Badalamenti's alternately soft and dissonant soundscape, about "darkness" and "empty space." Badalamenti's music seems to buoy her voice with its evocations of reverie - lovely, floating notes, as if we were hearing the music in slow motion.
The effect is quite extraordinary: a superimposition of the ethereal over the already surreal. Julee Cruise's prom dress is significant. Like the car, it's a fifties artifact, and Lynch, if
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