Current mood: HEAVY
Category: HEAVY Music
I was having a conflab with one of my spazzing friends last night and it emerged that I'd been listening to the music from Twin Peaks alot this week and I'd not mentioned it in the hits, and that got me thinking it was due a full piece in it's own right..
Why?
Well, the music from Twin Peaks, together with much if not all of Angelo Badalamentis music has a depth and a class that is truly excpetional..
I mean, generally speaking, everytime there's a long term creative success, it's essence comes from the detail and the quality: To be watched, loved, read or listened to time and time again, the creation has to be totally solid and stand up to examination in countless different places and at different times when fashion and the pace and importance of life are completely different. It's then and there that the clever PR bullshit gets stripped away and the creation stands up by itself and it's true merits become clear...
The music of The KLF, Fela Kuti, Lee Scratch Perry, Miles Davis, Andrew Weatherall, Kraftwerk all have it
The writing of Henry Miller, James Joyce, George Orwell (and of course Paul Giovanni, James Deman, Paul Deman and Paul Fullbrook) all stands the test of time and place...
And then there's Twin Peaks
I only saw Twin Peaks for the first time in 2003. I was aware of it at school, but wasn't allowed to watch that kind of thing, and it was only when i was running out of David Lynch films to watch that I remembered he'd had something to do with it....
I bought the whole of both series on pirated vhs from ebay and waded in. The picture and sound quality was pretty ropey (they'd all been recorded from the sci-fi channel, then mass copied), but it didn't matter. I, like so many people, got pulled in by this wonderful mystique community in the middle of nowhere that provided a kind of safe and stranger dream haven...
And a big part of this was the sound....
So often, when you take the music away from the images it's designed for, it doesn't stand up. So many soundtrack albums are just pure shite. Sometimes the music still has quality and value, but it doean't really work alone: It's too short or is lead by the image.
But I never find this to be the case with Badalamentis work. I almost feel like his music is solid - is a material object. It's never flitey or light. It's dark, deep and terribly beautiful. It's drenched and heavy. It's like a heavy sleep, a blissed dream of dark emotion.
I remember once putting the Twin Peaks CD on loop all night and I woke up feeling more than a little strange, but it was so beautiful and I kept it playing all day long....Jesus, by the end of the day I was in those fucking deep, dark woods...
And this week, I had it on and was trying to work out if i could DJ any of the tracks, but i got caught into just listening over and over again and enjoying it and thinking what could you put next to that, or before that, or after that in a DJ set??
On a more general note, I'm wondering why Italians and Italian Americans are so good at film music??
Look at the biggest films and the most famous soundtracks and they're nearly all made by an Italian or Italian/American composers..I mean, who else is there apart form Nino Rota (Godfather, La Dolce Vita,), Badalamentii (All of Lynchs later films) and Enino Moriconne (Do i need to list them?)
People go on about but John Williams, but he's never struck me as having much idea about soul or emotion...
Does anyone have any idea why this is the case? Is it to do with the tradition of classical and operatic music, or Italians apparent love of drama in day to day life??
Does anyone have any recomendations for film score composers? Great composers who aren't Italian or Italian American?
 | Currently listening :
Twin Peaks (TV Soundtrack)
By Angelo Badalamenti
Release date: By 31 August, 1990 |
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