David Lynch - The Darkened Room (remix)
It's pretty crazy here as I/we wind down one month and living space, and prepare to inaugurate new ones here.
With the close of one era and the start of another, there are always transitions. In the next few days we'll document two recent departures from our plane of existence, who both left indelible marks upon culture in their time with us.
We'll end January with something unusual for me, as I am not sure whether I've ever done a film director on here before, albeit one who dabbled significantly in music.
This little project started a few weeks ago, when I began to consider the possibilities in using the AI stem tools to remove/rearrange dialogue from movies and so forth, and to create what some people have come to refer to as Isolated Scores for films that don't have proper soundtracks.
When today's memorial honoree passed a couple of weeks ago just days shy of 79 -- probably the most visible person claimed by the catastrophic LA wildfires of early January, having succumbed to the emphysema the smoke and his evacuation had flared up -- I started to think about paying him homage in this way, and happened upon a bootleg DVD -- or maybe it was released legitimately, in a very limited way, long ago, I really am not sure -- of some of his short films that had been posted for subscribers to his website back at the turn of the 21st century.
Suddenly, the opportunity came into focus to strip down and reassemble the sounds he made for these pieces into what might, disbelief necessarily suspended, pass for a soundtrack album.
In the spirit of creativity which he so aptly represented, I spent the last two weeks molding and shaping the thing into a CD's worth of sounds.
In case you wanna see the films -- most of which I could find nowhere online, amidst many pleas, in many locations, for the DVD of them -- I stashed them in the folder alongside the OST I created.
Obviously I need offer no substantiation of who David Lynch -- easily in the discussion for Cinematic Auteur of Our Lifetimes -- was, or what he means to the continuum of the art of the moving image, or what kind of unfillable void in Art in general his passing creates.
In putting this opus on its feet, I made sure to get all the building blocks and industrial soundscape noises he loved to pepper into his work, showcasing them alone and in various strange combinations that (almost occasionally) work as music.
As far as I know, the only one of these that he ever commercially released was the actual Industrial Soundscape song, which came out as an mp3 file on his old site 20-something years ago.
Anyway I had a stone blast doing this thing, and I hope it's taken in the intended spirit of illuminated, always-challenging creative juice that David Lynch himself featured so unapologetically and naturally.
All right, get your goggles on and let's build us a lamp, shall we?
David Lynch
Dynamic:01
original soundtracks
2000-2001
01 Lamp In a Darkened Room
02 Out Yonder - Neighbor Boy
03 Steps
04 Dynamic 01 (title music)
05 The Darkened Room II
06 Sunset #1
07 The Darkened Room I
08 Industrial Soundscape
09 Boat
10 Interior Dining Room
11 Dynamic 01 (suite incl. Bug Crawls)
12 The Darkened Room (remix)
Total time: 1:16:00
PCM Audio, from a 2007 DVD, of David Lynch short films posted to his website in 2001
extracted, demuxed, edited, denoised, processed, remuxed and remastered by EN, January 2025
370 MB FLAC/direct link
370 MB FLAC/direct link
That is gonna finish out January on a pretty interesting note, and get me started on frontloading February to hit whilst I move my shit and flit from the pit to something more sunlit.
I will get started on putting together a nice sequence for the other dearly departed January star -- who somehow also left us at the age of 78 -- and I may even mess with the acoustic segment of it in the AI stem tool again to make it as great as it can be.
Don't you dare bypass the filter on this delicious Lynch special -- may he rest in peace -- though.... I don't wanna have to call in Frank Booth and his case of Pabst Blue Ribbon (!!!!!) to set you straight, now do I?!--J.
1.20.1946 - 1.15.2025