Twin Peaks Season

Dean Hurley is an American composer, sound designer, and music supervisor known for his collaborations with visionary director and musician David Lynch. He is responsible for building eerie, evocative soundscapes using electronics, tape loops, and field recordings. His sound design work was an integral part of the third season of Twin Peaks, and a digital collection of the material, Anthology Resource, Vol. 1, was released in 2017…

By the time Twin Peaks’ second season had aired and Fire Walk With Me had just began principle production, Thought Gang had been born. The esoteric jazz side-project of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti evolved from the seeds of Twin Peaks’ trademark slow cool jazz and blossomed into more experimental pastures: horizonless vistas of acid-soaked free-jazz, laced with spoken word narratives and sprawling noisescapes. Fire Walk With Me’s soundtrack would ultimately showcase two preliminary tracks (‘A Real Indication’ and ‘The Black Dog Runs at Night’) from a full-length album that wouldn’t see release for the next two and a half decades. Between May of 1992, and continuing throughout 1993, the bulk of the remaining material for the album was recorded in pieces. This dove-tailed into a string of contracted sessions for other Lynch-Badalamenti projects.

Philosophy of Beyond, the second volume in the Anthology Resource series, continues Dean Hurley’s experimental soundscape work into more ethereal and celestial territory. 12 tracks weave together a rich sonic tapestry built in part from comb-filtering experiments, tape loops, and sampled field excursions into unique acoustical environments. A bulk of the LP is assembled from Hurley’s sonic contributions to the recent feature film Perfect (2018, dir. Eddie Alcazar) as well as material made in residency for Art Gallery of New South Wales’ event Masters of Modern Sound…all of which are threaded together into a singular, cohesive dissertation on the afterlife. Outlining a landscape beyond physical reality, the record serves as a soundtrack to the mysterious and immortal voyage of the soul into depths beyond the known and back again. What lies beyond physical reality? Beyond intellect and the system of the five senses? What do accounts of near death experiences, alien encounters, psychedelic drugs, astral projection, even strokes all have to do with this and why do each seem to share a core architecture of description?

Since the release of 2015’s Love Songs for Robots, Montreal art-rock savant Patrick Watson has endured all manner of hardships—the death of his mother, the end of a long-term relationship, the departure of drummer Robbie Kuster, and the loss of a friend to suicide. They’re the sort of life-altering events that can’t help but filter down into an artist’s work. But while the title of his eponymous band’s sixth album, Wave, references the emotional tsunami he was forced to navigate, Watson refused to let grief be his guiding principle. “I just wanted to make a really simple and beautiful record—a little bit like Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden,” Watson tells Apple Music. That focus yields some of the most elegant, lyrically direct songwriting of Watson’s career, as he deftly threads Lennon-esque melodies and lean acoustic/piano arrangements with orchestration. But Wave’s spare canvas also leaves Watson with enough space to indulge his love of off-kilter experimentation—as he explains, making a low-volume record is not necessarily the same thing as making a low-key one.