Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted

I was a bit Twin Peaks fan at its peak. The series was nothing like I've seen on television. With the passing of Julee Cruise and Angelo Badalamenti last year, I've been mourning the musical collaboration between the singer, composer and lyricist, David Lynch, who is still alive. I never saw this show as experimental concert. Julee Cruise is the star performer who sings hauntingly and with the voice of an angel. Julee is floating above or singing from an old car. The concert last only an hour. It's bizarre to say the least. David Lynch is truly an artist and visionary too. He opens your mind to so much more. Music and visuals are key in understanding. I hope Julee and Angelo are making beautiful music in heaven as they did on earth.

This is a fantastic production that caught my eye because of my long love of 'Twin Peaks.' Although it is actually unrelated to the show, 'Dream' has enough elements of 'Peaks' to make it seem to be an extension of the series. Julee Cruise, the otherworldly bar singer in 'Peaks,' stars as the dream-self of an otherwise average woman whose heart has been broken. Other familiarities from the series include Michael J. Anderson (the "little man from another place"), the song "Into the Night," and the instrumental "Bookhouse Boys" used as the background to "Up in Flames." I greatly enjoyed this fifty-minute trek back into the surrealism and sound that made the series so unique.

There are two sides to Lynch. One is the master who works in long, abstract form and gives us not just a world and some plot that takes place there but a world together with the mind that gives rise to it, creates agency from that mind that is itself at the mercy of that world.

The other is the art school student, painter, sculptor, all around quirky guy who loves to populate these abstract forms with scrapyard theatrics and figures, log ladies and black-faced monsters behind the corner. It takes both of these Lynches to give us the truly mind-bending stuff that haunt.

Here we have just the second Lynch. He got together with Angelo Badalamenti, secured a soundstage and staged a performance piece around dreamlike heartbreak. We have bodies suspended on strings, a midget who recites, a demonic figure dancing on stilts. Various hues of light, beams and flashes, an industrial feel. The good witch from Oz sings throughout.

It has something akin to purpose, framed as it is as Lula and Sailor breaking up at the start, it was probably something he had fun with for a few weeks after finishing Wild at Heart. But it's a thin agency and mostly these forms mingling on a scrapyard stage, a bout of eccentricity.

He would do a lot more of these in later years when he could just grab a digital camera, but it's when both Lynches are at work that I'm interested.

Ever wondered what it would be like if David Lynch put on a musical stage show with Julee Cruise? Look no further! Industrial Symphony is a supremely strange show put together by David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti for the annual Brooklyn Academy of Music. They only had two weeks to prepare for the show, and so the result is rather remarkable.

It opens with Sailor and Lula from Wild at Heart on the phone, with Sailor leaving Lula. The rest of the film is an extended fever dream set on stage. It reminded me of a concert, only this is a concert by David Lynch so there's awful blonde wigs, half naked women gyrating on cars and dwarfs sawing logs. I found it rather fabulous.

Julee's vocals are incredibly haunting and hypnotic. Match this with the visuals David presents us and it feels incredibly nightmarish. There's a moment where Julee stops and screams mid-song and falls from the rope suspending her from the ceiling. It's so jarring and it actually scared me a little bit. It doesn't help that she turns into some 30ft skinned papier-mâché deer either.

The whole thing wouldn't have felt out of place if it appeared as a scene in Inland Empire, so that gives you an idea of its mesmerising weirdness. For Lynch fans, it's unmissable. For everyone else, it isn't.

For some reason I tend to start disliking Lynch because I like his work so much. I went into this quite critical, as I didn't really expect much. But still.... Lynch just continues to enchant me as an artist.

To explain what this is: Its a musical and a play, and its about a woman being brokenhearted as she's been left. The strength of the whole thing is the atmosphere. Really gripping and wonderful. There's fog all over the stage, and the haunting music is simply perfect. And of course the imagery.. and the lyrics. Its shocking, but attractive. You never really get whats going on though, its really dreamy. People floating in the air... and at one point there's a huge devil walking around on stage. When the haunting scene with the millions of dolls was strung down on the scene with creepy music alongside it was the point I personally was convinced that this is a masterpiece.

I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys the further-out side of Lynch's work. The atmosphere in this one is just gripping.