Damn fine news, everyone! Like a fish in the dang percolator, David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s phenomenal score to the acclaimed TV series Twin Peaks just keeps popping up lately. According to FACT, experimental pop power-sluggers Xiu Xiu are the latest to heed the beguiling and mysterious call from deep in the northwest woods. Following a recent live interpretation in Brisbane, Jamie Stewart and co. have taken to Facebook to announce that, on October 8, they’ll once again perform Badalamenti and Lynch’s magnum opus, this time in London through St. John Sessions at the Church of St John-at-Hackney.
To be fair, the freaky, funky, spooky, hyper-theatrical nature of that music seems to lend itself pretty easily to the Xiu Xiu aesthetic. Still though, as Stewart himself readily points out, tackling the score note-for-note is almost as impossible as appeasing the log lady.
The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans. It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the “purity” of the 1950s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us. There is no way that we can recreate Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch’s music as it was originally played. It is too perfect and we could never do its replication justice. Our attempt will be to play the parts of the songs as written, meaning, following the harmony melody but to arrange in the way that it has shaped us as players.
Jeez, Stewart sounds pretty passionate up there, huh? Maybe even a little… too passionate? I sure hope that those are HIS words and not, you know, someone named Bob’s.
• Xiu Xiu: http://xiuxiu.org
• Angelo Badalamenti: http://www.angelobadalamenti.com
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