“Twin Peaks Was 30”. A personal critical response by Jonathan Marshall.

Led by artistic director Cat Hope, Decibel recently mounted a homage to the musical collaboration between composer Angelo Badalamenti, vocalist Julee Cruise, and director David Lynch, for the latter’s  film Fire Walk With Me (1992). Entitled Twin Peaks Was 30, it was performed at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in May 2024.

This review is by A/Prof Jonathan Marshall.

 

Guest vocalist Rachael Dease with Decibel  performing “Questions in a World of Blue”.

It was the principally in the second composition, the world premiere of a commissioned work entitled “Tulpas Meet” by  Tasmanian composer Matt Warren that Hope and her collaborators most clearly sketched their larger reading of Twin Peaks as a portrait of a world where spatial, musical and sonic coordinates were twisted and skewed into a disharmonious realm of stochastic links, erratic configurations, irresolved grooves, and drones, which spread through bodies and soundscapes. “Tulpas Meet” served as an evocative prism through which what followed might be decoded, as slightly different instrumental combinations moved the audience from Badalamenti’s well known cool jazz chic, through to more fractured structures.

Audiences for Twin Peaks Was 30 were first admitted into the rear workers entry to PICA,  and into the main gallery which was set up as a claustrophobic proscenium arch theatre. The production concluded in the same space, but with a different orientation and dressed as a version of the Twin Peaks’ Bang Bang Bar. A wide stage ran down one end, in front of which audiences were seated at cabaret-style tables, with bar behind and a neon BANG sign. In between the main sets in these two spaces, two additional compositions were staged upstairs, with audiences leaving the proscenium arch stage for a piece mounted on the balconies overlooking the main gallery, before being ushered into the side upstairs gallery for a second work, and then back down to the caberet setting. Candice Susnjar’s arrangements of the instrumental jazz by Badalamenti et al often carried us smoothly between works, so the production largely played out as three blocks of music.

Twin Peaks Was 30 included much Lynchian weirdness. Hope wore three stylish ties around her neck as she hammed it up as the Bar’s mad master of ceremonies, and other costume details like the white, long nosed masks which appeared in the film, were worn akimbo on the side of the heads of Decibel’s performers and ushers.

Patrons being served at the BANG Bar at ‘Twin Peaks Was 30.’

 

In addition to Badalamenti’s cool jazz atmospheres, Decibel reproduced one of his more burlesque rock tracks, together with several of Cruise’s soaring ballads. The latter were ably interpreted by vocalist Rachael Dease, giving a more breathy and throaty rendition than the almost impossibly ethereal vocals recorded by Cruise herself. Decibel performed five pieces taken from the soundtracks, in addition to four other original musical works like “Tulpas Meets” which were less musically related to Badalamenti’s work, but inspired by concepts and/or sonic worlds suggested by the series.

Hope has stated that Decibel combines the distinctive “voices” of different sounding devices, juxtaposing the textures of acoustic instruments with electronic and amplified sounds. Stuart James’ exacting DX7 synthesiser sound employed by Badalamenti was therefore essential to the project, its rich, enveloping sound defined many tracks. Instrumental combinations and players elsewhere varied. James moved between electronics and drums, while Dease stayed on vocals, Hope took up flutes as well as vocalising and bodily performing, while Susnjar played electric guitar. They were joined by Lindsay Vickery on woodwinds, saxophone, and arranging, Tristan Parr on cello, Louise Devenish on percussion and drums, Phil Waldren on acoustic bass, and Aaron Dungey on viola.

Badalamenti’s and Lynch’s tracks “Falling”, “Fire Walk With Me”, “Laura’s Theme”, “The Pink Room” and “Questions in a World of Blue” all featured. So too did a variant on Badalamenti’s motifs composed by Dease, entitled “Since I Was 12”, which was anchored in an almost folk-like, repeated refrain building to chaos. Dease’s arch use of orchestrated folk music here recalled the work of Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan almost as much as that of Badalamenti. This linked well with the encore performance of Badalamenti’s and Lynch’s “The Sycamore Tree”, which by virtue of its melancholy lyrics foretelling of a deathly rendez-vous, was closer to a dirge-like murder ballad than most of Badalamenti’s better known works.

Decibel full band in the final stage of the night: The BANG bar.

Particularly where Dease sang, performances balanced an almost saccharine beauty with a pervasive feeling of doom such as was central to Badalamenti et al’s musical and dramatic vision. Despite repeated crescendos and musical resolutions, the concert as a whole played out as an extended study in musical return and sonic inertia. As with the life of Laura Palmer, around who’s murder Lynch’s narration circled, the score never allowed us to follow her (or our own) ecstasy, and so escape. For Twin Peaks fans, these skilled reworkings of Badalamenti’s and Lynch’s oeuvre were highlights.

As someone who never fully vibed with Twin Peaks itself, I was most struck by those compositions which used the series and its sonic worlds as a jumping off point for curious, raucous and/or unsettling expositions in gestural-timbral musics, or in the off-kilter rock Badalamenti also composed.

Decibel performed for example a version of the song devised for that central location of  the film Fire Walks With Me, The Pink Room. Departing from the cool orchestrations of the rest of Badalamenti’s work, “The Pink Room” recalls the nastiest version of a garage band playing the theme from “Peter Gunn”. Here too, the interest of Decibel in atmospheres and drone music was subtly in evidence, as dirty guitar and squealing saxophone built into, and was then overtaken, by the inexorable drive of percussion and bass dirge. Hope’s manic introduction to the arriving audience in her persona of the bar’s mad master of ceremonies also bought this section to an end. The Cramps and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins couldn’t have done better.

Cat Hope performing in the BANG bar.

James Rushford took a more textural approach in his composition “Espalier”. The piece premiered in Decibel’s 2012 homage to Australian artist-composer Jon Rose, and while the fugue like tones and vocalisations of the 2012 recording echo some of Badalamenti’s work, the original program notes made no explicit mention of Badalamenti or Lynch. “Espalier” was therefore best seen as an allied work which, when mounted in the context of Twin Peaks Was 30, read as evoking the shifting uncertainties and fated progression which the series traced. Here, as in much of the evening’s performance, the framing did more than dictate mood and ambience: the framing served as a manifestation of the musico-dramatic meaning itself—as with Lynch, for whom style and surface often served as content in its own right.

Watching Rushford’s work through security cameras on the PICA balcony.

For Decibel’s performance of “Espalier”, screens showed a live feed of infrared security cameras focussed on the performers. These were set up along the edges of the upstairs balconies. The camera feed did not visualise the musical actions of the performers clearly, but it did produce a sense of guilty voyeurism and unauthorised surveillance in the audience.

“Espalier” opened with a light bass drone as audiences came up from the lower galleries, and was then sparsely and quietly performed in extended glissandi and short emissions of sliding tones, together with some vocalisations. Devenish’s metallic strikes and bowed percussion provided sharp markers within an otherwise often extruded, drawn out yet airy ambience. At points, human and instrumental voices blended together. In its stop-start structure and sense of rising and falling, “Espalier” suggested the action of breathing. The piece was twitchy, unsettled, subtle and curious.

Performing “Glacé Cocoon”.

Also conceptually rich was Rebecca Erin’s “Glacé Cocoon”, performed following “Espalier” in the upstairs side gallery. Here Hope, Parr, Devenish, Dungey and Vickery responded to the relatively uncommon challenge of reading a sculpture as a score. The three dimensional work here was a bulbous, rotating red mass suspended before the performers. This object evoked Twin Peaks’ most outré plot device: the insane serial killer and murderer of Laura Palmer, BOB, who turned out in later episodes to be an interdimensional being who possessed humans, caused them to rape and murder, and then feasted on his victims’ energies. In its glossy red manifestation, Erin’s sculpture also evoked the characteristic design of Twin Peaks, with its red zig-zag patterns, as well as agent Cooper’s nuttier reveries about the town diner’s ole fashioned cherry pie.

The sight of five dark suited Decibel members fixated on this semi-organic blob brought the performance into Lovecraftian territory, as the music took us from the more texture focussed “Espalier” to a performance overtly grounded in performative gestures and enunciations. Sounds were jittery and restless. Drones emerged, particularly in the bowed percussion and vocalisations later in the piece, but rather than extended sounds, “Espalier” was principally characterised by a rich diversity of extended techniques to produce sonic density and musically irresolved agitation. The pronounced use of higher pitches towards the conclusion seemed to me at least to lead us away from Twin Peaks’ diners, bars and offices, and out into those sublimely threatening forests which feature in so many horror films. “Glacé Cocoon” concluded with radio static, suggesting both the lingering presence and diffuse absence of BOB’s malevolent energy.

The most performatively expansive work of the night however was the aforementioned “Tulpas Meet”. Tulpas are spiritual visualisations described in European mysticism and popular culture as projections of our other selves, such as Agent Cooper would famously be transformed into in the final episode of Twin Peaks, becoming the very serial killer he sought.

 

Performed behind a sheet of opaque plastic sheeting like that in which Laura Palmer’s body was found, Warren at first quoted not so much the musical motifs which accompanied Twin Peaks, but instead real-world and fantasmatic sounds which occurred at various points in the series. Throughout the performance of “Tulpas”, only indistinct shadows of the performers clumsily pulled aside that we saw a cluttered stage, with Hope at its centre. In jerky, semaphore like movements, she sketched Cubistic diagonals and crossed-body positions which added a sense of conflicted spikiness to proceedings. It was hard to know what was going on, but her body did not seem entirely under her own control, whilst there was a sense of dangerous cynicism and irony at play here too. Twin Peaks’ madness had begun to seep into the performance, causing bodies and sounds to convulse.

“Tulpas Meet”’s descent into the world of the Twin Peaks was announced by the sound of sirens. Hope ooh-ed, aah-ed, and wailed, as the music rose and failed, accompanied by shimmering cymbals, and echoey reverb-soaked guitar twangs. Five performers, barely visible behind the sheeting, delivered staggered blocks of backwards text as in a satanic mass, the sequence referring to the backwards vocalisations which featured in the closing Red Room scene from Fire Walks with Me. After these obscure incantations, we heard the sound of wind and rain. The last movement of “Tulpas Meet” prefigured what was to become an undercurrent across the evening of locked in or semi-static structures here, with lightly plangent string tones over extended bass, and then cymbals, developing into a pair of pulsing passages, briefly suggesting parallels with the use of repetition by Louis Andriessen and the US Minimalists.

“Tulpas Meet” was a seriously fun, dark game enacted in music, gesture and voice; arguably closer to performance art than new music per se. Here more than anywhere else in the program, the artists not only alluded to, but exceeded, Badalamenti and Lynch. I was however unsettled that, 30 years on, we are still mesmerised by the narrative of a good girl turned bad who was, almost as punishment for her vitality, murdered by one of the first of an extremely long list of televisual and cinematic sadistic male serial killers to come. If however one follows Susan Sontag in her famous injunction to read “against interpretation” and instead according to one’s sensorial response to the imprisoned yet restive sounds presented here, perhaps one might ride one of Hope’s vocal screeches, or Susnjar’s guitar twangs, out of these cycles of masculine violence and into more joyfully chaotic realms of sonic and corporeal possibilities.

Decibel’s “Twin Peaks Was 30” was presented at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, and produced by PICA in association with Tura New Music, May 9-11, 2024; see https://pica.org.au/whats-on/decibel-new-music-ensemble-twin-peaks-was-30/. It was performed by Decibel –  Cat Hope (artistic director, flutes, performance), Stuart James (drums, electronics, organ), Louise Devenish (drums, percussion),  Lindsay Vickery (woodwinds, saxophone, electronics, additional arrangements), Tristan Parr (cello) and special guests Rachael Dease (vocals, composition), Candice Susnjar (electric guitar, arrangements), Phil Waldren (acoustic bass), Aaron Dungey (viola), and featured compositions by Angelo Badalamenti with David Lynch and Julee Cruise, Matt Warren, Rachael Dease, James Rushford, and Rebecca Erin. It was co -designed and lit by Jennifer Hector.

Assoc. Prof. Jonathan W. Marshall is coordinator of postgraduate study at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Perth. He has published in both journalistic & scholarly outlets, including “Sound Scripts”, “Limelight”, & was a contributing editor to “RealTime Australia”, 1998-2017. Jonathan has published on hysteria, neurology & performance (“Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot”, 2016) & his forthcoming monograph “Butoh & Suzuki Performance in Australia” is due for release on the Brill Australian Playwrights series in late 2024.

Twin Peaks was 30 opened at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) in Perth, Western Australia on Thursday 09 May at 7:00pm. 

 

Photos by Edify Media.

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