#chrystabell

[unaturalhistory]

Chrysta Bell

[mimeticspace]

[radiophd]

chrystabell & david lynch -- the answers to the questions

[makotoscoffee]

[ursaminorjim]

"Polish poem" - Chrystabell, This Train

PLAY LOUD AND DREAM.

[nedison]

The Answers to the Questions - Chrystabell & David Lynch (2024)

[dustedmagazine]

Chrystabell and David Lynch — Cellophane Memories (David Lynch Music Company)

Photo by David Lynch

Vocalist Chrystabell first worked as an actress with poly-artist David Lynch on the third season of the 2010s incarnation of Twin Peaks, in which she played the FBI agent Tammy Preston. That wasn't the beginning of their collaboration: The two had worked together on her debut album This Train (2011) and the EP Somewhere in the Nowhere (2016). His famous vocal muse, the high soprano Julee Cruise, had quite a different voice from Chrystabell, whose sultry alto combines a warm lower register with the capacity to venture upward in head voice. She has since pursued a number of musical projects with other artists, including Strange As Angels (2021) an album of Cure covers with the Nouvelle Vague’s Marco Collin. Her reunion with Lynch is on 2024’s Cellophane Memories.

Many often think of Lynch’s work in film and television as primary while assuming that music is a less serious pursuit. They would be wrong. From transcendental meditation to scriptwriting to playing on a recording, he takes all of his activities seriously. Cellophane Memories’s electronic music is redolent of ambient synths and not dissimilar to some of the tracks from the reboot of Twin Peaks, or from the work of departed composer Angelo Badalamenti, with whom Lynch had a close working relationship. Mythic images, particularly ones embellished in romantic horror and fantasy — castles, fairies, deserted houses, lonely highways — are the album’s scenery. The themes of loneliness and isolation go hand and hand with this imagery.

The song “She Knew” opens the album using patches that bring the listener right into the Twin Peaks universe, extra vibrato on lower strings, and a sustained high violin closer to straight tone. Chrystabell frequently uses overlapping vocals on Cellophane Memories. “Real Love” develops upon the Twin Peaks Season Two cut entitled “Blue Frank.” There are a number of vocal overdubs, each sinuously sliding between their respective melodies.

“The Answers to the Questions” points up a declamatory approach, textual elision. Elision furthers the commingling of sonorities and ambiguates meaning. Some isolated and lonely people talk to themselves. Here, it seems instead that the stories Chrystabell has to tell, with their timeless archetypes, resound again and again. The blurring of narrative and objectivity into subjective textures is a classic Lynchian device as well, as one can see in the photos he takes with a time lapse setting.

“Sublime Eternal Love” closes the album with an affirming major progression. The vocal overlaps are still there, but Chrystabell’s diction is more distinct, ending a recording of dark pathways moving towards an imagery of endless light.

Christian Carey

[antigonas]