A look at 10 highlights from the career of composer Angelo Badalamenti, from his ‘Twin Peaks’s score for David Lynch to work with David Bowie.
When Angelo Badalamenti, composer and renowned collaborator of filmmaker-musician David Lynch, died on Sunday at age 85, he left behind some of the most evocative soundscapes known to cinema. Lustrous orchestration and small combo jazz sounds for Lynch works such as “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” tweaked the senses while underscoring the grotesquerie below the surface of the American dream. But there was so much more to Badalamenti than his sweeping cinematic ambience for a single filmmaker.
Here is a list of some of Angelo Badalamenti’s finest musical moments, with and without David Lynch.
The Slow Club scene in “Blue Velvet” and “Mysteries of Love” (1986)
Along with a cameo appearance as the pianist/band leader at the Slow Club where the tortured Dorothy Valens (played by Isabella Rossellini) sings, Badalamenti starts off her musical rendition of “Blue Velvet” as a sleazy lounge song, all blowzy saxophone and off-the-beat rhythms, before segueing into the tempered, twinkly “Blue Star.” That askew noir jazz vibe infiltrates the interstitial music that Badalamenti composed for “Blue Velvet,” until “Mysteries of Love.” Written with Lynch for breathy vocalist Julee Cruise, the ethereal “Mysteries” represents pure and blinding white love. From this point forward, Lynch, Cruise and Badalamenti became a team, existential doom-pop’s holy trinity.
Julee Cruise’s “Falling” and the theme song music for “Twin Peaks” (1990)
The descending guitar chords and the spare, flighty melody of Badalmenti’s whooshing synthesizer emulates the rushing springs of Twin Peaks’ great Northwestern mountains. But something sinister is surely afoot, a threat made deceptively angelic when Cruise’s high voice flits across Badalamenti’s haunted instrumental version of “Twin Peaks”’ theme – an unlikely pop hit that cracked Billboard’s Alternative Airplay Top 20.
“Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (1989/1990)
The stage at BAM during the winter New Music America Festival found Lynch directing a noisy yet celestial set of industrial soundscapes composed and played by Badalamenti and sung by Cruise (don’t forget dozens of rubber baby dolls lowered from the rafters with their eyeballs burnt out).
