Composer Angelo Badalamenti was the Great Missing Man For the first few hours of Twin Peaks season 3.
It began almost eerily quiet. There was the typically meticulous David Lynch sound design, but there was nothing like the nearly wall-to-wall jazzy snap and shuffle of the old series. Still, it made sense. This was a world slipping back into its skin and feeling its way through the dark. Characters we hadn’t seen in twenty-six years were in no rush to open up to us about where they’d been all this time (except for Lucy and Andy). It was mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery, right from the first scene.
What do you do when you’re driving and you get lost? You turn your music down until you understand better where you are. Same thing here.
When Badalamenti did show up again, it was in moody, almost funereal, washes of sound. Ascending and descending. Up into Heaven, down into dirt. Up into dreams, down into secrets. The new Twin Peaks used some of its old cast very differently this time (including its own lead actor) and the use of Badalamenti’s music, every bit as essential as the on-screen players, similarly changed. It no longer showed up willy-nilly, scoring every twist and turn. No, when you hear a Badalamenti piece in Twin Peaks season 3, it’s a heavy moment. Something’s about to change. In a series full of questions, Badalamenti’s keys and strings often seemed to underscore an answer. It’s the sound of a door opening and you never could have predicted what was behind it.
A few others share space with the master, notably Johnny Jewel’s torchy trumpet mood piece “Windswept” that emerges as the theme to Agent Cooper’s strange return to the conventional world. It sounds like a lonely Saturday night. Everything cool is happening so far away while you’re alone picking up the pieces of something, but none of them fit together.
Side 3 of the vinyl deserves special attention. Its three pieces are all from the devastating Episode 8, perhaps the strangest, most brain-flaying hour of scripted television ever produced. I’m still getting over it. Krzysztof Penderecki’s nightmarish orchestral piece “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” scores the series’ most important revelation, a scene that plays like a great short film all by itself as Lynch’s camera jumps directly into the flaming blossom of the world’s first atomic bomb explosion at the test site in White Sands, New Mexico. Lynch and Hurley’s own “Slow 30s Room” brings the otherworldly chill-out with a flawless imitation of antique swing on a lethargic loop and submerged in 78 rpm-style surface noise. For the climax, Badalementi’s seven-minute “The Fireman” arrives on angel’s wings to bless ruined Earth, bring peace after chaos and evoke creation after destruction. It’s among his finest work.