David Lynch

David Lynch’s filmmaking oeuvre is probably best classified regionally: after beginning his career with several early films set under carnivalesque, otherworldly atmospheres, Lynch dwelt for a time on small-town America, an obsession which, with works like Blue Velvet and television series Twin Peaks, launched him to widespread recognition and acclaim. From there, the highly unusual auteur moved on to Los Angeles, the setting of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and, most recently, Inland Empire.

Crazy Clown Time, Lynch’s first true solo foray into music making, may mark another departure for the long-time director, as the album features little of the distorted Hollywood aesthetic of his latest work. If anything, Crazy Clown Time seems closest to 2010’s Interview Project, in which Lynch and his son drove across the country and back in order to film a series of interviews with seemingly arbitrary roadside individuals. The two projects—together his most recent and most unconventional—do share similarities, but most immediately they are polar opposites: Interview Project resonates as real and genuinely moving, while Crazy Clown Time scans as demented and genuinely creepy.

Musically, Crazy Clown Time is nothing particularly special. Dedicated followers will be pleased to pick out the director’s nasal, buzzing voice from behind all of the filters he applies to it. Apart from that, the album is more valuable for the sounds that don’t stand out: almost all of its fourteen tracks are characterized by an interplay between straightforward, persistent drum patterns in the foreground and a wash of stretching, groaning sustain in the distance. The dynamic allows tracks to blend into each other, lending the entire album the feel of steady motion through something permanent and unchanging—not unlike a long car ride across the middle of the country. But the effect is schizophrenic as well. Lynch’s high-pitched, insane-asylum vocals, like his films, draw out the psychotic side of the mundane: far from relaxing, the endlessness of the effect becomes taunting, and the excessively repetitive lyrics suggest speakers who are slowly slipping into insanity.

Crazy Clown Time will probably only have value to the initiated, and even then only as a very specific relative of Interview Project. As different as they seem, they are derived from the same central approach: to infer a fully-fledged story from only four to five minute glimpses at narratives beginning and ending in media res. Together, the two may be coveted by fans as clues to Lynch’s next thematic obsession.