Backwards through the backwoods: music editors Dean Hurley and Lori Eschler on Twin Peaks

• The US pilot of Twin Peaks on 35mm screens as part of Film on Film Festival at BFI Southbank on 15 June.

In 2014, David Lynch told the Paris Review, “I used to say picture dictates sound. But sometimes, it’s the other way around. Sounds will conjure an image, and sound is what came first.” Few TV themes conjure images with quite the power of Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017): its deep, tremolo guitar and the electric Rhodes piano that shadows it instantly evoking a waterfall, a cup of coffee, a photo of a murdered prom queen, a red room, an owl; the macabre in the mundane, the occult in everyday Americana.

Often, though, it was Lynch himself dictating the sound. “The motorcycle bounces off a black ’66 Chevrolet and makes a sound like the end of the world,” he instructs on page one of Wild at Heart’s 1989 script. His sound dictation could be even more literal. “David would describe the scenes and the mood to Angelo [Badalamenti, Twin Peaks composer], who would play the Fender and start changing as David coaxed him through it,” recalls Lori Eschler, Lynch’s music editor for the first two series of Twin Peaks – both newly available on Mubi, along with the celebrated 2017 resurrection. “He spoke with a lot of the musicians that way when they were recording, and he used really visual metaphors. I remember one time we were recording and the take was good. He said, ‘That was really great, guys – but now I want you to play it again like there’s a Sunday school on fire.’”

With this prescriptivism came an unusual degree of freedom for Eschler as sound editor. “When I first started, he was really clear he wanted the music to be a character that participated in the story. And he really wanted it to almost imperceptibly sneak in at times.” But as the series progressed, Lynch urged her to “paint around the bushes”. Eschler picked up Lynch’s “mystery loops”, which were orchestral cues he had slowed to an eerily glacial pace, and pushed further into the woods.

“I would take some of the music, the newer music from Angelo, slow it down, play it backwards, and then overlap it with a forward version of something else. We had all these different names for things: loops, mystery loops – there was one drone that he called ‘The B-52’ because it sounded like the airplane. He would often change the name of them too and just sort of use a new descriptor. I remember one he called ‘Mr Jitters Goes to Town’.”

Was it a struggle to tap into such a distinctive voice, I ask, or did it become easier the longer you were submerged in the Twin Peaks landscape? “Eventually, we developed a language that made sense to both of us,” says Eschler. “It was very unusual. I’d never done anything like that before, or afterwards. I did some sort of playing around, but mostly I was a straight-ahead music editor – almost a completely different job description.”

Sound designer Dean Hurley started engineering for Lynch at his home studio in 2005 and spent nearly two decades as his sonic amanuensis, recording and collaborating on multiple albums (Crazy Clown Time, 2011; The Big Dream, 2013), a film (Inland Empire, 2006), installations and TV, and as music editor for the returned Twin Peaks in 2017.

“The craziest thing, looking back,” Hurley tells me, “is all of David’s tricks and experimentation, they’re all there in Eraserhead [1977] from day one, even [in 1970 short] The Grandmother before that. He’s slowing stuff down. He’s using needle drops as score. He’s playing things backwards. He and [sound designer] Alan Splet would do crazy things where they would record a Bolex [camera] through an air vent and then slow the recording down. [Then] re-record it through the air vent three or four times until it just became a swirling noise of something.” 

Hurley agrees, though, that while some of Lynch’s technique is ever-present, the third season of Twin Peaks represented a change. “David and Mark [Frost, co-creator] had screened the last episode of series two [ahead of producing The Return]. He came out of it saying, ‘I used too much music. It’s wall to wall.’ And I remember just looking at him, cross-eyed, like, ‘What are you talking about? That episode is incredible.’ It’s always weird to hear someone, a creator, talk about their creation in a negative sense once it’s become beloved.” Music in The Return features more diegetically, with bands performing at the Lounge used almost as a refrain, and a way to book-end parts instead of the standard cliff-hanger grammar of the serial. “I think the result of that is that it’s a more 70s filmmaking approach, stylistically,” says Hurley, “to not have music over scenes and let the scene hold its own.”

The 2017 series is officially, awkwardly, titled Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series (Lynch described it as “a feature film in 18 parts” and Cahiers du Cinéma made it their film of the year). Not that Lynch had fallen out of love with TV, Hurley says: he loved Top Gear, Forensic Files, Breaking Bad and Body Cam (“He recounted a whole episode to me, and I swear to you, it sounded like one of his scripts”). But at some stage, a project spanning three decades transcended easy description. “He didn’t like labels,” Hurley says. “He liked to think of it how he liked to think of it. In his world, the way it was worked on was this huge linear thing that he just kept going along. I think, in his mind, it was, “I don’t want to cheapen this by calling any one of these ‘episodes’.”

I ask Hurley and Eschler how much of their shared shorthand with Lynch, technical and creative, they carried with them after the work is done. “His notion of being non-judgemental in his experimentation,” says Hurley, “was fun and playful, and you’re trying a bunch of things. My instincts early on were, ‘What is this for? This kind of sounds stupid’, you know? But then, later, you realise it’s all this accumulation, his insane interest and wonderment – it elevates the smallest little thing.”

“The time I spent with him, everything was a mystery,” recalls Eschler. “Everything – he was very curious. He would watch things over and over, and if something was happening, he would want to just keep studying it. I started seeing everything in my life differently, and it was great! As we were working, the whole team started to click on that level, both on the series and [the 1992 Twin Peaks standalone movie] Fire Walk with Me. There were a lot of non-verbal things going on with the entire group. And that really made it interesting and fun, but also super-efficient. But yeah – his perspective on the world, I think it totally changed my life.”

► All three seasons of Twin Peaks are available to watch on Mubi.