VA - Twin Peaks (Music from the Limited Event Series) (2017) [24bit FLAC]

The hallucinatory performances at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks: The Return are collected on a new soundtrack, celebrating a triumph of musical programming, mood, and David Lynch’s strange reality.

The talent booker at the Roadhouse is an enigmatic figure in the town of Twin Peaks. Unseen, unnamed, and unmentioned, the bar’s curatorial mastermind secures acts to play this small-town dive bar, acts who wouldn’t ordinarily pass within 30 miles of the place. Fashionable English indie rock bands appear as a matter of course, synth-pop trios descend upon the stage from Brooklyn, Latin jazz singers perform alongside Moby, Nine Inch Nails premiere a new single—even Eddie Vedder turns up in an oversized fedora. How do they do it? It’s a triumph of musical programming. Not since Modest Mouse graced the Bait Shop in Orange County has a minor concert venue been so ambitiously booked.

Of course much about Twin Peaks: The Return seems governed by the logic of a dream. Nightmares have always been David Lynch’s metier, and he and Mark Frost’s long-awaited 18-part revival series is thoroughly, obstinately phantasmagorical. But while the efforts of Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) to shake off a quarter-decade slumber and thwart his nefarious doppelganger sometimes seemed fantastic, they still retained the shape and momentum of narrative television: However strange, there was a plot. The same can’t quite be said of our time at the Roadhouse. The nightly shows felt ethereal, hallucinatory—unreal somehow, even by Lynch’s standards. Did these concerts really happen? Does the Roadhouse exist inside a dream?

More readily apparent is how these scenes function as episodic punctuation. Our arrival at the Roadhouse toward the end of an installment nearly always heralded its conclusion, and therefore seemed a kind of reprieve from the terror and tumult outside its doors. Lynch has said that he considers The Return not a serial but one coherent feature, or an 18-hour film. In this respect, the Roadhouse may be his concession to the demands of TV: The performances cleave the drama along hour-long grains, dividing its unwieldy sprawl into manageable, broadcast-ready chunks. This also accounts for their restorative effect. Amid a series that is staunchly unpredictable, the Roadhouse is one of the only things we know to expect.