Even when benign, an element of horror could probably be ascribed to most of the work of David Lynch. (Working through a label called Sacred Bones Records, who'd have figured?) But for those keenly familiar with Lynch's work, they'd also know it is usually filled with far more uncertainty than true horror. The director/musician/painter and all-around fringe Renaissance man, David Lynch, and Polish composer Marek Zebrowski have teamed up to bring out the depths of this uncertainty in their upcoming re-release of Polish Night Music (a 2008 collaboration) through Sacred Bones Records. In this case, it's all about the uncertainty of a particular landscape -- namely, Poland. Despite the vivid titles, David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski's Polish Night Music avoids context at every turn. Plastered with creaking, squirming, and ambient terror, the only thing that is decisively "horrific" about Polish Night Music is the unknown.
Zebrowski, has himself spoken of his perspective on his native Polish landscape:
"(Poland) is a landscape that continues to remain at once familiar and completely alien to me. Every time I am there, I am surprised by something, and I think for David, Poland certainly represents the process of discovery."
In each of the 4 tracks on the album, the titles are prefaced with "Night..." --- a dim filter for an album predicated on capturing the soul of a nation. Focus, in all cases, is placed on the fearsomeness its landscape has to offer. Indeed the bleak soundscapes that follow are no walk in the park, but also nothing new for David who explained the origins of his fascination with "setting" in a 1990 interview with Time Magazine:
"Philadelphia, more than any filmmaker, influenced me. It's the sickest, most corrupt, decaying, fear-ridden city imaginable. I was very poor and living in bad areas. I felt like I was constantly in danger. But it was so fantastic at the same time."
Judging from a sample of David Lynch's Polish Night Music, "Night (A Landscape with Factory)" [provided on Soundcloud through Sacred Bones Records], it's hard to say at the outset whether the spaciousness of the intro conveys a sense of desolation, maliciousness, or of purely natural processes. Frankly, all or none could apply, and that's the album's strength. David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski together cultivate the sensation of an endless abyss, where the character, if one is present, remains completely still.
Althought they shift up and down like a broken vice, there's nothing terribly constricting about the way Lynch's ambient drones clash against the piano's random thought-patterns in "Night (A Landscape with Factory)," Instead, both relay a vastness to the album that tugs at one's curiosity and begs for more exploration. At times, it's difficult to un-hear "Lynch: the director" at work. While setting and perspective are clearly at the core of the album, David Lynch and Marek Zebrowski rarely offer a sensation of movement in the foreground. One gets a feeling of sedentary observation; patterns that do convey motion are either harmlessly distant, or inwardly manufactured. The spirit seems to do most of the falling.
