San Francisco Tape Music Festival
Sunday January 11, 2026 7:00pm
Sound design excerpts from Twin Peaks: The Return, “Episode 8” (2017)
2’47” 6 Channels
As early as Eraserhead, filmmaker David Lynch started making sounds himself when he couldn’t find what he wanted in the studio’s sound libraries, but it wasn’t until Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) that he took official credit of Sound Designer for the first time. Throughout the festival are excerpts of his dreamlike and disturbing sound design from episodes of The Return.
His process was characterized by a meticulous, experimental approach conducted in his private studio, "The Bunker," where he collaborated closely with sound supervisor Dean Hurley and Ron Eng. Most sounds originate from organic sources, such as wind or machinery, which are then pitch-shifted, equalized, or layered. Everyday sounds like room tones are treated with comb filters to create "unsettling disharmony" or melodic undertones. A dominant motif throughout The Return, electricity is used as an "amoral tool" for spirits. Sounds like electrical transformer hums were mapped over keyboards to create musical themes, such as the "Night Electricity Theme".
Lynch frequently employs thuds, whirs, and "malevolent drones" to create a sense of industrial dread, often placing these sounds in domestic settings where they don't logically belong. Contrary to the original series’ heavy use of music, The Return often utilizes long periods of silence or very distant, tension-raising hums to enhance the feeling of unease.
David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an iconic American filmmaker, painter, and musician known for his surreal, dreamlike, and often disturbing cinematic style, dubbed "Lynchian," blending the mundane with the macabre through meticulous sound design and bizarre narratives.
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema, with his films often characterized by a distinctive surrealist sensibility that gave rise to the adjective "Lynchian". In a career spanning more than five decades, he received numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006, an Academy Honorary Award in 2019, and Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement posthumously in 2025.
Lynch studied painting and made short films before making his first feature, the independent body horror film Eraserhead (1977). He earned critical acclaim and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama The Elephant Man (1980), the neo-noir mystery films Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). For his romantic crime drama Wild at Heart (1990), he received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He also directed the space opera Dune (1984), the neo-noir horror Lost Highway (1997), the road movie The Straight Story (1999), and the experimental psychological horror film Inland Empire (2006). Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC surrealist horror-mystery series Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017), for which he received nine Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
Bernard Parmegiani (1927-2013)
La Création du monde (1982-84)
97’18” Quadraphonic
‘Lumière noire’ (Black light) (1982-83)
21’06”
The dreamer of the world keeps falling into his own abyss to reach his original point. Black light… Seething latent energies, incommensurable, with no conscious strategy. Chemistry with no resolution. Layers crossed by the most essential elements. An echo within an echo multiplies space by itself. Everything is ready to “start”.
The beginning of this movement represents the most obscure part of cosmic evolution. It inspired my musical reverie well before the astrophysicists’ Big Bang did. The absence of tone that largely characterizes the sound used in this piece results from the extensive use of “white noise”, a sound whose mass should statistically contain all the accumulated frequencies. The deliberate choice of these rough, emerging, bursting sounds, treated in spurts, shifting and repeated with a growing strength, represented images that are closer to indescribable physical phenomenon.
Secondly, a first trial at organizing things leads to opposing and converging forces, to a dynamic of matter in the making then evolving towards more fragile and constantly aborted forms.
It is ending with the first sparkles of light, generated by sounds interfering with the space between medium and high pitches.
- INTERVAL -
‘Métamorphose du vide’ (Metamorphosis of vacuum) (1983-84)
39’08”
Something takes on shape, heat, light, movement, anarchic bodily vibrations. Everything is “existential energy.” Contrasting with ‘Lumière noire’ (Black Light), this movement exploits resinous sounds and offers layers of colorations that superimpose and connect. The internal dynamics of these layers, whose pitches are spread between a very low area and an overly high one, is masked by the presence of vibrated sounds, more or less emphasised, at different speeds. Light accompanies the long continuum of increasingly compact vibrations that change into harmonic accumulations. They are themselves diluted, contracted, creating short lived colors effects, sliding masses of more or less complex sounds, iterations of selective events following each other at different accelerando-slowregular speeds. After this progressive and continuous filling up of the vacuum, the end of this movement announces, through an almost melodic chant, the supreme consecration of those long and slow transformations: signs of life.
‘Signes du vie’ (Signs of life) (1984)
37’04”
The apparition of planet Earth gave birth to the organization of a “logic of living beings”. From the amoeba to the (newly born) man everything is manifestly a sign of life. All the elements of metamorphosis participate in this game. This last “moment” in La Création du monde explorations lead us to unveil new stages. The sound material solidifies, meaning that it approaches what we can recognize through auditory processes. These sounds, which have been turned into music, merge into each other, through rhythmic shapes and tones. First unsure and fragile, they avoid any individual outlines. The breath reiterates all aspects of its élan before coming to existence out of its environment. Water, in its simplest form, generates micro-melodies through repetitive shapes. It also applies to animal and plant life: so many divisions that induce each other so that eventually they subtract the one we are in the musical and sound reality of this “creation.”
Bernard Parmegiani was a pioneer and leading light of electroacoustic music. He leaves behind him a vast and fascinating œuvre, a priceless heritage for today's generation. His life was structured around a few mainstays: working in a studio filled with machines, lighting a pipe filled with Amsterdamer Tabacco, in the company of his wife (“first ear”), and not least, a few affectionate cats.