Pay it Forward: Xiu Xiu on David Lynch

With Xiu Xiu set to release an album based on their Eraserhead live project, founding member Jamie Stewart explains the terrifying (but inspirational) impact David Lynch had on him growing up.

I grew up in the valley of Los Angeles, which, if you’re from LA, is this super bleak, smoggy grid, nothing going on. It still has a horrible reputation, which it deserves. But at the time, there were a million movie theatres, and a lot of third-run theatres where you could go and see movies that had been out for a couple years for $1. I was babysitting my little brother and we went to this theatre run by teenage stoners. There was no one in the lobby, no one at the concession stand, just empty. There were movies playing, because we could hear them, but there was no one there. So we walked in the first door, halfway through Fire Walk with Me. It’s an extraordinarily disturbing movie for an adult, but we had no idea what it was, didn’t know who David Lynch was. And we were children; my brother was very little. We just thought, OK, it’s a movie, we can’t leave. So we just sat there, and we were… traumatised.

Then, when I was a teenager, I had a much cooler friend. He said, “You have to see this movie, Wild at Heart.” The commercials made it look like a romantic comedy. I was trying to be a serious art goth kid, and I was like, “I don’t want to see this bullshit romantic comedy.” I had no idea what it was. And he was like, “No, you’re wrong, you have to see it, I’m coming over right now.” He came over, stuffed the cassette into the VCR and I was like, “Oh, this is everything I have been looking for.” I was on the cusp of wanting to explore more serious aspects of music and art and film, but I was a kid; I just didn’t know where to find it.

Fire Walk with Me scared the shit out of me. Even now, I don’t like watching scary movies. I grew up when it was the height of serial-killer rampages in southern California and classic low-budget slasher movies, which would, for some fucking reason, advertise on television during children’s cartoons. So I was scared all the time, anyway. And then my brother and I are just trying to hang out one summer day and see Leland murdering his children.

But Wild at Heart! It’s beautiful. The music is amazing, the acting is totally insane. The narrative is very strong; you could tell somebody the plot, and because of that, it’s incredibly engaging as an introduction to David Lynch. You get into that very specific, very strange, very beautiful, very intentional, spiritually mangled world, but it’s not confusing. It made me want to see everything he’d done. I was like, these are the doors I want to have open to me, this strangeness. It’s scary, but not in a pointless way; the frightening aspects present the evil of humanity. But it also shows the love and imagination and fantastic side of humanity.

For me, Lynch’s work specifically applied to music the first time I saw Twin Peaks. At that point, in my mid-twenties, we were just starting Xiu Xiu. That series is incredibly funny. It’s very sad, super romantic, really sexual. It deals with American suburban politics in a very pointed way. It’s violent, a little bit scary and unapologetically strange. I had never seen anything that did all of those things at once, cohesively, in a single episode – but there’s still some linearity to it. It says something cognisant. I thought: this is what I want the band to do, to do all of those things at the same time, but still have it be about something specific.

We put our Twin Peaks concert to bed in January of 2018. We’d toured it on and off for a couple years, and when Lynch died, we started getting a lot of invitations to play it again. But the moment had passed. At the same time, he’s one of our number one art heroes, so we wanted to thank him in some way. One of the most wonderful models that David Lynch is for anybody involved in art, is his attachment to imagination, to pushing yourself, to experimentation – and also, to listening to the universe. And the universe was saying to us, David Lynch has taught you to try new things, so it seemed like a more genuine honorific for us to do something different. And Eraserhead is really the only other work of his that, sonically, has such a focused, specific palette. You can describe very easily what it sounds like. The elements, as simple as they are, are so extraordinarily effective that with one or two fairly identifiable – but at the time, totally new – gestures, you evoke this entire universe.

As far as I know, [Alan] Splet and Lynch were the first people to use that level of non-musical sound design as a complete score. Obviously there’s a couple of songs in it, but I think for a lot of experimental musicians and film fans, it’s essentially the beginning of that. We don’t play to the movie. It’s more of a tribute to the aesthetic, to that world. We thought, what if the movie was 15 hours long? What other sounds that work with the initial sound would need to be added? And there’s a film we made to play along with; we thought about that in the same way: what if the film was seven times as long, what would be in it that feels the same but didn’t occur in the original? What could an expansion of it be? If Eraserhead was a planet, what we’re trying to be is the space garbage and dead extraterrestrials and meteors floating around it – the detritus that has floated off.

No one has done anything like Lynch before or since, and it seems unlikely anyone will do anything else that is so strange and so totally incoherent, but at the same time so compelling. I mean, he created an entire aesthetic, you know? He’s an adjective. Any artist who becomes an adjective enters into the culture.

Music and film have literally kept me alive as a totally insane adult. And it seems like the most genuine way to say thank you to it, is to exhibit what we’ve learned. And also, getting to explore something that deeply… When you play something, you really learn it, and it becomes a deep part of you. That seems like another way to say thank you, to dive in as deeply as possibe.