Xiu Xiu plays the music of Twin Peaks

Xiu Xiu plays the music of Twin Peaks

Xiu Xiu plays the music of Twin Peaks / View full image

In 2015 the Gallery’s Australian Cinémathèque commissioned Xiu Xiu to reinterpret the music of TV series Twin Peaks for the exhibition ‘David Lynch: Between Two Worlds’.

Compositions and songs by composer Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch were given a startling makeover and presented in two sell-out performances. The music has since been presented throughout Europe, Russia and the United States, most recently at Lynch’s own Festival of Disruption.

Led by Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo and Shayna Dunkelman, the music of Xiu Xiu defies simple description. It’s a mix of post punk and synth pop, classical and experimental styles, full of brutality and emotional depth. Xiu Xiu’s performance isn’t simply a recreation of the Twin Peaks soundtrack, but provides an entirely new interpretation that emphasises its chaos, drama, fear, noise and sidelong leering glances.

The music of Twin Peaks is everything that we aspire to as musicians and is everything that we want to listen to as music fans. It is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the ‘purity’ of the 1950′s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us. There is no way that we can recreate Badalamenti and Lynch’s music as it was originally played. It is too perfect and we could never do its replication justice. Our attempt will be to play the parts of the songs as written, meaning, following the harmony melody but to arrange in the way that it has shaped us as players. Jamie Stewart, 2015

‘David Lynch: Between Two Worlds’
Exclusive to Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA)
14 March – 7 June 2015.

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