David Lynch believed that you could live in one place and have everything. This is how he remembered his early childhood in a cul-de-sac in the neighbourhood of Spokane, Washington.
The clues to the conflict that raged elsewhere, on foreign soil from the 1940s, was evident in the frequent murmur in the sky above. ‘These B52s would fly in a squadron,’ the director recalled. ‘They have a drone, and with all of them together the drones are kind of in harmony. It’s the most beautiful sound. And they’re not travelling so fast, so it takes a long time for them to travel across the sky: it’d be a summer day with drones of these giant B52s, and it’s just a beautiful, almost cosmic, dreamy mood.’ A variation on that non-musical din emerged as a motif in the soundscape of the films he wrote and directed, from Eraserhead in 1979 to his final feature, Inland Empire from 2006. A similar motif appears in the music he produced independent of his films. The…