The album starts as a rescore of the pilot episode of Twin Peaks and gradually spirals out in Lynchian fashion. The first half of the album (“Dear Laura Palmer”) is almost entirely taken from live performances at Industry Lab and Jamaica House during the Fall of 2016 and is more raw and improvisational. The second half of the album (“Fire Walk With Me”) is more composed and produced and was almost entirely created by filming and recordings from after the live performances.
ORIGINS:
One night after seeing a show at the Industry Lab I was talking to Tim Davison about an OST series he was starting through Boston Hassle. I mentioned that I composed a piece called “Fire Walk With Me,” which uses primarily Twin Peaks video samples and lyrically takes a lot of material from dialogue from Twin Peaks & how I was thinking about messing with the pilot episode. Before I knew it, the show was set up and billed as an original score to the pilot episode - so I started working on creating more multi-media work in the world of Twin Peaks.
I started by recreating the Angelo Badalamenti scores, and then by rescoring the pilot episode with original music. As I became more and more immersed in the world of Twin Peaks, I could no longer separate myself from the material I was writing, traveling down a lynchian rabbit hole.
Dear Laura Palmer,
I have a Laura Palmer in my life - someone whose life was filled with secrets, died too young, and visits me in my dreams everyone once in a while. She was actively dying when I first watched the series in high school and passed away shortly after. This played into my obsession with this universe in which one can walk between two worlds that can be tapped into through dreams. I wanted to communicate with my Laura Palmer, and I feel like in some ways dreams and this music allowed me to do so.
Fire Walk With Me
This song was initially inspired by a near death experience/awakening which became “Hope I Live Before I get Old”, a song I wrote for the band I was playing in at the time, Koala, which ended up on our 2010 album “Xibalba”.
In the Fall of 2014 when the bass player of Koala’s father took his own life by fire, I began revisiting this material - interweaving it with new material I had been writing and a collage of lyrics taken from a variety of sources (many of which are lines from characters in Twin Peaks). This song is dedicated to all who grapple with addiction and mental illness - to all those playing with the chance to walk between two worlds - and to all those who have danced too close to the flames.
CREDITS:
Written/reimagined, performed, recorded, and produced by Mike Sim
Mixing for “Twin Peaks Theme” & “Dear Laura Palmer” by Mike Sim
Mixing for Fire Walk With Me by Brady Custis
Mastering by Brady Custis
Filming by Ariel Rejman & Mike Sim
Photos by Adam Blake
Video and Audio from live performances
-11/19/2016 @ Industry Lab
-12/2/2016 @ Jamaica House
(released May 5, 2017)
AUDIO:
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{(@)v(@)
:::the owls are not what they seem:::
