https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzp_qv3-FkA
The lady in the radiator is my favourite part about Eraserhead. Her and this song is so BITTERSWEET. The end of this clip and it’s soundscape is something I want to focus on though.
- Sustained organ chord: major key, I think, it’s a pretty bright chord but the tone of the organ is so echo-ey, as if it is being played in a large catherdral, the noise bouncing off the walls
- swirling wind sounds pick up
- some kind of high pitched squeaking noise
I could try adding some kind of strange chord into my Lynch inspired soundscape. This soundscape is great because there is only three sounds, a long chord, textural wind, and intermittent squeaking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgtisIQtcqg
This is the original soundtrack to Eraserhead. Unlike other soundtracks, this one doesn’t include the songs that were in the film, rather it includes the soundscapes that were in the film. It has a lot of that droning industrial noise that you get from large whirring machines, a bit of dialogue, the song ‘in heaven’, strange music that sounds like it would have come from a jukebox (but this music is at a lower volume than the drone, which makes it even stranger). There are sounds which sound like trains in the distance. There is the sound of someone listening to a record, and skipping through sections. The actual sounds of the record are louder than the music playing from the record player. The drone is more of an indoor drone, high pitched, rumbling from outside, like the kettle is boiling over.
This high pitched thing actually reminds me of a film I saw a while ago, called Come and See, about a boy who joins the partisans in belarussia during the second world war, from memory. The forest he is in at some point in the film gets bombed, and for half an hour in the film all you can hear is a high pitched ringing, which is the sound of the boy gone deaf. That’s all he can hear. We are put immediately into his perspective and into his world, as he struggles to understand people and situations. It wears off after a while, but it was so damn awful, a chunk of this film just high pitched ringing. I’d have to be a pretty ballsy filmmaker to do that to my audience.
Back to Eraserhead. Barking dogs. Lots more weird tinkly music – contrasting kitschy kid kind of music, like the sort of music that is played during silent films, with the heavy heavy drone.
