David Lynch... Composer?

Bauhaus

When I was a teenager just starting to wade into the world of music, I came across a photo of one of my favorite bands, Bauhaus. An arty, shadow-lurking outfit from Northampton, England, they had a knack for dabbling in the weird and the macabre—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes pretentiously. In the shot, bassist David J was wearing a t-shirt that caught my eye. It featured the unsettling image of a wild-haired man, with a single word floating above his head…

Eraserhead.

Now, this was the pre-Google world. No quick searches, no Wikipedia rabbit holes. If you wanted to figure something out, you had to ask around. So I did. I went to my cooler-than-me friends in art class, the ones who seemed plugged into the universe’s hidden frequencies. Turns out Eraserhead was a film by a then-still-emerging director named David Lynch. Even better—one of these friends had a copy and offered to screen it for me.

So, on a snowy Friday night, we settled in, hit play… and my entire concept of reality got drop-kicked into the void.

What followed was pure sensory overload: disturbing imagery that felt like it had crawled straight out of the subconscious, a relentless atmosphere of dread, and a soundtrack that didn’t sound like music so much as an industrial fever dream.

In other words—pretty fucking weird.

And I loved it.

That Eraserhead soundtrack, crafted by Lynch and Alan Splet, wasn’t just an influence for me—it was THE spark. Before I ever studied John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, or Alvin Lucier, this was the moment that whispered (or, more accurately, shrieked), Go ahead kid—break all the rules.

For a teenage would-be composer, that eerie, textural mass of sound blew the doors off what I thought music was. It didn’t have to be scales, chords, or even played on “real” instruments. It could just be. It was more than a soundtrack—it was a manifesto. A challenge. A reminder to ask the biggest question of all:

What is art, really?

And yeah—the film itself is pretty fantastic, too.

A giant has left us. RIP David Lynch, and thank you for lighting the way for so many.