Chrystabell & David Lynch: Cellophane Memories (clear) LP

The origin of Chrystabell and David Lynch’s album Cellophane Memories comes from a vision that David experienced during a nighttime walk through a forest of tall trees, over the tops of which he saw a bright light. As he recalls it, the light became the lilt of Chrystabell’s voice and revealed a secret to him. It is from these mysterious convergences of light and sound, day and night, starry sky and black forest that Chrystabell and David’s collaboration has continued to blossom.

For Cellophane Memories, the two have traveled through different portals. Fittingly, many of the songs are set in fairytale forests, mountain peaks, swimming holes, crepuscular highways and darkened bedrooms. These are the abodes of both loneliness and romance, the sorts of sublime landscapes where people often travel alone in search of a wayward lover. But they are also shapeless atmospheres—of color, weather and breath: blue and white skies, red roses, darkening thunderheads, swirling winds and summer perfumes, which quickly immerse the traveler in the supernatural sensations of other worlds.

Time is a mercurial creature in Chrystabell and David’s songs. The characters are little more than oblique sketches of time’s quotidian melodramas: people arrive and depart as strangers, strangers fall into despair and love, lovers part at the crossroads and reunite in a dream. In this quantum matinee of everyday life, each character is both a star and a background extra. Elisions in time reappear over and over within Chrystabell’s vocals, which emerge and dissolve and loop back in layers of harmony and history. They are mantled by David’s, and late composer Angelo Badalamenti’s, orchestra of waldeinsamkeit-inspired strings, oneiric guitar glissandi and clouds of reverb, whose melodies are like the sensation of time pausing for a first kiss.

As with much of Chrystabell and David’s work from the past, Cellophane Memories returns us to a central question: what is a mystery? Alas, the riddle remains unanswered. But all mystery contains slivers of those conceits and feelings described above: the departing and the coming-back, the landscape, atmosphere and breath, the topsy turvy mechanisms of time, memories of the bygone, a distant light radiating from darkness, music within silence, love.