Barry Adamson – on creating his DJ set for Blue Velvet & David Lynch's musical world

The world of cinematic music does its job very well. In addition to set-ups and pay-offs, it also offers an emotional third dimension that glues the images somehow both to truth and illusion, blending and bending perception to create a language we are all now familiar with, and one we can’t wait for, knowing how it enthralls and takes us out of the everyday.

The world of a David Lynch film pays particular attention to this phenomena and ramps it up to levels far beyond the ‘everyday’ idea, manipulating the viewer’s senses in a nightmarish and outlandish fashion, unbridling a new language and disturbing and confusing logic into a new form of cerebric satisfaction.

Thus, the music delights in twisting and turning all of these notions, and the music I will play in my DJ set before the screening of Blue Velvet will reflect the aforementioned and the profound effect cinema, music and cinematic music have always had on my career. I will reference particularly the influence of David Lynch and the musical landscapes that share similar vistas; how the bright lights of the city give way to dark shadows, and stories, songs and characters inhabit and reflect a subterranean world. Songs of desperation, twisted and toxic desire, promises of true love thwarted by reality, danger around each and every corner, an unease, anticipation; music that both thrills, chills and excites, along with the ride of the film.

This year I will release an anthology of cinema influenced song, story and instrumentals. Memento Mori charts forty years of fascination with the genre, some of which feeds into the David Lynch landscape, having been a composer on his film Lost Highway.

I’m looking forward immensely to ‘scoring’ the evening for the two hours before the screening of Blue Velvet, a must see David Lynch original, and I’m thrilled and honoured to be asked to be a part of this event.

Blue Velvet is screening on Thursday 16 August 2018 as part of Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House.

Barry Adamson’s Memento Mori (Anthology 1978-2018), a forty-year anthology is released on 26 October 2018.