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, crepus-cular 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 re-unite 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.