Polish Night Music

What strange vibrations lurk in the evenings of our minds? For the better part of the last four decades, David Lynch has sought to excavate the sordid corners of the psyche through film and television and—perhaps less known—through music. Polish concert pianist Marek Zebrowski and Lynch met while working on the score for Lynch’s Inland Empire, and shortly after decided to pool their collective affinity for improvisation and bizarre experimentation. Undoubtedly inspired by Poland’s after-dark underbelly, Polish Night Music is a soundscape of industrial shivers delivered in plunky piano vignettes and crescendoing ambience, every sound covered in invisible grime. The four movements—each titled “Night,” then subtitled abstractly (“A Landscape With Factory,” “Interiors,” etc.) traverse the eerie planes of unknowing, mining the cerebral instinct of humans in danger. In a sound bite for the LP, Lynch unsurprisingly suggests, “We don’t know what will happen.” And we can’t know until we step into the darkness of Polish Night Music and the complicated psychic terrain of one of America’s greatest filmmakers.