Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535880
56 M PS E . O R G to me and said, "Randy, you have no idea what sound like that does to me." That was one of the weirdest and proudest moments of my career. David asked me to move to LA because he wanted to do all his sound in-house, at his home, and not schlep up to Northern California. It was a tough decision for me because I felt like I was building a future at Skywalker Sound, a dream place for any sound person to work, but on the other hand, who would give up the opportunity to be Lynch's sound person? I chose Skywalker, and I'm pretty sure that David was pissed-off at me about it, just as he had been with Alan. But he found some great people to work with him on the rest of his movies. What part of Lynch's sonic legacy do you hope will inspire future generations of filmmakers? David's sense of independence will inspire future generations, his experimental approach to creativity in sound, his reverence for sound. You know, almost all directors will tell you that sound is important. David gave me a single card, main title screen credit for WAH. He had to fight the DGA to get permission to do it. That has only happened a couple of other times in my career, and it's still extremely rare for a sound person other than the composer to get a main title credit on an American film. I hope David's sincere respect for the sound profession will be a lasting legacy. Dean Hurley On which project/projects did you collaborate with David Lynch and what was your role? I worked full time for David every day for like 13 solid years, maintaining and running his studio. I was the sound supervisor and mixer on Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return, I was also the engineer on his album releases and I took care of anything and everything sound related that David was involved in. Sometimes it was just daily experimentation where he would come to the studio to just do whatever. At the same time, he had these art shows that toured the world and which had a multi- channel surround component. I went to like, I don't know, seven different countries, installing this soundscape thing. How did you meet Lynch for the first time? I was brought into the fold when David fired his previous studio engineer, Ronald Eng—who we worked with on all of David's movies—put up my name so my first time meeting David was when he interviewed me for this position—I was 25 years old. It was pitched to me like David wants somebody to run a recording studio and I was like, well, I'm not a music engineer. You know, I'd barely done any music recording myself. I was interested in it and had a four-track when I was a kid and loved recording bands, but I never pursued it. So I felt like I wasn't the person he was looking for. But I thought, well, this will be a really fantastic interview because I was a fan. Immediately, David started talking to me about things in a very different way. He said: "I do a lot of sound experiments, I'm really interested in sound and I've got this room—but I don't know how to run it!" He opened the door to his studio and said: "You know how to run all this?" And I was like, sure. He didn't ask where I had worked before or anything like that. Instead, we just talked about all kinds of other stuff and I told him that I'm from Virginia and it turned out he actually had a farm in Cheswick in the 1980s. He spent like eight months living there and the fact that we were 20 minutes apart in the '80s just blew my mind. A week later, he called and said the job is yours if you want it and if it doesn't work out, we'll go our separate ways. No big deal. And I got up there and started working. And we just kept working. You know, I think in that first month, we probably did like two music sessions, both of which produced songs that ended up in Inland Empire. And I remember David's wife and picture editor Mary Sweeney whispered to me at one point: "David's really happy with you." Lynch had a truly unique sense of sound and sonic storytelling in movies. How would you describe his approach to sound? He had an addiction to wanting to exploit the outer limits of what's possible when sound and image