by osmosis

Mash-up and DJs, David Lynch and appropriation. These words sound risky to me, and so the smooth sound of Dark Night of the Soul caught me off guard. I expected to be jarred but Dark Night is an album that makes eeriness soothing.

Rumors about collaboration between Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, both musical entrepreneurs, began to percolate in winter 2009. Then, around March, nostalgic movie-style posters announcing Dark Night of the Soul appeared and filmmaker David Lynch became implicated in the project. Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, working with the likes of Vic Chesnut and Jason Lyttle, honed the album while Lynch put together a body of filmic photographs to be shown at Michael Kohn Gallery. If all had gone according to plan, Dark Night of the Soul would have been released along with a book of Lynch’s images. But because of label disputes, fans who buy the book will get a blank compact disc along with it and fans who want music will have to rely on the internet. Controversy enhances intrigue, however, and Dark Night's elusiveness bolsters its appeal.

Before Dark Night of the Soul was an album, it was the title of a Spanish mystic's spiritual treatise. First written in the 16th Century, then translated and retranslated in the 20th, St. John of the Cross' masterpiece chronicles the soul's precarious union with God, describing the soul's trek through darkness as if it were a journey through Middle Earth; the traveling soul is constantly tempted to stray from holiness. "That sensual love grows, it will at once be observed that the soul’s love of God is becoming colder," writes St. John. "When the soul enters the dark night, it brings these kinds of love under control." By the end of the dark night, sensuality will have been purged by purity.

Also before the it was an album, Dark Night of the Soul was a plot device for The Bold and The Beautiful. In Season 22: Episode 231, Brooke reads a passage from St. John's treatise aloud. She realizes that darkness and light must always be aware of each other (which is the perfect recipe for disaster in a show in which each character has both a disarming smile and a sinister underside) and that the soap's cast ought to get their children christened.

The Lynch-Mouse-Sparklehorse trio is a mystic-soap hybrid. It embraces hardcore soul searching (like in the apocalyptic track 'Angel's Harp') while indulging in petty melodrama (like in the carnivalesque 'Everytime I'm with You'). It also borrows liberally, from other artists as well as other eras.

Openings aside, I'd never seen as many people in a gallery as I did when I visited Michael Kohn on a Saturday afternoon. Lynch's photographs are nostalgically creepy, zooming in on domestic moments that suggest Norman Rockwell has merged with Tarantino. They hang in sets of four or three, while speakers in the corners played the album on repeat. In one image, a girl weilds tongs above a flaming grill–she looks like a femme fatale preparing to break the law. I first saw her while listening to the words, "You twisted little girl, showing them what life is all about" and "You got it all worked out, funny little girl, showing them what pain is all about" (this song features Julian Casablancas of The Strokes).  The tong weilding fatale became, of course, the little girl who knew what pain is all about, while the song's narrator became a speculative onlooker who had about as much insight into the girl as I did.

I don't like seeing songs depicted in front of me–isn't the freedom to let strange, fragmented pictures float around the verses one of music's key luxuries?–but I do like seeing Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse as Lynchian. A sleepiness pervades much of Dark Night's sound and the lyrics focus in on small, pending turning points. If soul searching means living on the brink of change, but looking to gardenhoses and joyrides to find it, then the album is full of such searching.

After spending two days on the Lost Highway set in 1996, David Foster Wallace concluded that "[Lynch] seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he's in there." I like to think that the whole goal of the Dark Night collaboration is something similar: to enter a space of soulful crisis just because the idea of entering is mysterious and intriguing.

St. John wanted to go somewhere–he thought you endured the dark night of the soul so that you could finally become one with God–while Brooke's dark night was just another way to keep the cast of The Bold and the Beautiful constantly on the brink of upset. For Lynch, Danger Mouse, and Sparklehorse, the dark night is far less directed than. Evoking the soul's eeriness is all their project aims to do.