VA - The Eraserhead. Music Inspired by the Film of David Lynch (2025)

When Eraserhead premiered in 1977, it didn’t just mark the beginning of David Lynch’s singular career—it rewired the language of underground cinema. A nightmarish journey through industrial decay, existential dread, and fractured identity, the film remains one of the most haunting works ever committed to celluloid. Shot in stark black and white, Eraserhead unfolds like a fever dream—where sound, space, and emotion bleed into one another in an uncanny, hypnotic dance. But what truly sets Eraserhead apart, even beyond its disquieting visuals, is its sound. David Lynch, working closely with sound designer and technician Alan Splet, constructed an aural landscape as vital and disturbing as any of the film’s images. The soundtrack is not built around traditional music, but rather an evolving tapestry of ambient industrial noise: distant hums, howling winds, metallic drones, mechanical grinding, and eerie silences that stretch time to its breaking point. Splet and Lynch manipulated everyday sounds—recording radiators, engines, air currents—to create a dense sonic fog that reflects the inner turbulence of the protagonist, Henry Spencer, and the collapsing world around him.

This groundbreaking sound design became a cornerstone for generations of industrial, dark ambient, and experimental musicians, who saw in Eraserhead’s audio a blueprint for a new kind of music—one rooted in texture, tension, and the psychogeography of sound. Artists from Throbbing Gristle to Lustmord have drawn inspiration from the film’s oppressive audio universe, where machines breathe and silence screams. This compilation is both a tribute to that legacy and a continuation of its spirit. Each track resonates with the film’s core atmospheres: alienation, decay, the surreal beauty of dread. It is a homage to David Lynch’s uncompromising vision and to Alan R. Splet’s revolutionary work—sound not as background, but as character, as architecture, as emotion.
credits
released July 17, 2025

REVIEWS

Vital Weekly
this is one of the better samplers I’ve heard in a while in the realm of dark ambient/electronics-based music.

Mark Hjorthoy
First of all, this really needed to be done! If you’ve never seen David Lynch’s bizarre and twisted masterpiece ‘Eraserhead’, you need to. Right now. Such a strange film needs an equally strangely inspired album, and this pulls no punches. So many great artists offered up not only strange, but brilliant music for this. Adi Newton (Clock DVA), Sonologyst, 400 Lonely Things, and so many more add strange sounds, creepy loops, and unsettling pads to further propel an album that should be part of its own film. A fitting tribute to the weird world of Lynch. You haven’t heard anything like this before.

This Is Darkness
The latest release from the ever awesome Unexplained Sounds Group label is this impressive album tribute to the ground breaking 1977 movie, Eraserhead. Featuring tracks by 13 different musicians, there is something here for everyone – for fans of dark ambient, drone, experimental electronica, and noise. As always, Raffaele Pezzella (aka. Sonologyst) has done an incredible job of curating and mastering the album, with each track offering something different, but with the album working beautifully as a whole. Gorgeous!

Weird Bones
This compilation offers no definitive answers. Instead, it provokes, disturbs, and honours the original by refusing to worship it. It takes that iconic sonic mythology and asks, “What else could it be?” The result is unsettling, poetic, and – in the most Lynchian way possible – beautifully unresolved.

Tracklist
1. Grey Frequency – Lapelle's Factory (05:15)
2. Adi Newton – Contra Ciel II (06:56)
3. Oubys – Meta Video Dub (05:32)
4. Richard Bégin – The factory that makes erasers (03:18)
5. Sonologyst – Silent Dinner (03:54)
6. Kabra – Behind the scenes (04:54)
7. Mario Lino Stancati – Man in the planet (05:52)
8. Mark Hjorthoy – The Lady's Radiator (04:25)
9. Wahn – Labyrinth Man (05:12)
10. Macrogramma – Thermal Subconscious (05:32)
11. Bruno Dorella – Radiator Folies (05:10)
12. 400 Lonely Things – Dear Hearse (06:44)
13. Nikos Sotirelis – Metamorphoses (05:34)