American composer Angelo Badalamenti, author of the languid soundtrack to David Lynch’s cult series “Twin Peaks”, has died at the age of 85, according to American media on Monday.
His death, at his family home in New Jersey, was confirmed by his niece to the New York Times and the Hollywood reporter.
Born in 1937 in New York, he studied classical music. In 1986, he began his work with filmmaker David Lynch on the highly acclaimed “Blue Velvet”, a collaboration that he continued on feature films with “Sailor and Lula”, “Lost Highway” and “A True Story”.
He will even play a gangster, facing the camera, in the thriller “Mulholland Drive.”
But his probably best known work with the American director is that around “Twin Peaks”, a flagship television series from the early 1990s which revolutionized the genre.
Angelo Badalamenti writes a suspended, calm and sinister theme, in the image of this “disturbing strangeness” that David Lynch excels in creating in a small imaginary town bordered by giant pines in which telephones ring in the void.
“The notes arrived like that,” he told Spirit and Flesh magazine in 2015, recounting the creation of this soundtrack with the director.
“David was amazed, and so was I. He had his arm hair standing on end and was pulling a tear, saying, I see Twin Peaks, it’s good, I got it, and I said I’m going to go home, work on it. Rework it? Don’t change a note! And of course I never changed anything.
Mr. Badalamenti has also composed music for Nina Simone, Shirley Bassey, David Bowie and Paul McCartney.