Cordelia Gartside dives into a watery mass of sonic expression on “laura palmer”

There is an indelible link between the sound, story and visual language of David Lynch’s work. However, it is not so easy to compress those sonic textures and lyrical themes into a concise, three-minute-and-sixteen-second alternative pop song. “We saw Fire Walk with Me in this crazy cinema, it’s from the 1920s with these red velvet seats and peeling wallpaper,” Gartside tells BEST FIT. “As we watched the film, I could feel my life changing in real time. I came away and I was kind of incapacitated for three days. I couldn’t talk or do much, and the song came out of that period of stillness.”

Turning the lyrical switch from "annihilate her" to "illuminate her", Gartside explores the need to be seen despite a feeling of internal turbulence. Behind the angst of her vocal, a throb of sound builds. “So much of what it became was about trying to create a soundscape, rather than a song with the band,” she explains. “Like trying to create feeling through textural noise rather than melodic lines, which is a really new experience for me.” It's an idea clearly executed on the final track, as layers of synthesizer, guitar, bass and percussion mesh together in order to create a relentless wall of sound that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Talk Talk or Radiohead album.

The creative build of “laura palmer” was a relatively long process. Despite the wall of sound that consumes the headphones on a first listen, the germ of the idea began life as an altogether more delicate object, as Gartside describes: “The bones of this song are very simple, it's that repeated picked guitar line. It took me three or four months until I took it to the band, but we didn’t really make any headway so I shelved it for a while. It needed that space to become something bigger than just me and a guitar.”

From there the studio became a more integral writing tool, and one which would, without, have the song sounding far less texturally dense and layered than it does. “The experience in the studio after writing everything did feel like another version, like writing the song on top of itself,” says Gartside. “I really wanted to explore layers and textures and create mass in the songs, so I spent a long time after recording in my room adding and writing extra parts.” For the acutely engaged listener, there are playful and idiosyncratic sonic additions to the track, such as knives scraping together, and an iPhone recording of a seagull walking on top of a car roof.

Aside from the primary character of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me, Gartside attributes no obvious influence to the track. Instead, she focuses on exploring how mood can be expressed and eventually evoked through sonic experimentation. “A lot of the time it's the mood. With this song my brief was ‘fucking weird’! I wanted it to be percussion rather than drums, and I wanted everyone to push their comfort zones as much as possible, which is not something I'm really used to doing.”

More so than on any previous projects, Gartside stresses that sonic exploration was fundamental to the writing of “laura palmer”. Pushing herself and the band out of their comfort zones forced them to find something new, and not be afraid of the strange or uncomfortable. “Diving into weird, watery mass of ideas, then trying to pull something solid out of those ideas, was part of the process for the EP. But ‘laura palmer’ is the song that still feels the wateriest!”

As the nights draw in and Lynch films are flicked onto laptops, TVs, and smartphones (to his probable dismay), “laura palmer” is born into an atmosphere built for it to thrive in. Find a park bench in the gloaming, or a bedroom lit with the curtains drawn, and listen to Cordelia Gartside for the first time. “I definitely have a place for all the songs,” she says. “They all exist in a world, and within that world there are different levels. One level might be a weird office space, and then another level might be a horrible tunnel. Another one is just a dark room. I like having that division between the songs because I think it honours their individuality. They are related and they are linked but they all have their own autonomy”.