Black Lodge by David T. Little

VIEW THE FILM TRAILER here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Psa31HVuFw

Set in a nightmarish Bardo, a place between death and rebirth, a tormented writer faces down demons of his own making in search of escape. This is the premise of composer David T. Little and poet Anne Waldman’s Black Lodge — a multilayered modern opera that draws on the complex mythologies surrounding artists like William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), David Lynch (Twin Peaks), and others. A journey into Hell and back, Black Lodge fuses industrial metal and punk with classical string quartet and opera to create something wildly vivid and new.

With music and lyrics created first, then reverse-engineered by director Michael Joseph McQuilken into an episodic art film with flashes of technicolor body horror, Black Lodge harnesses a bristling energy that wowed a packed house at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O22 when it premiered last October in a production by Beth Morrison Projects. The debut merged elements of the film with live performance by Timur and the Dime Museum, prompting the New York Times’ Zachary Woolfe to remark how “…the music embraces Little’s longstanding interest in the grittier side of pop, the dark, pounding industrial ‘nu metal’ style of (I’ll date myself) Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down,” to say nothing of industrial, metal, and goth paragons Nine Inch Nails, Meshuggah and The Cure, or classical composers like Monteverdi, Mozart, and Mahler.

Fans of David T. Little’s other groundbreaking projects (Dog Days, Haunt of Last Nightfall, Soldier Songs) might think they recognize this work’s dark, existential terrain. But Black Lodge is after something different: “I was seeking something beautiful in Black Lodge,” Little writes in his album notes, “though deep down I still believed Burroughs’ notion that ‘you have to live in hell to see heaven.’ I now see that I had both written myself into and out of that hell. In going through it, I found a new and healthier way of being that I didn’t consciously know I was seeking — a resolution the Man in Michael Joseph McQuilken’s artful screenplay is not granted.”

Despite his fate and plaguing demons, that Man — played with aplomb by the incomparable Timur — still somehow finds his way into our hearts. He renders “My Childhood,” the haunting (and seemingly haunted) first single from the recording, with a mournful sense of longing mixed with underlying dread, as though at any moment a rift could open up and swallow him whole. When a menacing disembodied voice (also Timur) suddenly growls the words “Look closer: pitch oozing out. Always pitch underneath. Millions of red ants crawling all over. Look closer,” the dread becomes a window into the dark forces he’s fighting against, and we’re right there with him.

From Adina Verson’s spoken word invocation, almost whispered, in “The Strange Light in the Lodge” to the heavy metal leanings of “Here, My Severed Digit (Part 2)” and the punk rock-inflected “A Theory of Puncture” (with a compelling and dynamic interplay between Timur, the Isaura strings and lead guitarist Matthew Setzer, also known for his stellar work with the industrial goth group Skinny Puppy), Black Lodge carves out a musical arc that is equally diverse and disarming. Overall, the work challenges its listeners to grapple with their own expectations and interpretations — and as Little accentuates, there are no wrong answers.

“I think this is a piece that everybody can have their own experience with,” he says. “I think that’s part of it. As an audience, you have to meet this piece halfway – engage with it on its terms, and let it tell you what it’s got to tell you. And that will be different for everybody."