Before Dean Hurley’s thriving career in sound design and his own string of albums, before “Twin Peaks: The Return” and spending more than a decade working alongside iconic filmmaker David Lynch, there was a fever, a Fisher Price record player, and a story about a train.
“It was like this psychedelic experience where you hear sound effects, music and voice text. It was like seeing a horror film or something,” Hurley remembers. Home sick from school around the age of six, he found himself inside a landmark sensory experience courtesy of a children’s record about Puff ’N Toot, an anthropomorphized train determined to climb a steep mountainside.
“I’d never experienced that sort of thing before,” he recalls. “It was like the sonic world on codeine. It was just so bizarre, and I remember that sticking with me.”
Hurley has since created his share of unsettling soundscapes, though he couldn’t have fever-dreamed while growing up in the Shenandoah Valley where his career would lead: from an undergrad degree at University of Maryland, Baltimore County in 2001, to graduate school for a semester-and-a-half at San Francisco State University, then 15 years in Los Angeles, 13 spent running David Lynch’s in-house, post-production facility, Asymmetrical Studio. Hurley is now living back on the East Coast in the Bon Air suburb of Richmond, and he is scheduled to play a rare live set on Saturday, Aug. 24 at Gallery5.
Though hesitant to call himself a musician — “aural collagist” suits him these days — he’s amassed quite the discography. On top of his many credits assisting the likes of Zola Jesus, Dirty Chromatics and Sky Ferreira with mixing, writing and production, Hurley’s released music of his own via the Sacred Bones and Ecstatic labels ranging from film scores and library-style ambiance collections to full-album collaborations, including multiple outings alongside ambient artist Romance and a 2022 New Age pop LP crafted remotely with German-Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Gloria de Oliveira. He’s handy with multiple instruments and has co-written plenty with Lynch, but the composition of sound is what captures Hurley’s imagination.
“That’s the thing that gets me going,” he says. “There’s something about quality and texture and sounds that tells a story just by the sonic patina.”
Locking in the low end
That passion is evident in the Hurley’s live setup — both his own rig and what he looks for in a potential venue. “I’m in the sound game because of the Mount Everest sonic experiences that I’ve had in my life,” he explains. “Like you’re standing at the edge of a tarmac and a cargo plane goes overhead, and the vibration ripples your whole body… It’s different than [hearing] an unamplified string quartet at a wedding. It’s still beautiful, and you can marvel at the harmonics of it all, but I think I’m in it for the vibrational result. That’s why there has to be a sub component.”
Adam Hopkins gets it. No stranger to low end himself, Hopkins is an accomplished bassist and co-founder of free jazz label Out of Your Head Records, which hosts monthly concerts at the Artspace gallery in Stratford Hills. Hurley attended UMBC with one of Hopkins’ closest friends, Nick Prevas, who designed the Out of Your Head logo. Once Hopkins learned Hurley lived in town, the bassist made it his mission to find the right confluence of lineup and setting — and the right speaker setup — for Hurley’s music to be staged here.
“I just think people would really love to hear it,” Hopkins says. “Artspace obviously wasn’t going to work just because there’s such a dynamic range to what he does. [But] he doesn’t have crazy needs. He just needs a subwoofer.”
Hurley puts woofers through their paces by pairing an Ensoniq Mirage keyboard sampler with a Moog Taurus bass pedal synthesizer, which he says produces “incredibly low fundamental tones.” He’s even got a turntable that can spin at eight rotations per minute. “The slower RPM you can get, the lower the fundamental of the stuff coming out of it,” he notes.
His home studio, on the other hand, is designed for both highs and lows. His sound design work requires a zero-decibel environment, one quiet enough to record the most subtle Foley sounds — the barely audible brushing of two hands against one another, for instance.
“It was probably the most stressful thing I’d experienced in life so far,” Hurley says of packing up and moving to Richmond in 2018. “I was hyper-concerned about finding a place where I could build a studio and have it be adequate enough.”
Fortunately, Hurley found a property with an angled garage that could be built out and insulated. Of similar importance is his studio’s ability to keep sound in, something he tested by inviting friends over and watching “Predator” at 85 decibels — equivalent to heavy traffic or a lawnmower — while his wife and daughter slept upstairs. “I came up and I was like, ‘Did you hear anything last night?’ and she said, ‘No.’ It was like the heavens parted and the divine, warm light of God shone down like, ‘My son, this is a space where you can do whatever you want.’”
Family was at the center of Hurley’s decision to leave the West Coast. When Hurley’s wife was pregnant with their daughter, around the time Hurley was working on “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the couple saw they were outgrowing their bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. The price of nearby real estate wasn’t working in their favor, nor was the fact that they’d decided they didn’t want to raise a child in Los Angeles. There was also the pull of extended family back East. “Okay, I’m bringing this life into this world,” Hurley remembers thinking, “and either she could see her cousins and her grandparents like twice a year, or maybe now’s the time to move closer to them.”
Hurley still visits LA a few times a year to sit with filmmakers and finalize major projects, but it’s part of a welcome sense of balance that living in Richmond has imposed. “It dials in the amount of work that I can do that makes sense,” Hurley says. “If I was still in LA, I’d just be working on everything [but] here I’m more decisive about what I take on.”
He’s found other benefits to living in Richmond. Hurley describes feeling lucky to have landed in Central Virginia ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Going to all the closed-down school parks and playing on the playground — everything was amazing.” There was also the unexpected bonus of rejoining the rhythm of seasonal change. “This rush of liquid memories floods the brain and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t experienced this in decades.’ That was really incredible.”
It doesn’t mean the decision to leave the West Coast was an easy one. “That was the hardest conversation ever,” Hurley says of ending his full-time work with David Lynch.
Molecular adaptation
For Hurley, who started at Asymmetrical while in his mid-20s, partnering with Lynch was highly formative. “I oftentimes find my hand kind of driven by my years of working with him,” Hurley says.
When he interviewed for the job, Hurley thought he’d simply be running a recording studio. In truth, 2005 marked the start of a close collaborative partnership with one of the last half century’s most distinctive multimedia stylists — so distinctive that the term “Lynchian” has become shorthand for ominous and uncanny moments that hold a surreal, dream-like quality. Hurley’s responsibilities ranged from sound design, editing and supervision to co-writing and producing music and open-ended sonic experimentation. The gig was a departure from the more fragmentary process he’d previously been part of at LA post-production house Soundelux.
“It was immediately overwritten,” he says of that industry-standard approach. “When you’re working for somebody like [Lynch], you’re trying to adapt and align yourself on a molecular level to be on the same page, to anticipate desires, motivations and directions.”
Especially resonant was Lynch’s modus operandi of creating first and asking questions later. Multiple albums under David Lynch’s name — “Crazy Clown Time” and “The Big Dream” among them — grew out of sessions during which Hurley and his boss would pick up instruments and jam until inspiration struck. (In one Instagram video, Lynch appears to be playing guitar with an electric toothbrush while Hurley sits at the drums.) Hurley still applies that ethos to his day-to-day sound design efforts. “If I am doing my due diligence and sort of tilling the fields, even when I have downtime and I’m not on a show,” he says, “I can be inventing new things that are going to inspire me when I do have something and I’m looking for raw material.”
The inverse has proven effective, as well — taking odds and ends left over from cinematic efforts and reshaping them for musical purposes. “I will do these bespoke sound design jobs, and then I’m left with all this stuff, and I’m looking for a way to take the scrap material and build a house. I build an album, or build a track, or something like that.”
The jobs he completed at Asymmetrical are now the stuff of Lynchian legend. Hurley had a hand in Lynch-led feature (“Inland Empire”), the Netflix short (“What Did Jack Do?”) and more commercial (“Dior: Lady Blue Shanghai”) efforts, culminating in a third season of “Twin Peaks” that earned him two Primetime Emmy nominations — for Outstanding Sound Editing and Outstanding Sound Mixing.
Adam Hopkins is among those who were taken with Hurley’s contributions to “The Return,” which threaded a needle by delighting both a cult following and the critical community. “The reboot of ‘Twin Peaks’ is one of my favorite things that has ever been televised,” Hopkins says. “For so many people, episode eight was the thing — with the nuclear bomb, and there’s this [Krzysztof] Penderecki piece in it. There’s stuff in it that’s so loud, but there’s stuff in it that is so, so quiet for television that you just have the extremes of dynamics in that episode.”
Hurley still speaks regularly with Lynch, 78, who recently announced he’d continue working despite an emphysema diagnosis. Their collaborative work is more sporadic these days, however, distributed between a wide variety of projects Hurley takes on in both cinematic and musical realms.
Richmonders are fortunate for the opportunity to see Hurley pause to perform. Shows in New York, Germany and Austria are among the few Hurley has chosen to stage; counting high school battle of the bands, he estimates he’s performed live less than 10 times. “It’s not really part of my thing,” he notes. “I got into this whole thing to work in a studio … But in subsequent years, I’ve seen the the value that bringing my studio practice to a stage can provide.”
“It is fun under the right circumstances,” he adds.
Fun for Hurley and likely a memorable sensory experience for those in the audience. No fever required.
Dean Hurley will perform an opening set at Gallery5 on Saturday, Aug. 24. Amminal and Second Dinner will also perform. Doors open at 7 p.m. and music starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance ($15 the day of the show) and can be purchased at gallery5arts.org.
