Eraserhead is David Lynch’s first feature film, premiered at the Filmex festival in Los Angeles in 1977 after about five years of intermittent production. Its soundtrack, created by Lynch with the sound designer Alan Splet, replaces a conventional score with an almost unbroken bed of low rumble, hiss, wind and distant machinery.
The two spent close to a year on the audio, re-pitching and re-editing recordings in a manner close to musique concrète; the ambience of one scene came from air blown into a plastic bottle floating in a bathtub, with a microphone inside. Fragments of Fats Waller’s organ playing drift through the murk, and the only conventional song, In Heaven, was written and performed by Peter Ivers to lyrics by Lynch. The soundtrack album, first issued in 1982, is often heard as a forerunner of dark ambient, and the film’s constant mechanical drone showed later filmmakers how environmental sound alone can carry dread.