Dean Hurley

When it comes to eerie, evocative soundscapes, Dean Hurley has a subtle but immediately recognizable style. The composer, producer, sound designer, and music supervisor's collaborations with visionary director and musician David Lynch, like the acclaimed third season of Twin Peaks in 2017 and 2011's album Crazy Clown Time, are among his most prominent projects. However, his work with artists such as Zola Jesus, Dirty Beaches, Chromatics, and the Veils further distinguished him as a sound-shaper with a gift for gripping atmospheres. His own projects dug deeper into the ways memories, moods, sounds, and music overlap, whether with the almost subliminal nuances of 2017's Anthology Resource, Vol. 1, the half-remembered action movie soundtracks of 2020's Big Balls, or the new age/shoegaze fusions of 2022's Oceans of Time. Hurley also established himself as a sought-after composer for film with projects like Divinity, a collaborative score with DJ Muggs. Prior to his collaboration with Lynch, Hurley worked at Hollywood-based audio post-production facility, Soundelux, before moving to Lynch's Asymmetrical Studios in 2005. He was initially brought in to engineer recording sessions, but over time found himself experimenting with many different aspects of production. His first major collaboration with Lynch was for the 2006 movie Inland Empire; he also worked with the director on his commercial projects and musical works such as 2010's Dark Night of the Soul, 2011's Crazy Clown Time and 2013's The Big Dream. Hurley's work away from Lynch during this time included mixing Zola Jesus' Taiga and Dirty Beaches' Stateless in 2014 and creating his own album Days of Thunder and Rain, which he fashioned from old soul samples and released as a free download, in 2015. The following year, he worked with Tiny Ruins and The Veils, then reunited with Lynch for Somewhere in the Nowhere, an album with Chrysta Bell. Hurley gained further renown when Lynch returned to the hugely successful Twin Peaks television series and delivered its third season, Twin Peaks: The Return, in 2017. Hurley's involvement with the show was pivotal; along with serving as the drummer for Trouble, a fictional band that appeared in the show (and also featured Lynch's son Riley on guitar and Dirty Beaches' Alex Zhang Hungtai on tenor saxophone), he provided a number of original ambient soundscapes for various sequences. Hurley released an album of the material as Anthology Resource, Vol. 1 on Sacred Bones in August 2017. The acclaim for Twin Peaks' third season extended to Hurley's Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Special and Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Limited Series or Movie. He then worked on the 2018 documentary Stuntman and contributed a remix of "Blue Girl" to a deluxe edition of Chromatics' Camera EP. Containing material created for the 2018 film Perfect as well as an artist residency for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Anthology Resource, Vol. 2: Philosophy of Beyond was released in 2019. That year, he also worked as the sound designer on the short film Fire Is Coming, a collaboration between Lynch and Flying Lotus, and produced Sky Ferreira's single "Downhill Lullaby." Early 2020 saw the released of Lynch's short film What Did Jack Do?, which featured compositions and mixing work by Hurley; Sacred Bones released music from the film as The Flame of Love that January. The rest of the year delivered a wealth of releases from Hurley, including Concrete Feather, a set of moody synth excursions that Boomkat issued as part of their Documenting Sound series; Big Balls, a six-cassette work inspired by the action movie scores of the late '80s and early '90s; and a version of Black Sabbath's "Warning" for the Sacred Bones tribute album What Is This That Stands Before Me? Additionally, he served as sound designer for the film Happily and composed the score to the film Looks That Kill. Following a 2021 remix of Chromatics' "Saturday," Hurley scored Flower, a 2022 volume of Tales from the Library of the Occult; covered Mort Garson 's "Our Day Will Come" for SBXV Todo Muere, a compilation celebrating Sacred Bones' 15th anniversary, and collaborated with Romance on In Every Dream Home a Heartache, which used degraded samples of vintage soap opera soundtracks as source material. He also teamed up with Gloria de Oliveira on Oceans of Time, a meditation on connection, mortality, and what lies beyond. Touching on shoegaze and new age inspirations, the album included a cover of Jeff Buckley and Elizabeth Fraser 's unfinished song "All Flowers in Time Bend Toward the Sun." Hurley's 2023 projects ranged from River of Dreams, another album with Romance to an original score for Tod Browning's 1925 film The Mystic to a collaboration with DJ Muggs on the music for the dystopian sci-fi film Divinity.
© Heather Phares & Rob Wacey /TiVo