‘Where we’re from,” says The Man from the Other Place in David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks, “there’s always music in the air.” The line concerns a terrifying alternate reality called the Black Lodge, but could apply to the whole of Lynch’s surrealist cinematic universe. From industrial drones to soaring ballads, it has always been filled with music: think of Roy Orbison songs shattering reality in Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, or Julee Cruise’s spectral singing in Twin Peaks. “Cinema is sound and picture both – 50/50 really,” Lynch says. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t think this way.”

Lynch has long made his own music, dating back to 1977 with his soundtrack for his debut feature film Eraserhead, composed with sound designer Alan Splet. Lynch gave his first vocal performance on Ghost of Love, a song for 2006’s Inland Empire in a spine-chilling croon, and has since released two solo LPs. Now, his new album Cellophane Memories, made with longtime collaborator Chrystabell, is another strange adventure in sound: an album of ghosts, fed by several of the long, devoted creative partnerships that have shaped Lynch’s remarkable 78 years.

When Lynch went into his Los Angeles studio to begin work on Cellophane Memories, he was faced with a mystery worthy of his films: a huge collection of old, anonymous recordings he rediscovered on the studio’s hard drives. “I had to call Dean [studio manager Dean Hurley], and say ‘Dean! Who actually did these things?’” It transpired these recordings, dating back many years, included pieces by Hurley, Lynch himself, and his late friend Angelo Badalamenti, who wrote numerous Lynch scores including Twin Peaks’ eerily beautiful theme and died in 2022.

Those unearthed recordings are combined with new ones on Cellophane Memories, an album where time behaves strangely. Chrystabell’s lounge vocal is cut up, collaged and reversed over dreamlike mixes of synths, drones and shimmering guitars. The lyrics, jotted quickly by Lynch and sung without rehearsal by Chrystabell, evoke moments from across decades of Lynch screen projects: dark forests, moonlit kisses, middle-American homes and violent nightmares. Nameless figures remember each other, disappear for ever, but love each other – as Chrystabell sings in Two Lovers Kiss – “always through time”.

The Texan singer, 46, was introduced to Lynch 25 years ago by music agent Brian Loucks, who had known the director since his musical partnerships with Badalamenti and Julee Cruise. Certain he had spotted another promising collaborator, Loucks set up a meeting. “I get to David’s, and he opens the door,” Chrystabell recalls on a separate call. “He has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, opens his arms for a hug, and he’s like ‘Chrystabell!’ There are some moments that, when you look back, informed the rest of your life. In that moment, I had some inkling that was the case.”

The pair immediately hit it off, and that day they wrote their first song together, Right Down to You. They have collaborated ever since: Chrystabell contributed music to Inland Empire, they made the 2011 album This Train together, and then the 2016 EP Somewhere in the Nowhere. The following year, Lynch cast her as FBI agent Tammy Preston in the revived Twin Peaks – her first professional TV acting role. “He’s always just reporting for duty, to serve the ideas,” Chrystabell says. “If it’s the idea that Chrystabell is right to play Tammy Preston, he didn’t conjure that up to be a good friend – he’s simply following orders from the idea.”

Their friendship was crucial, though, in Cellophane Memories’ impulsive recording process. “We were watching the weather, catching up,” Chrystabell says, “then David would say: why don’t we write a song now?”

“Their eyes met / She started crying / She felt she knew him / From somewhere before,” Chrystabell sings on She Knew, improvising the album’s vocal melodies while reading lyrics Lynch had written moments before. Having grown up around vocal booths – her stepdad ran a recording studio – it meant trading a lifetime of professional experience for pure intuition. “If you tried to think, it didn’t work,” she says.

It’s easy to see how she gets on with Lynch, who talks enthusiastically about seizing moments of inspiration. “This was a hungry project, and I’d feed it, and if I didn’t have any food, I’d make the food, because it was so hungry,” he says of these stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “Chrystabell is a great, great talent. I feed her the lyrics, and then she goes [to sing], and I hold my breath, focusing with her, and it comes out – and it’s beautiful!”

These vocals are twisted and layered in dreamy collages, recalling his other distortions of the human voice, from the reversed dialogue in Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge to early short films such as 1968’s The Alphabet. This lifelong interest boils down to a word: “Experimentation. In order to find gold, you’ve got to start digging,” he says, adding that collaboration is also essential: “It takes two to tango.”

Lynch’s first major experiments in sound were collaborative, working with Splet on The Elephant Man, Dune and Blue Velvet after Eraserhead. To continue after Splet’s death in 1994, Lynch built Asymmetrical Studio – where some of Splet’s ashes now rest, and where Cellophane Memories came together.

Chrystabell doubled up as engineer, while Lynch unearthed the archival tracks by Badalamenti. The composer scored screen projects for Lynch spanning three decades, including Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and made the 2018 album Thought Gang with him. Lynch describes many working relationships as normal business, “but then along comes someone like Angelo, who you love like a brother. I miss him like crazy.” He recalls recently listening back to The Voice of Love from Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “Unbelievable emotion came out of that. He was a genius.”

Cellophane Memories stirs other recollections for Lynch. “I start listening to it, and think of my childhood memories.” He can’t give details, simply calling it “a joyful feeling of times in the past. It was an overall feeling of, say, the early 50s, or 60s, or 70s.” He explains these sensations with the kind of gnomic pronouncement you might hear in one of his films: “It made the concrete more and more transparent, and you could go back and know things from the past.”

Lynch started as a painter and found fame as a director, but holds a special reverence for music. “Music can say intellectual things, but it can also speak to the heart in a wordless way that’s so powerful,” he says. “Music is a magic.” On Cellophane Memories’ closing track, Sublime Eternal Love, Chrystabell sings Lynch-penned lyrics about a man who cries out for understanding and is answered by music as an all-powerful force. “We live in an extremely troubled world right now,” Lynch says. “This thing of ‘sublime eternal love’ is a possibility for human beings, and every human being should know that – it exists within each one of us.”

Music is often a transformational force in his films, marking important changes in people and their realities. The mind-bending eighth episode of Twin Peaks’ third series, exploring the origins of the interdimensional entity Bob, trades dialogue almost entirely for music – from 1950s pop vocal group the Platters to Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Lynch’s use of music in films comes down, again, to a word: “Intuition – knowing when something is not right, and knowing when it is right. Every sound, every piece of music, every mood in lighting, costumes, how fast, slow, loud or soft speech is – all these things are elements in a film, and they’ve all got to feel correct.” How do you know if a piece of music works? “It does something that supports the idea, and gives the correct emotion. If it speaks to you, that is correct.” As for when we’ll see another major Lynch screen project, though, “that’s a question that’s going to be unanswered”.

Mystery permeates every corner of Cellophane Memories – even Lynch and Chrystabell can’t fully illuminate its shadowy characters or fragmented stories. It is also the defining fascination of Lynch’s career, prompting generations of audiences to puzzle the source of a severed ear, an otherworldly baby, or who killed Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. That sense of the unknown is, more than anything, what is meant in calling something Lynchian. “Just the word ‘mystery’ is so beautiful – it should be carved in stone somewhere,” he says. “The big mystery is life as a human being. Once you get involved with your life – it’s kind of unfortunate in a way, but it’s OK – you get going in your job, and your likes and dislikes, and don’t think about the big mystery really. Sometimes you do – just before you fall asleep.

“Life is filled with mysteries, just filled,” he continues. “Human beings, we’re like detectives. We like to think about these things, or I sure do, and we want answers. The secret is: the answers are there, and they also lie within. It’s all there for us. If we want to get it, we can get it.”

• Cellophane Memories is released 2 August on Sacred Bones