Johnny jewel navigates away from his nightmares on 'themes for television'

Spend just a few minutes with any Johnny Jewel project ( Chromatics, Desire, Glass Candy, Symmetry) and you'll find that it's easy to get lost in the dark edges of his velvet

production. As it turns out, Jewel is also easily lost in his music, especially after appearing in (and composing some original music for) _Twin Peaks: The Return_. "I was about a year

deep into recording what would become _Windswept_ when I heard that David [Lynch] was making Season 3," he writes in a press release. "It's been a year since Chromatics

performed at the Roadhouse. With disintegrated memory through the haze of television snow, I wanted to share a glimpse behind the red curtain." Inspired by the majestic weirdness of

_Twin Peaks_, Jewel created six hours worth of material, edited down into the album _Themes for Television_, which he released today. (This comes a little less than a week after announcing

Chromatics' long-awaited _Dear Tommy_.) With the exception of "Saturday (Evening)" featuring Desire, the 21-track album is an instrumental foray into foggy synths and

lounge-jazz dripped in a sticky glaze — it's a soundtrack to a show that doesn't exist, but nonetheless creates a fantastically vivid sets of moving pictures in your mind's

eye. "The project began as a sonic exploration of the sounds I was hearing in my nightmares," Jewel continues. "I wanted to find my way out of the maze by focusing on beauty

over fear — like the way the fractured sunrise looks in a dream." You can stream _Themes for Television_ below, and watch a video for "Red Door," which is just

quintessentially Johnny Jewel — a Hitchcock-ian fever dream of leather and stained glass rendered in striking black and white. Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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