The industrial soundscape as dread. Alan Splet's sound design, a continuous bed of machine-hum, hiss and unplaceable mechanical noise, sits closer to a Throbbing Gristle record than to conventional film scoring.
Why the Bureau files it. The connection is the sound. David Lynch and Alan Splet spent the better part of a year building the film's audio: a sustained drone of industrial hum, distant machinery, hiss and pressure that never resolves and never stops. There is almost no music; there is a continuous textured atmosphere, which is exactly the dark-ambient and power-electronics approach to sound as oppression. Played without the image, long stretches of Eraserhead would file comfortably beside the tradition's drone recordings.
The film was made over five years on next to no money, largely at night, with Lynch holding most of the creative roles, the same outside-the-apparatus method the tradition prizes. Its world is the industrial city as nightmare: soot, pipework, the constant sense of unseen machinery running. The imagery of a humanity overwhelmed by its own mechanical surroundings is the tradition's home territory, arrived at independently.
Lynch is no tradition figure and the influence runs the other way as much as anything: the record-makers who came after took from him as readily as he anticipated them. The Bureau files Eraserhead for its sound design above all, a case where film audio and industrial recording converge on the same idea of dread.
This film is filed in the influenced field: cinema that shares the industrial, noise and avant-garde tradition's sensibility without being made by tradition figures. It is adjacent to the tradition, not of it. The canonical Film entries (Decoder, Halber Mensch, Pig) are tradition-internal works made by or with tradition artists; the influenced field collects the cinema that runs alongside the tradition and feeds the same imaginative reservoir.