Description
“Available on vinyl again for its 10-year anniversary, Nicolás Jaar’s alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s masterpiece ‘The Color of Pomegranates’ marked a shift in his output, following his oddest inclinations and collaging rickety rhythms, microtonal synths, solo piano and concrète passages into a poetic precursor to 2020’s ‘Telas’.
When Jaar started work on the music that’s included on ‘Pomegranates’, there wasn’t really a concept at all. He’d been producing TV score demos, producing tracks for various artists and sketching out experiments in-between. But an encounter with Parajanov’s notoriously magickal film, a surreal biography of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova that’s regarded as one of the 20th century’s most enduringly influential cinematic achievements, stopped Jaar in his tracks. He noticed harmonies in Parajanov’s visuals that felt eerily familiar, so spent two days piecing together his various unused cues and sketches into a complete soundtrack, synching the results. A decade later it’s regarded as a creative milestone for Jaar, or at least the point where his avant ambitions began to match up with his skills.
Now it’s easy to be stuffy about this if you’ve not heard it before, unofficial soundtracks are so often surplus to requirement and, at best, a pallid facsimile of the art they’re referencing. But Jaar’s set of weightless reveries and hallucinations works eerily well. Even if he hadn’t intended the tracks to mimic the rhythm and visual style of Parajanov’s film at first, you can almost visualise the striking costumes and movements as Jaar’s treatment plays out. It’s varied material for sure – just within ‘Three Windows’ snatches of chorals are disintegrated by eerie sound design elements, fractured oscillations and Vangelis-like electric piano phrases – and Jaar works like a DJ or a curator, finding the narrative thread in Parajanov’s imagery. So whimsical cues like ‘Near Death’, a haze of reverberating melodies and dusty distortions, can fit in perfectly next to ‘Nothingness’, a Satie-like moment that’s set to tape hiss and evocative environmental recordings.”
