There are few film-makers quite as particular about music as Jim Jarmusch. Over the years, he’s enlisted Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA to score his hitman-meets-samurai flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, had Tom Waits and Iggy Pop jacked up on caffeine and locking horns in a thick swirl of smoke in 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and got Neil Young to let rip some improvised guitar for the soundtrack to Dead Man. Not to mention that his films feature acting turns by everyone from Joe Strummer to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he directed a documentary on the Stooges along the way.
“Music’s always been there,” he says, in his unmistakable deep baritone register, speaking from New York. “Since being a teenager, music has been something that shaped my life and the decisions I’ve made throughout it.” But for the last decade, Jarmusch has evolved from avid admirer and astute curator to making music for his own movies with producer and musician Carter Logan in their band Sqürl. Together they’ve composed scores for films such as his deadpan zombie romp The Dead Don’t Die and Paterson, a subtle yet poignant tale of a bus driver poet.
Now Sqürl are going further by releasing their debut studio record, Silver Haze. It’s an album of atmospheric, immersive, slow-burn drone rock that features guests Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika and Marc Ribot. The result is something Jarmusch proudly describes as “enthusiastically marginal … I’m not mainstream, I’m not underground – I’m somewhere in between. But the truly beautiful things grow out of the margins, so it feels like a more comfortable and honest place to be.”
This approach is hardly surprising for a film-maker who has a reputation for being fervently, even obdurately, independent. “I’m a control freak in that I have to do it my own way,” Jarmusch says. “I have to choose all my own collaborators. I have to have final cut. I have to produce it through my own company. And as for the people financing the films, I allow them to give me notes on a rough cut but I always, contractually, have absolutely no obligation to use them.”
When making 1995’s Dead Man, Jarmusch briefly flirted with working with larger production companies and found himself at loggerheads with the then boss of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein. After Jarmusch refused to take his suggested cuts on board, Weinstein reportedly sabotaged and minimised the film’s cinematic release. Despite this, it is often declared a masterpiece by critics, and has come to perfectly embody Jarmusch’s lifelong commitment to art over commerce.
“I consider myself an amateur,” Jarmusch offers. “Because the root of the word amateur contains the word love. So, it’s like for the love of doing something, not a lack of skill necessarily, whereas professionalism is: I do this to make money. I’m interested in imperfection because I’ve learned that mistakes are sometimes very valuable, even very beautiful. I think perfection is imperfect but imperfection is perfect.”
Jarmusch likens his love of embracing imperfections to weavers of the Navajo and Zuni Native American tribes. “When they make a blanket and it has a repeated pattern that is totally symmetrical, they reject it and say it has no magic,” he says. “If there’s something that somehow fucks up the symmetry in some small way, then it has a little opening for something magical.”
This was the mindset when Sqürl went into the studio with Randall Dunn, producer to a host of bands – including Boris, Sun O))) and Earth – who love bleeding heavy guitars into melodic noise and textural soundscapes. “We try not to overthink things,” says Jarmusch of their free-flowing studio approach. “Our music isn’t always formulaically structured, so we don’t quite know where it’s going to go when we’re starting out. We don’t have the traditional structure of A, B, C – we just have A, and occasionally B. Structures are not what we’re interested in; we’re interested in a feeling.”
At 70, Jarmusch is comfortable with making music that isn’t chasing the zeitgeist. “We’re not 20 years old and going to make our band world famous,” he says, with Logan, also on our call, adding: “We’re not trying to, or expecting to, appeal to everyone.” This aspect has been key to Jarmusch’s outlook on life across both music and film. “I don’t believe in aiming at any kind of demographic,” he says. “I’ve gotten into arguments about this with my films when I say I don’t think about the audience. I don’t think about the rest of the world. If you start thinking about what that target is then you’re going down the path of mainstream calculation and that’s just not our way. We’re not those kinds of artists.”
Their relationship stretches back almost 20 years, with Logan taking an office job working for Jarmusch around the time of the Bill Murray-starring Broken Flowers in 2005 before graduating to producer for several of his films. While Logan has been playing music since he was eight, and was a drummer in the school jazz band, Jarmusch’s musical background is more self-taught and primitive. He played in wiry New York no wave bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of which, the Del-Byzanteens, had minor success and were part of the influential CBGB scene. But tensions grew in the band, they broke up, and Jarmusch stopped playing music for a long time. “I just focused completely on films,” he says.
With the modern-day film industry a vastly different one from that in which Jarmusch came up, funnelling creative energy into making music has become a vital escape from some of the stresses and hurdles involved in getting films funded and made. “The film industry is kind of gone,” he says. “It sucks. It’s gotten worse. The kind of split-rights deals – an equal 50-50 shared profits, after costs, with financiers – that I used to be able to do with my films … if you even suggested that now you would be laughed out of the fucking building.”
The pair relish the instantaneousness of making music compared with vast timelines involved in making films. “It’s liberating,” says Jarmusch. “Because I write my own scripts, it’s about a two-year process to have an idea for a film and then have it completed. Music is so different. It’s immediate. I love it.” Jarmusch recalls a moment with his old friend and collaborator, Waits, as one that crystallised that in-the-moment magic of making music. “He sat down at a piano and said: ‘Hey, let me play you this thing I wrote,’ and he sings this beautiful song and it just goes out into the air and into the ether and it’s gone. I was thinking: ‘Oh man, I’m working on a film and it’s gonna take me two years before I can even express what I’m trying to say.’”
One example of the album being shaped by such in-the-moment decisions is the song The End of the World, in which Jarmusch’s booming spoken-word delivery depicts apocalyptic end-times scenes over funeral march guitars, drums and electronics. Initially, it was an instrumental piece but the dense, sombre mood of the music inspired Jarmusch to create the scenario on the spot. “I was scribbling away and wrote this little text and I read it to them and they were like: ‘Get in the booth,’” he recalls. “It came very fast but the music suggested it.”
To further harness such spontaneity, the pair also sometimes use Oblique Strategies cards (first created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975). Each card offers a suggestion to alter the creative thought process. To say: “What if I try this randomly selected, completely arbitrary approach?” according to Logan. Jarmusch has his deck nearby and pulls one out. “The most important thing is the thing most easily forgotten,” he reads. “It’s a good way of taking a little step back and looking at things in a different way. Like a dog turning its head to the side when it doesn’t understand something to get a different perspective.”
Accompanying the album is a press release that is refreshingly absent of the typical florid hyperbole that tends to accompany such things. Instead, there’s a long list that reads: “Sqürl likes to paint with loud, slow guitars and drums. Sqürl loves shoegaze, haze-rock, drone metal, and trip-hop. Sqürl is bored by Auto-Tune.”
Why the hatred of Auto-Tune? The pair say they love its use by Kanye West and Frank Ocean, but Jarmusch is now “sick of relying on easy things”. However, he’s on to a new bugbear anyway. “Lately, I have an aversion to blues-based rock’n’roll guitar solos,” he laughs. “We just lost Tom Verlaine and I’m listening to Television again and thinking: ‘God, look how they made these beautiful songs with nothing blues-based at all.’ The form is so beautiful – exquisite. I just can’t listen to people shredding on a fucking electric guitar any more. That’s my new Auto-Tune. No blues-based shredding, please. I don’t want to hear that.”
A throwaway dislike expressed tongue-in-cheek it may be, but it’s representative of an artist who clearly thrives on wanting to avoid the obvious, easy and predictable. To slow things down in a world that is speeding up. To embrace mistakes as beauty rather striving for perfection. To celebrate amateurism over professionalism. Or, as Jarmusch himself says, “to value expression over virtuosity”.
But, four years after his last effort, does the world of cinema beckon again for Jarmusch anytime soon? “I can’t speak about details but we’re putting together a plan for a film,” he says. “I wrote it thinking of specific actors who I’m now trying to wrangle. Actors are like wild animals that I have to somehow corral because they have so much going on. So, I’m trying to corral some incredible wild animals – I hope I can capture them.”
In the meantime, Jarmusch seems more than happy to be throwing himself into music head first. Aside from releasing their debut album, Sqürl are also playing shows, including at Christine and the Queens’ Meltdown festival, where they will perform live scores to the surreal dadaist films of Man Ray. “Music is a very magical thing,” says Jarmusch. “I love film-making because it has every other form of expression within it but music really is the most beautiful thing humans create to express their feelings. Music’s just the shit, you know?”
Silver Haze is out 5 May on Sacred Bones Records.
