Nicolas Jaar Creates Soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's "The Color of Pomegranates" 1969
Mysterious are the ways of God especially when it comes to reveal a modern artist doing a cover work on another talent that passed away many years ago. The acclaimed New York-based musician Nicolas Jaar has uploaded a Soviet avant-garde film from 1969, called “The Color Of Pomegranates”, created by surrealistic director Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990) to Youtube along with his own original score. “The Color Of Pomegranates” is a biography of the Armenian ashug Sayat-Nova (King of Song) that attempts to reveal the poet's life visually and poetically rather than literally. Nicolas Jaar leveled up the whole story to the new surreal level by reworking the orginal sound with his soundtrack 'Pomegranates' (2015).BUT Nicolas is not the first to take over the original score, famous (by Matrix OST) musicians Juno Reactor did this a year ago. So get your extra hour of awesome visual and sound overdose here and below
“A the beginning of 2015 my friend Milo heard some of these songs and told me about the film. I watched it and was dumbfounded. I felt the aesthetic made complete sense with the strange themes I had been obsessed with over the past couple of years. I was curious to see what my songs sounded like when synced with the images, which turned into a 2-day bender where I soundtracked the entire film, creating a weird collage of the ambient music I had made over the last 2 years.
The film gave me a structure to follow and themes to stick to. It gave clarity to this music that was made mostly out of and through chaos. It also gave me the balls to put it out… I wanted to do some screenings but the guy who owns the rights to the film only wants the original version of the movie out there. I can’t blame him, I’m sure Paradjanov wouldn’t want some kid in NY pissing all over his masterpiece and calling it a soundtrack! I’ve listened to it a couple of times without watching the movie and I think it stands on its own. Or at least I hope it can!”
Video was removed from the web, the only episode found:
““I was still living at my childhood home when I finished Pomegranates. On March 1st, I arrived in my new home and it was completely empty except for a baby tree. The owner was there to greet me and he asked me if I wanted to keep the baby tree because he had nowhere to put it and no one to give it to. I agreed to keep it and take care of it.
Before he left I asked him what kind of tree it was. He told me it’s a pomegranate tree. He had no idea I had just put this out!”
“Pomegranates”, EP, 2015
Find album “Pomegranates” LP details here or stream it from Spotify