It would be easy to understand SQÜRL, a collaboration between Carter Logan and the director Jim Jarmusch, as the musical pet project of a famous filmmaker. The duo formed a decade ago, to score Jarmusch’s movie The Limits of Control, and now SQÜRL market themselves as an “enthusiastically marginal band from New York City,” an image so coy it might make you want to bang your head on the limits of pretension. Yet music is not a new passion for Jarmusch, whose pedigree reaches back to his days manning the synths for the enthusiastically marginal Del-Byzanteens in the early 1980s—when everyone in New York had a band, as he once told The Washington Post. Like Jarmusch’s recent films, among them Only Lovers Left Alive and Paterson, his music’s ease and self-assuredness question why the knee-jerk reaction of our time is to treat earnest cultural voraciousness with cynicism.
Jarmusch, after all, is nothing if not earnest. Even the focus on material objects that pervades his recent features is less a social commentary than a reflection of its creator. SQÜRL’s new album, Some Music for Robby Müller, was developed as the score to Claire Pijman’s 2018 documentary Living the Light – Robby Müller, about the titular Dutch cinematographer; one scene features Jarmusch at a guitar store in Bushwick, searching for an instrument that “relates to Robby in some way.” (He settles on a mid-1960s Teisco Spectrum IV with a Bigsby vibrato, used on the album.) Trying to capture a person’s essence with a new guitar seems the province of an advertisement, not a filmmaker, but such is the ambiguity of Jarmusch’s recent universe: Music, film, objects, human beings, and cities all exist on the same plane, equalized by his conviction in the eternality of beautifully made things.
He conjures Müller, a friend and frequent collaborator, by using a warm guitar tone, often laden with reverb. Some Music consists of a series of sun-kissed instrumentals, bound by a song called “Robby’s Theme” and a single variation. Müller was resourceful, hated excess, and loved natural, minimal lighting sources; appropriately, Some Music is a spare record based on a few precise shifts in atmosphere.
The album is SQÜRL’s prettiest, and because of its surprising simplicity, among their best. Jarmusch and Logan strip their arrangements of all past accoutrements—gone are Jozef van Wissem’s powerful lute playing, the crunch and feedback of heavy distortion, the glass harmonica, bass guitar, and Jarmusch’s buried, punkish vocals. What’s left is a sound so direct and meditative that you can hear SQÜRL considering light’s filmic properties while they make music. Logan’s drums appear only once, on “In a Lonely Place,” their tom-heavy menace a well-chosen contrast to the album’s Americana-drenched hues. “While Vermeer Was Sleeping” evokes a lonesome mood that echoes Müller’s life—many of his movies, including the ones he made with Jarmusch, were shot on the road in the United States, fixated on the simultaneous dislocation and enchantment of the itinerant traveler.
It’s been a long time since Jarmusch sounded dislocated, on either record or film. Müller died in 2018, and maybe this album captures a feeling they once shared, or perhaps it’s a sign of what’s next for Jarmusch and SQÜRL. More than a band, SQÜRL are an idea about how music and film interact, and their enthusiasm for both mediums is as palpable as a vintage instrument. Inside the brief 30 minutes of Some Music for Robby Müller are real feelings that will outlast the fame of its creators, and all of the guitars, pedals, and vibratos that went into its creation.
Buy: Rough Trade
