In Jim Jarmusch’s beatific Paterson, Adam Driver plays a bus driving poet named Paterson, living in Paterson, New Jersey. It’s a film guided by patterns: the patterns Laura, Paterson’s wife wears, the pattern of his day to day routine, the repeating patters of twins throughout the film. It’s a film about the poetry of “normal life,” and it features words by Ron Padgett, writing for Driver’s character, calling back to William Carlos Williams’ epic poem, called Paterson, of course, and a quick but pivotal verse by Method Man. Jarmusch films have always unfolded slowly –think Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law, and Mystery Train — but Paterson feels warmer than those films. It seems to luxuriate in its pace, offering a balmy sweetness to the patient viewer.
Throughout the film, Jarmusch and collaborator Carter Logan’s SQÜRL provide ambient textures behind Driver’s slow motion. The band’s body of work, including pieces for Jarmusch films The Limits of Control, Only Lovers Left Alive, and the recently-released EP #260, features sprawling feedback and distorted drones. But the duo approached Paterson differently, mostly forgoing guitars in favor of analog synthesizers, creating a contemplative sound that feels like an electronic counterpoint to Jarmusch’s recordings with lutist Jozef van Wissem, Concerning The Entrance Into Eternity and Mystery of Heaven.
The Paterson soundtrack was recently released by Third Man Records, and AD rang up Jarmusch and Logan to discuss expanding the music to album-length, the band’s experience providing live scores to silent film director Man Ray’s Retour a la Raison, Emak Bakia, Les Mysteres Du Chateau Du De, and L’Etoile De Mer, and most excitingly, to debate and define, Coffee and Cigarettes-style, the term “ecstatic music.”
Aquarium Drunkard: Paterson feels very different from what I hear on SQÜRL’s records and your other scores. Did the themes of the film itself dictate a shift away from that more heavily distorted format?
Jim Jarmusch: It started because I love many forms of music. I’ve always loved electronic music. Carter, too. We’ve been into the whole history of electronic music, from Otto Luening to Stockhausen to Berio, lots of different things. This kind of happened when we made our first score contributions to a film, The Limits of Control. I was trying to score that film with existing music. In [a] certain sequence, [the characters] are in an art museum and I could not find stuff that seemed to work. So the editor at the time, Jay Rabinowitz, said, “Why don’t you guys just try to make some music for it?” Which we did — we worked with Shane Stoneback, Carter and I, and it was good.
In this case, with Paterson, I wanted an electric score from the very beginning. I was trying all kinds of things. I love Boards of Canada, Tangerine Dream, and of course Eno, and Aphex Twin and Biosphere. We love Blanck Mass, he’s a friend of ours, and Jónsi and Alex from Iceland, and all kinds of stuff, Cluster, Global Communication. I was trying a lot of stuff, and some of it would be too sweet, some of it would be too dark. I don’t know what words to use, but it wasn’t quite weaving together right. But then our editor on this film, Affonso Gonçalves — “Fonzie” — [said] “Well man, I know you and Carter just got some analog synths and you’ve been into that and doing the live Man Ray scores, why don’t you guys try to make the score?” So we didn’t have much free time to do it, but over a series of weekends we started creating some stuff and when it got laid in, it was working really well. So we just followed that.
