Nicolas Jaar - Pomegranates

Nicolás Jaar approached Pomegranates less like an album than an imaginary soundtrack, using fragments of piano, electronics, voices, and environmental sound to create a parallel world for one of cinema’s most surreal films.

Originally released digitally in 2015, Pomegranates began as Jaar’s alternative soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates. Rather than attempting to imitate the film’s original score, Jaar responds to its dreamlike imagery with his own language of ambient electronics, musique concrète, minimal composition, and carefully manipulated sound.

That freedom makes Pomegranates one of the more unusual entries in Jaar’s catalog. Pieces appear and disappear like scenes remembered out of sequence. Sparse piano passages dissolve into drones, distant voices drift through the mix, and stretches of near-silence suddenly give way to rhythm or dense electronic texture. Tracks such as “Garden of Eden,” “Construction,” “Pass the Time,” and “Muse” feel connected less by conventional song structure than by atmosphere and recurring sonic details.

The project also demonstrates the remarkable distance between Jaar and the dance-floor expectations that surrounded his earliest work. There are traces of rhythm throughout Pomegranates, but they rarely function as straightforward club music. Instead, percussion becomes another component in an expansive sound collage alongside field recordings, acoustic instruments, distorted speech, and electronics.

Even separated from Parajanov’s film, the music retains a strongly visual quality. Jaar leaves enormous amounts of space within these compositions, allowing individual sounds to acquire unusual weight. The result can feel meditative one moment and deeply unsettling the next, constantly shifting between beauty, abstraction, and unease.

This vinyl edition gives Pomegranates a physical home more than a decade after Jaar originally shared the project, presenting one of his most elusive works as a 2LP set. For listeners drawn to the exploratory side of electronic music, it is a particularly rewarding detour through Jaar’s catalog.

Pomegranates is music for an imagined film as much as an existing one: fragmented, cinematic, mysterious, and proof of Jaar’s ability to make silence and space feel every bit as important as sound.