Pomegranates 2LP

It’s been 10 years since Pomegranates – Nicolás Jaar’s unofficial/alternative soundtrack to
Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film The Color of Pomegranates – was first released, and to highlight
this occasion we are reissuing the album on vinyl, with the first edition (a collaboration with
the label Mana) having long been out of print.

Longer and slower-releasing than his other albums, Pomegranates often parallels the
cinematic epic on which it’s based, with ideas pursued over long timelines and
across dark landscapes, assembling elements and moods from the aesthetic and folkloric
landscapes of Armenia. Jaar’s identity is perceived within this, folding in his heritage as
Palestinian and Chilean as he attempts to build a musical architecture outwards that frames
as much of the mess and sprawl of life as possible; using a language that investigates the
movement and fluctuation of his own artistic career and character similarly to the film’s tracing
of the coming of age of the young poet, Sayat-Nova.

At times, Pomegranates feels profoundly intimate, as though looking through the archive of a
friend’s music and discovering the accent and common currency that lives within each of
these tracks. Much of Jaar’s most elegant and touching melodic work is nestled here, its
power residing in its simplicity and willingness to speak to the heart and not the mind of the
listener.

In the text document included in the first freely distributed version of the album in 2015, Jaar
writes that the album was conceived during a moment of change, and that the pomegranate
became an icon that heralded that passage of time. The physical publication of Pomegranates
closes one door whilst opening another, keeping promises and marking a significant point in
the career of an artist who restlessly reinvents himself, with a document that illustrates a
common language of lyricism, freedom, and emotional resonance linking his many paths and
projects