SQÜRL

SQÜRL operates as an experimental outfit that resists easy categorization, with director and guitarist Jim Jarmusch alongside film producer and musician Carter Logan at the helm. The project originated in 2009 under the name Bad Rabbit as a three-piece that supplied the Limits of Control EP as the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s film of identical title. Within ten years the trio had evolved into SQÜRL, cultivating a textural, broodingly atmospheric approach particularly suited to film scoring. The ensemble went on to furnish music for multiple motion pictures and, in 2023, issued the album Silver Haze on Sacred Bones, its dense and frequently ominous soundscapes punctuated by appearances from Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Marc Ribot. Music for Man Ray appeared the following year.

Jarmusch and Logan assembled the initial Bad Rabbit lineup in 2009 by enlisting session musician and engineer Shane Stoneback. Their early aesthetic emphasized heavy percussion, detuned droning guitars, loops, and feedback-saturated cassette recordings, fusing chopped & screwed hip-hop, country, stoner metal, and cinematic atmospheres. A limited pressing of EP 1 surfaced in 2013; EP 2 followed that November and contained a remix by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner. After EP 3 in 2014, SQÜRL joined Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem to score Only Lovers Left Alive, an effort that received a Cannes Soundtrack Award. The group has since appeared at festivals including All Tomorrow’s Parties in Iceland and Big Ears, and captured a live album at Jack White’s Third Man Records. Jarmusch and Logan separately composed scores for several silent films by surrealist Man Ray. SQÜRL’s fourth EP, 2017’s EP #260, preceded their original score for Paterson, while 2019 brought the soundtrack to Jarmusch’s zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die. Some Music for Robby Müller arrived in 2020 as a sonic companion to the 2018 documentary Living the Light – Robby Müller, which centered on the Dutch cinematographer.

Beginning in 2016, SQÜRL toured Europe presenting self-composed live scores to Man Ray’s films. The project reached its apex in 2023, marking the centenary of the American-born, Paris-based artist’s first experiments in cinema. A restored print of Retour a la Raison opened at Cannes as part of an anthology comprising four silent shorts—Étoile de Mer (1928), Emak Bakia (1926), Le Retour á la Raison (1923), and Les Mysteres du Château de Dé (1929)—accompanied by a newly written SQÜRL score. Music for Man Ray derives from a live recording made at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in February 2023; the tapes were subsequently edited and compiled for release in May 2024.