Jthere are few filmmakers as picky about music as Jim Jarmusch. Over the years, he’s enlisted Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA to score his hitman and samurai flick Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, had Tom Waits and Iggy Pop on caffeine, and locked horns in a thick billow of smoke in 2003’s Coffee and Cigarettes, and had Neil Young rip up an improvised guitar for the Dead Man soundtrack. Not to mention his films feature acting roles for everyone from Joe Strummer to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and he’s directed a Stooges documentary along the way.

“The music has always been there,” he says, in his unmistakably deep baritone register, speaking from New York. “Since my teens, music has shaped my life and the decisions I’ve made throughout it.” But over the past decade, Jarmusch has gone from avid admirer and shrewd curator to making music for his own films with producer and musician Carter Logan in their band. Squrl. Together they composed scores for films such as his deadpan zombie play The Dead Don’t Die and Paterson, a subtle but poignant story of a bus-driving poet.

Today, Sqürl goes further by releasing their first studio album, Silver Haze. It’s an atmospheric, immersive, slow-burning drone rock album that features Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anika, and Marc Ribot. The result is something Jarmusch proudly describes as “enthusiastic fringe… I’m not mainstream, I’m not underground – I’m somewhere in between. But the truly beautiful things grow out of the margins, so it’s like a more comfortable, more honest place.

This approach is hardly surprising for a filmmaker who has a reputation for being fiercely, even stubbornly, independent. “I’m a control freak in that I have to do it my way,” Jarmusch says. “I have to choose all my own collaborators. I must have the final cut. I have to produce it through my own company. And as for the people financing the films, I allow them to give me notes on a first cut but I still have, contractually, absolutely no obligation to use them.

While making Dead Man in 1995, Jarmusch briefly flirted with working with bigger production companies and found himself at odds with then-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. After Jarmusch refused to accept his suggested cuts, Weinstein allegedly sabotaged and downplayed the film’s theatrical release. Despite this, it is often called a masterpiece by critics and perfectly embodies Jarmusch’s lifelong commitment to art rather than commerce.

“I consider myself an amateur,” offers Jarmusch. “Because the root of the word amateur contains the word love. So, it’s like out of love to do something, not necessarily a lack of skill, whereas professionalism is: I do this to make money. I am interested in imperfection because I have learned that mistakes are sometimes very precious, even very beautiful. I think perfection is imperfect, but imperfection is perfect.

Jarmusch compares his love of imperfections to the weavers of the Native American Navajo and Zuni tribes. “When they make a cover and it has a repeating pattern that is totally symmetrical, they reject it and say it has no magic,” he says. “If there’s something messing up the symmetry in some way, then there’s a small opening for something magical.”

It was in this state of mind that Sqürl entered the studio with Randall Dunn, producer of many bands – including Boris, Sun O))) and Earth – who love to bleed heavy guitars into melodic noise and textural soundscapes. . “We try not to think too much,” Jarmusch says of their fluid studio approach. “Our music isn’t always formally structured, so we’re not sure where it’s going to take us when we start. We don’t have the traditional structure of A, B, C – we just have A, and sometimes B. Structures aren’t what we’re interested in; we are interested in a feeling.

“The music is so different. It’s immediate. I love it’ …(Left to right) Carter Logan and Jim Jarmusch. Photograph: Emiliano Granado/The Guardian

At 70, Jarmusch is comfortable making music that doesn’t chase the times. “We’re not 20 and we’re going to make our band world famous,” he says, with Logan also on our call, adding, “We’re not trying, or planning, to please everyone. .” This aspect has been key to Jarmusch’s view of life through music and film. “I don’t think you have to target any type of demographic,” he says. “I’ve argued about this with my films when I say I don’t think about the audience. I don’t think about the rest of the world. If you start thinking about what that goal is, you’re heading down the path of traditional computing, and that’s just not our way. We are not that kind of artists.

Their relationship dates back nearly 20 years, with Logan taking a desk job working for Jarmusch during Bill Murray’s time with Broken Flowers in 2005 before graduating as a producer for several of his films. While Logan has been playing music since he was eight years old and was a drummer in the school jazz band, Jarmusch’s musical background is more self-taught and primitive. He played in nervous New York City bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of which, the Del-Byzanteens, had minor success and was part of the influential CBGB scene. But tensions grew in the group, they broke up, and Jarmusch stopped playing music for a long time. “I focused entirely on the movies,” he says.

With the modern film industry being very different from the one in which Jarmusch emerged, channeling creative energy into music-making has become a vital escape from some of the stresses and hurdles of financing and making films. “The film industry is kind of gone,” he says. “It sucks. It got worse. The kind of rights-sharing deals – an equal 50-50 sharing of profits, after costs, with financiers – that I could do with my films…if you even suggest that now you’d be laughed at that fucking building.”

The pair appreciate the instantaneity of music compared to the vast timeframes involved in filmmaking. “It’s liberating,” Jarmusch says. “Because I write my own scripts, it takes about two years to have an idea for a movie and then finish it. The music is so different. It’s immediate. I love it.” Jarmusch remembers a time with his old friend and collaborator, Waits, as the one that crystallized that instant magic of making music. “He sat down at a piano and said, ‘Hey, let me play you what I wrote,’ and he sings this beautiful song and it flies through the air and into the ether and it I was like, ‘Oh man, I’m working on a movie and it’s going to take me two years before I can even express what I’m trying to say.’

An example of the album shaped by such in-the-moment decisions is the song The End of the World, in which Jarmusch’s booming spoken-word delivery depicts end-time apocalyptic scenes on guitars, drums and funeral march electronics. Initially, it was an instrumental piece but the dense and dark atmosphere of the music inspired Jarmusch to create the script on the spot. “I was doodling and I wrote this little text and I read it to them and they were like, ‘Get in the cabin,'” he recalls. “It came very quickly but the music suggested it.”

Curtain reminder… Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Jarmusch's 2016 film Paterson, for which Sqürl composed the music.
Curtain reminder… Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani in Jarmusch’s 2016 film Paterson, for which Sqürl composed the music. Photo: Amazon Studios/Allstar

To further exploit this spontaneity, the couple also sometimes uses Oblique Strategy Cards (first created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975). Each card offers a suggestion for altering the creative thought process. Saying, “What if I tried this random and completely arbitrary approach?” according to Logane. Jarmusch has his deck nearby and pulls one out. “The most important thing is the most easily forgotten thing,” he reads. “It’s a good way to take a step back and see things differently. Like a dog that turns its head to the side when it doesn’t understand something to get a different perspective.

The album comes with a press release that’s pleasantly absent from the typical flowery hyperbole that tends to accompany such things. Instead, there’s a long list that says, “Sqürl likes to paint with loud, slow-moving guitars and drums. Sqürl likes shoegaze, haze-rock, drone metal and trip-hop. Sqürl is bored with Auto-Tune.

Why the hatred of Auto-Tune? The couple say they love its use by Kanye West and Frank Ocean, but Jarmusch is now “fed up with relying on easy stuff.” However, he is on a new bugbear anyway. “Lately I’ve had a distaste for blues-based rock ‘n’ roll guitar solos,” he laughs. “We just lost Tom Verlaine and I’m watching TV again and thinking, ‘God, look how they made these beautiful songs without any blues basis.’ The shape is so beautiful – exquisite. I can’t listen to people rocking out on a fucking electric guitar anymore. This is my new Auto-Tune. No blues-based shredding, please. I don’t don’t want to hear that.

A throwaway aversion expressed ironically perhaps, but it’s representative of an artist who clearly thrives on wanting to avoid the obvious, the easy and the predictable. Slowing things down in a fast-paced world. Accepting mistakes as beauty rather than striving for perfection. Celebrating amateurism over professionalism. Or, as Jarmusch himself put it, “to favor expression over virtuosity”.

But, four years after his last effort, will the world of cinema soon return to Jarmusch? “I can’t talk about specifics, but we’re working on a plan for a movie,” he says. “I wrote it with specific actors in mind that I’m now trying to cast. The actors are like wild animals that I kind of have to circle around because they have so much to do. So, I try to collect amazing wild animals – hopefully I can capture them.

In the meantime, Jarmusch seems more than happy to dive headfirst into music. In addition to releasing their first album, Sqürl also gives concerts, notably at Christine and the Queens’ merge festival, where they will perform live scores from Man Ray’s Surrealist Dadaist films. “Music is a very magical thing,” Jarmusch says. “I love cinema because it contains all the other forms of expression, but music is really the most beautiful thing that humans create to express their feelings. Music is just shit, you know?

Silver Haze releases May 5 on Sacred Bones Records.