info: http://manarecords.com/005

Out on 2LP, August 24th 2018.

Mana is pleased to finally present Pomegranates by Nicolas Jaar as a double LP, with new mastering by D&M. The sleeve is designed by David Rudnick, with labels by Stéphane Jourdan and a new insert created by Jaar collaborator and friend Maziyar Pahlevan.

Longer and slower-releasing than his other albums, Pomegranates often parallels the cinematic epic on which it’s based (Նռան գույնը), 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.

Distributed by Honest Jon's, London.

Nicolas Jaar - Pomegranates

electroacoustic composer + revox performer

Théo Fernandez is a French composer and performer. Originally from Toulouse, now based in Paris. He moves through the territories of electroacoustic music. From this practice, he retains a plastic approach to the sound object: the careful, alert collection of sounds that ripen slowly; and find their consequences in the dramaturgy that link them to others. He works mainly with reel-to-reel tape recorders. Tape does not restore but re-deform again. An oxidisable nature that revisits what has been lost with digital clarity; in loops, where each passage carries a certain nostalgia for the future; where music belongs to a moment that may never have truly existed.

''There, along the darkened passages,
  he found a night-nurse,
  sitting working beside a shaded lamp.''

 

                                   
♫storyteller♫ 
@Augsburg

Mana is a record label established in 2017 by Andrea Zarza, curator at the British Library Sound Archive, and Blowing Up The Workshop founder Matthew Kent. 

Publishing works with an archival and contemporary sound, Mana is a platform redrawing narrative boundaries and perspectives through a playful, radical and unexpected approach.