Indie cinema icon Jim Jarmusch, director of Dead Man, Stranger Than Paradise, and Only Lovers Left Alive, has roots in the music world stretching back to the 1980s. He founded the band SQÜRL in 2009, described on the group’s website as “an enthusiastically marginal rock band from New York City who like big drums & distorted guitars, cassette recorders, loops, feedback, sad country songs, molten stoner core, chopped & screwed hip-hop, and imaginary movie scores.” Jarmusch plays with producer and composer Carter Logan (and originally, also with producer/engineer Shane Stoneback). Earlier this week, the duo announced the forthcoming release of EP #260, featuring remixes by Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe and Föllakzoid. From Dangerous Minds:
Contradictions embraced: Although SQÜRL’s music is anti-mathematic, SQÜRL loves mathematics. We love the Fibonacci numbers. And magic numbers. Perfect numbers. Bell numbers. Catalan numbers. 260 is none of these. It isn’t a perfect number, and not factional of any number. It’s not even a regular number. 260, though, is the number of days in all Mesoamerican calendars. The Mayan calendar. The Tolkien calendar. 260 is also the number of days of human gestation. (Orangutans also). 260 also has an elliptical connection to the dark rift; a series of molecular dust clouds located between our solar system and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. And although not a magic number, 260 is the magic constant of the magic square investigated by Benjamin Franklin, and part of the solution to a famous chess problem; the n-queens problem for n=8. 260 is also the country code for Zambia. And the US area code for Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Listen to the first track from EP #260, “The Dark Rift,” below.