Junun

the fort

Jonny Greenwood first heard of Shye Ben Tzur after a concert by a band he thought were weak except for one song. He asked who wrote it, and the answer was an Israeli composer who had lived in India for years and wrote qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis. They met, and a guest spot by Greenwood at Ben Tzur's concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London turned into a plan for a record.

Ben Tzur knew the Maharaja of Jodhpur, Gaj Singh, who let them have a hall inside Mehrangarh Fort, built on a rock above the city in the 15th century. India had no studio that suited them, so Nigel Godrich packed his equipment into boxes and shipped it out. For nearly three weeks in February 2015 they lived in the fort with a band of Rajasthani musicians, among them the trumpeter Aamir Bhiyani, the nagara drummers Nathu and Narsi Lal Solanki, and the singers Zaki and Zakir Ali Qawwal. Greenwood's rules, as Ben Tzur tells them, were the region's own string instruments or none, Rajasthani players only, and Western chords used with great care.

Paul Thomas Anderson, whose films Greenwood had scored since There Will Be Blood, came because he was asked.

Jonny said, 'do you want to go to India?' And I said, 'yes!'

Paul Thomas Anderson · IndieWire, July 2018

a small camera

Anderson's new camera gear was held at customs and sent back to America, so he shot almost all of it on one small digital camera, with Godrich's drone for the views over the roof. It was his first documentary and his first film shot on digital. There is no narration and nobody is named until the credits. The musicians sit on the floor of one big chamber and play, and most songs run unbroken from start to finish.

What happens between the songs is the life of the place. The power cuts out and the recording stops. A trumpeter buys an electronic keyboard in town, a harmonium goes to be mended, and a man feeds the hawks that circle the fort. Greenwood is mostly at the edge of the frame, behind his laptop and his guitar. Godrich said the reverb on the record is the room itself, a space under the palace that also happened to be full of pigeons.

out, and on the road

Junun had its premiere at the New York Film Festival on 8 October 2015 and went straight to MUBI, the streaming service, which had it to itself for a month. The record, also called Junun, came out on Nonesuch on 20 November, and the film went on sale on iTunes the same day. Nick Schager of Variety found it a reverent tribute and a solid first step into documentary for Anderson; Leslie Felperin in The Guardian gave it three stars.

The musicians played Junun on stage for the first time at the Barbican in March 2016. As Junun they opened for Radiohead across Europe in 2017 and North America in 2018. Godrich, on a panel after a screening in Brooklyn that summer, said the trip was one of the best things he had done in his life, and that the power cuts would have driven Thom Yorke crazy.

Their second record, Ranjha, came out in 2026, made in Greenwood's studio in Oxfordshire rather than in the fort. Zaki Ali Qawwal, one of the voices of Junun, did not live to hear it: he died in November 2021, during a rehearsal in Ajmer.