Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur release Junun

Junun, the album Jonny Greenwood made with the songwriter Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express, is out on Nonesuch today on double LP and CD, a week later than first announced. Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the sessions, also called Junun, reaches iTunes the same day after a month on MUBI. The title is a spelling of “junoon”, mania, or the madness of love.

Ben Tzur says nobody planned the record. Greenwood heard his music, a friend introduced them, and Greenwood's guest spot at Ben Tzur's concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London settled it. A studio was never the plan either. Ben Tzur knew Gaj Singh, the Maharaja of Jodhpur, from earlier concerts in India, and that opened Mehrangarh Fort to them. Nigel Godrich and Greenwood made a room of the fort into a studio, and for three weeks in February everyone lived there and recorded day and night, as Greenwood described at the time. The sessions ended on 13 February with the group's set at the World Sacred Spirit Festival, held in the fort.

Ben Tzur had written the songs and rehearsed them with the Indian players, sending sketches to Greenwood and Godrich. He left the arrangements open, to be settled by playing them in the fort each day. He tells The Quietus that one of the main decisions we made was that we would try to use chords as sparingly as possible, and play more with rhythmic and 'sound' elements³. In this music, he says, the tension sits in the raga and its scale, and careless chords kill the atmosphere.

The Rajasthan Express on the record are 19 folk musicians whose playing comes out of qawwali, Manganiar court music and Rajasthan's brass bands. They're people I've known for 15 years; they're like family to me.³ The songs are sung in Hebrew, Hindi and Urdu, to Ben Tzur's devotional poems and verses by the Sufi poet Hazrat Nawab Mohammad Khadim Hasan Shah of Ajmer.

Greenwood tells Uncut that his part was overseeing the production, and that he never wanted a reverent field recording of “world music”. They were making a record. Basically to sit in with the drummers and pretend we were accompanying James Brown and Miles Davis.⁷ They took everything from the Radiohead studio out to Jodhpur, and an echo chamber went into one of the fort's basements, so it felt like the whole building became part of the record.⁷

Junun, the title track of the record· Shye Ben-Tzurwatch on youtube →

Hu, an outtake from Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the Junun sessions· Nonesuch Recordswatch on youtube →