Yes / Jackie's Eyes

Johnny Jewel was hired to score Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011). His work was completed; then Refn decided not to use it, choosing instead previously released Chromatics and Desire tracks from Jewel’s own Italians Do It Better label. Jewel and collaborator Nat Walker then formed Symmetry, reworked the unused material into “Themes For An Imaginary Film,” and released it as its own thing.

Yes / Jackie’s Eyes is the Drive score that almost was — a complete piece of music existing in parallel to a film it was meant to accompany and never did. A phantom soundtrack: specific enough to feel like it was written for images, general enough that the images you bring to it are your own.

The IDIB label aesthetic — cold synth, gauzy reverb, Californian-doing-Italian-doing-1980s — draws directly from Berlin School (Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream) filtered through Italo disco and David Lynch. Jewel’s project is the question of what happens when you strip all that down to just mood and memory.