Nicolas Jaar - Cerebral club music

A childhood in Santiago and the move to New York

Nicolas Jaar is one of the most promising and least predictable artists on the American electronic scene. He was born in New York to Chilean-Palestinian artist Alfredo Jaar and French-Chilean mother Evelyne Meynard, but spent his entire childhood in Santiago, the city of Pinochet's horrors (events that heavily shaped his worldview). Over the years, Nicolas has turned the multiculturalism steeped into his family background into an essential element of his music, building a career in constant evolution (albeit with its ups and downs), with albums that are always markedly different from one another - and it's precisely in this ongoing change that much of his strength and originality lies.

Jaar contributes enormously to the attempt to create dance music meant for thinking - or, flipping the perspective, highbrow music meant to be heard in a club. Jaar wants to speak to the listener's mind more than to their body.

Fascinated by jazz with African sonorities, by classical piano - Erik Satie in particular - but also by club dance music, he decided to dedicate himself to electronic music when his father gave him a Ricardo Villalobos record, the Chilean DJ who was forced to flee Chile with his family precisely because of Pinochet's military coup. These youthful passions would later feed into his more recent discoveries in house, minimal techno and microhouse. Jaar thus seeks to renew and look beyond, drawing fully on the influences of South American culture and the constant stimuli of an eccentric city like New York.

The early singles and EPs

His career begins with a handful of promising singles, which can be seen as attempts to find his own identity. Among them, hints of what was to come can be glimpsed in Democracy EP (2009, with Ethiopian musician Soul Keita), and the singles "The Student" (2008), "Russian Dolls" (2010), and "A Time for Us/Mi Mujer" (2010). The track "Mi Mujer", released almost as a lark, went on to become his most-streamed song on Spotify.

Politics - that is, the antithesis between the two ideologies of capitalism and socialism, which would resurface in later years - is present on Marks & Angles EP (2010), which plays ironically on Marx and Engels and on the American bag brand Marks and Angels. Just three tracks, with "Materials" in particular, with its jazzy piano work, standing out as a preview of his first truly significant work.

The first LP, the first soundtrack and international recognition

His debut album is Space Is Only Noise (2011), a hypnotic, slow-motion journey through minimal techno and micro-house, experimenting with field recordings, musique concrète and free-jazz rhythms. Jaar thus establishes himself as a forerunner of a new generation of young producers who move decisively beyond the usual coordinates of what is commonly understood as electronic music. A track like “Être”, which opens and closes the record, with its vocalizations, children's voices and above all a jazz piano with slow rhythms that suddenly accelerate, takes us to places alien to the New York electronic scene.

But even when the sound draws closer to another rising star (one of his likely points of reference), James Blake, on “Colomb”, Jaar does it in a different way, leaving the listener with fewer reference points. The noir downtempo of “Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Sand” has the allure of a smoky club à la “Twin Peaks”, before giving way to the drowsy chant of “Keep Me There”, once again a blend of electronics, jazz undertones and recorded voices.

A disruptive eclecticism allows Jaar to range from the futuristic songwriting of “Problems With The Sun”, to the hypnotic dance loop of “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See”, to oddly minimal piano pieces (“Almost Fell”) and alien chants (“Balance Her In Between Your Eyes”).

This great melting pot of new ideas points to a future that looks more than promising for the young Jaar. Just a few months later he returned to his audience with Don't Break My Love EP (2011), just two tracks, interesting experiments in minimal glitch.

The following three years mark a pause in his solo career. Jarr forms a vaguely psychedelic electronic chamber-music duo with multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington, debuting in 2013 under the name Darkside with Psychic. If there is a link to psychedelia, it is certainly very tenuous, and if one really wanted to find it, it might be with the later Pink Floyd of David Gilmour, i.e. the least interesting version of the band.

Otherwise, it's an album that skillfully combines relaxing lounge atmospheres with moments of Moroder-style electronics. “Golden Arrow” stands out above all, a ten-minute composition of electronic pulses wrapped in thick fog, initially without rhythm, before evolving into a second part that is even danceable. Around this same time Jaar kept on recording dance music, which would only be released in 2018 under the name Against All Logic.

His solo return comes in 2015 with an utterly unexpected soundtrack, for Sergei Parajanov's 1968 Russian film “Sayat Nova”, “known” in Italy under the title “Il colore del melograno”. Pomegranates is a mature, ambitious work that once again places Jaar light years away from musicians usually associated with him.

Between abstract cosmic symphonies (“Garden Of Eden”), deconstructed oriental dances (“The Fool And His Harem”), and glitch studies alternating with piano sighs that sound like Faustian vestiges of death (“Near Death”), every track offers original ideas.

The second half brings order to the chaos, moving from the romantic, depressive pianism of “Divorce” and “Muse” to the robotic yet angelic vocals of “Three Windows”, all the way to the quasi-religious overtones of tracks like “Volver” and “Spirit”.

Shortly afterwards, Jaar released his second soundtrack, this time for a brand-new film. His work on Dheepan (2015), directed by Jacques Audiard, turns out to be far less surprising.

Between 2015 and 2016 he gathered various singles released in previous years — including “Don’t Break My Love” — into three albums titled Nymphs (later collected into a triple CD in 2016). Standouts among these certainly include the elegant piano sonata fractured by manipulation on “Mistress” and the thirteen-minute “Swim”, closely tied to the dance scene but especially elaborate and cerebral.

Sirens, political dance

We created a monster

(A dialogue on Pinochet between father Alfredo Jaar and son Nicolas)

His most political and, in some ways, most authentic and sincere LP (but also his most anomalous) is Sirens (2016). Despite Jaar's attempt to open himself up completely, speak about his own childhood and create a sort of “political dance”, Sirens seems destined to remain a chapter apart in his discography.

Jaar delves deeply into his own past and that of his country, Chile, which he fled as a child along with his family because of Pinochet's bloody dictatorship. The work is a continuous flow of ideas, autobiographical memories, personal stories and national history (“I found broken bones on the sides of the road”), feelings and fears (memories of children arrested alongside their parents, who all later became “desaparecidos”), dialogues between father and son (“We created a monster”), struggles of peoples repressed in blood, and betrayed victories.

The phrase on the cover (“We already said no, but the yes is everywhere”) is emblematic. Referring to the 1988 plebiscite in which the Chilean people said no to Pinochet's reconfirmation (a story told in 2012 in the film “No – I giorni dell’arcobaleno” by Pablo Larraín), it points to just how fragile and temporary the achievement of freedom can be, since the dangers of a return to dictatorship are everywhere. Jaar confirms his importance on today's scene for two reasons. On one hand, starting from his own past experiences, he manages to be relevant and issue a warning to his contemporaries (what happened to him will happen again); on the other, he records an album very different from its predecessors, once again proving his enviable capacity for reinvention.

From the opening “Killing Time” it's clear how atypical Jaar is compared to his generation: unconventional structures, background noise, rapid streams of notes interrupted by electronic trails that give way to delicate piano notes. Finally, a melancholy, hushed vocal. “Killing Time” is a timeless track, because — while describing a personal vision of a past lived in constant danger — it tells the common condition of millions of people, of past, present and future generations; what happened to Jaar's family has already happened countless times, repeats today every day, and will happen again in the future. The vocal grows ever more ethereal and whispered, almost insubstantial, in seeming contradiction with the anger and fear that might have produced screams and violence instead. Jaar's denunciation is not angry, it's not a useless cry in the desert; it's a sincere, mature reflection on the human soul that transcends national and personal boundaries.

“The Governor” moves between new wave and dance, with aspects decidedly more European than Chilean or American. The anguished sax at the close manages to be both bizarre and heartbreaking. “No” shows Jaar's more Latin side and describes the dialogues between him as a child and his father. Latin rhythms disappear entirely in “Three Sides Of Nazareth”, the most powerful track on “Sirens”, obsessive and pounding to the point of bordering on post-punk energy. The closing “History Lesson” is utterly disorienting; one wonders why he chose to close with a doo-wop track with an electronic undercurrent. But the raw, stripped-down lyrics explain everything. Jaar uses the rhythms of light, carefree music to carry messages of bleak resignation, in memory of those who didn't make it, who didn't survive. A certain Frank Zappa, about half a century earlier, had done very similar things in utterly different times and contexts.

Sirens earns widespread acclaim, but Jaar disappears again for four years, aside from the more conventional dance releases under the name Against All Logic. He returns to soundtrack work with the drama Ema, directed by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain, a soundtrack centred above all on the eleven-minute “Tema”. These are years of reflection and meditative research that lead to a series of collaborations (FKA Twigs, Lydia Ourahmane) and installations, including “Incomprehensible Sun” at a Dutch military base, “Retaining The Energy, But Losing The Image” with ten rotating parabolic reflectors, ending up in the United Arab Emirates with a performance at the Mleiha archaeological centre in Sharjah.

Two albums released just a few months apart in 2020 emerged from this spiritual discovery, in some ways antithetical, in others mirror images of each other.

The new introspective phase 

In March it's the turn of Cenizas, a collection of experimental tracks, almost all around three minutes long, which amounts to a long listen of melancholy minimal music, with some interesting moments that never quite become memorable.

The best tracks are "Vanish," with an unusually languid vocal that might recall Bon Iver, the thoroughly original "Gocce," a compulsive union of percussion and dulcimer, and above all the seven minutes of "Mud," with its hypnotic Middle Eastern groove, somewhere between mystical kraut-rock and the very earliest Pink Floyd left orphaned by Barrett.

Telas comes out in July, presenting a completely different format, so compact and cohesive that it can be regarded as a single electronic symphony. From the thirteen tracks of Cenizas, we go down to four, each around fifteen minutes long.

A decidedly more ambitious work than its predecessor, Telas can be summed up as a grand compendium of visionary music, totally abstract, having by now shed all those earthly ties that were still so strong on albums like Sirens. Pure experimentation, avant-garde jazz, even old-school electronics winking at Fennesz's glitch aesthetic: it all coexists on a compact record that, listened to closely, reveals points of contact with Cenizas. The attempt to create a new internet-age world music is undeniably intriguing and offers interesting ideas in every track (particularly the horns on "Telahora" and the playful glitches of "Telencima"), but it still feels like a transitional moment on the way to more fully realized work.

In 2021 the Darkside project with Dave Harrington is dusted off, digging up some tracks recorded in 2018 alongside more recent ones. Spiral comes across as a more elaborate work than Psychic, an unusual downtempo record where wave and even kraut influences are evident. The latter surface clearly on "Lawmaker," with a groove that's almost Can-like. While Psychic evokes Gilmour-era Pink Floyd, here it feels closer to the ramshackle psych-folk of Barrett or the drowsy folk lullabies of "More," with results that are overall more interesting ("The Question Is To See It All," "Spiral").

Born of an idea from 2020 - when Nicolás Jaar performed at the Museum of Memory & Human Rights in Santiago, Chile - Piedras marks a genuine revolution in the Chilean musician's discography, an evolution that took four years to take shape, passing through the intermediate stage of Archivos de Radio Piedras, radio recordings from a near, imagined dystopian world. In the Chile of the future (though it could be any country in the world), technological development is aimed solely at controlling and repressing the population, and anyone seeking small spaces of freedom is forced to fall back on radio frequencies (one of which is Radio Piedras), now deemed obsolete by the government.

It's not easy to say what connection there might be with his previous work. Perhaps Piedras is the political evolution of Sirens, his most original and indeed most political work, dedicated to his father's memories of the tragic Pinochet period. Today Nicolas changes while keeping a spiritual bond with Sirens, imagining a future that is deeply tied to Chile's past (Pinochet's US-backed coup and the tragedy of the desaparecidos) and repeatedly referencing today's Palestinian genocide ("Rio De Las Tumbas"), as if to say that what happened in Chile in 1973 is still happening today in every region of the world.

Piedras thus unfolds a narrative that uses various genres as its vehicle, from avant-garde moments to slowed-down reggaeton rhythms, rendered so altered as to become totally alien to their genre of origin. The first volume is the more purely musical one, with several standout tracks such as "Piedras," halfway between a dreamlike electronic ballad and video-game music, notable especially for its choice of synth timbres. On "Agua pa Fantasmas" Jaar attempts a personal, intellectualized take on trap music, just as on "Rio de Las Tumbas" Latin rhythms are used to convey decidedly weighty themes, such as that of the suffering Palestinian people. While Jaar turns genres meant purely for dancing into tools for reflection, "Song For Hope" closes the first volume with slow, relaxing lounge rhythms and a vocal that sounds as if it were lifted straight from a Bon Iver record, used with the same mastery.

On the second volume of "Piedras" the music essentially dissolves into nothing. These forty-five minutes, split into twelve tracks, become one long hyper-minimal composition of noises, silences, tiny electronic patterns and vocoded vocal monosyllables ("Even Heaven Is Uneven"). The few notes present are so slowed down and blurred that they become almost lysergic ("El Azar"), before finally vanishing into silent nothingness with ghostly chants, which feels like a metaphor for a world (perhaps only partly imaginary) where the greed and power of the few reign unchallenged ("I, You").

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google