Still is. My friend Mike was a great bass player. I was just there, honestly, doing a C-minor pad on the accordion. As a band, we eventually graduated to wandering around and trying to find plugs in the street—and by plugs, I mean electrical outlets where we could plug in our gear. I would bring speakers, and then I would do my electronic thing, whatever the fuck that was at the time. I remember making 30 bucks one day on Elizabeth and Spring Street. Me and Mike, we would literally walk around trying to find plugs, because we had such a fun time doing that.
There was a moment where—this is more the accordion days—but we would go to Spanish Harlem because we could eat chicken and rice, and I could speak Spanish. We could eat really cheap, like for three bucks, and they would serve us beer sometimes when we were like 14 or It was all really fun… and I have never talked about it before, which is weird. That sounds like a formative experience—for an aspiring musician to play music in public and to see people react to it.
I think I wanted that. I was excited by that. I was excited about playing with people also. When you grow up in New York City, what are you gonna do?
Are you gonna ask your parents to pay for a practice space? That same scarcity of space is what inspires a lot of people to make electronic music in the first place. A hundred percent! What do you want from me? So yes, a lot of times you end up making things a certain way out of necessity.
So much electronic music is made out of scarcity and trying to do the most with what you have at the time. I think that is beautiful. I was surprised by the fact that people thought of me as a musician. When he was three, his parents split up and his mother took him home to Chile. Despite his Chilean heritage, the kids in his class, after hearing he was born in New York, saw him as American. Then, when Nicolas was nine, his parents got back together and the family returned to New York.
But he discovered he felt equally out of place as one of the only South American students in his class of upper crust white students. All of that is weirdly embedded in my own history. In , when he was 21, Jaar released Space Is Only Noise , a slow-burning debut full of lush, atmospheric tracks equally fit for raves and spiritual journeys, but ideal for both. The record introduced Jaar as something of a prodigy in the electronic community and made him a much sought-after DJ.
Soon enough, the young producer would become a mainstay at some of the most prominent festivals and clubs in Europe. During the years that followed, Jaar released a smattering of breathtaking singles imbued with the sort of thoughtful, euphoric energy that draws so many people to club culture in the first place. Last summer he released Pomegranates , an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's avant-garde film The Colour of Pomegranates that, like the film, explores the emotional textures of various stages of life.
I feel extremely naked listening to that stuff. Specifically, how the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of clubs had shifted, drastically, in a different direction. Needless to say, keeping track of Jaar is a tall order. Parsing through his various exploits can feel just as futile as trying to list all the various genres referenced in his music.
It is, however, extremely rewarding. What separates it from the pack are the almost self-consciously unhip acoustic voices mostly MIDI generated that Jaar uses. Here, Jaar develops percussion as a means of punctuation, rather than a driving force; glitchy drums drift in and out of the mix as grooves come and go, leaving warped samples and instruments in their wake. The one you like, tell a nice story.
Nico : Once upon a time there was a little bird that was flying. And there, there was a man with a very big gun and did like this gunshot. Against All Logic , displays yet another side of Jaar. The tracks are hedonistic, transcendent, and eerily for Jaar coherent.
When building a playlist, the curator always tries to find the center of an artist or a genre. There are strains of ideas and sounds that appear and reappear, but putting a finger on one feels impossibly reductive.
The journey may be bumpy, but it also includes some of the most important and idiosyncratic music created this decade.
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