A CONVERSATION WITH SOUND MAKER NICOLÁS JAAR
FIRE FROM ASHES
A twinkling piano riff grows louder as it folds into itself. Soon after, the sound of a human sniffle, the slow creak of a door, a body shuffling about, then settling. The high-pitched keys dissolve into the ambient crackle of a microphone: “Thanks for being here, everyone.” Every noise is so exact that I forget we’re not in the same room, that I’m among 7,000 others on a website typically reserved for streaming video games, listening to a live broadcast by Chilean-American musician, Nicolás Jaar. Raised between Santiago and New York City, Jaar graduated from Brown University in 2012 with a degree in Comparative Literature. He released his first full-length record as a junior, touring the global club circuit on school breaks and assembling songs between exams. Jaar is a prolific creator, and his work resists labels and categories: He has scored a Palm D’Or-winning film; he’s co-produced MAGDALENE, the acclaimed album by vanguard-pop artist FKA twigs. Jaar is curating a residency for sound artists in a converted food storage shack in the West Bank, and under his alias Against All Logic (A.A.L.), conjures tracks that signal the familiar warmth of a dancefloor— the 4/4 beats that instruct bodies to move synchronously as dawn breaks outside. When Jaar releases music under his birth name, however, his tracks drift freely in the space between electronica, sound collage, and ambient noise. Stillness emerges from unconventionally slow beatsper-minute: While a house or techno track will often clock out at an average of 128 bpm, many of Jaar’s songs linger in the cool range of 80 to 100. He insurgently uses samples to probe the political: One song from his 2011 record Space Is Only Noise re-appropriates the oft-misogynistic language of 2000s Latin-American pop, and another from 2016’s Sirens stretches the fluttering chords of ’70s Paraguayan folk harpist Sergio Cuevas. Jaar’s latest album, released March 27, is titled Cenizas. When I asked him to distill the project into a sentence, he characterized it as “a place full of ashes of an old fire, and we still don’t know
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how to clean up the mess.” “Cenizas” is the Spanish word for “ashes,” an image apt for tracks that merge destruction with regeneration through their whispering, monastic harmonies, dripping, glitched percussion, and Coltrane-infused piano echoes. This same sentiment arises in the record’s lyrics: On the opener “Vanish,” the repeated phrase “Say you’re coming back” evokes with incessance a kind of circular time, one that rejects linear progress. This refusal is revisited on the record’s final song, “Faith Made of Silk,” where Jaar sings “Look around, not ahead / a peak is just the way / towards a descent” over and over again atop a sprinting drumbeat. It’s through these tracks that Jaar confirms the following inquiry as fuel for his work: Can electronic music imagine a new political world? I noticed that to accompany his live-streamed sounds, Jaar broadcasted his computer screen in real-time. While users in the chat function championed the techno scenes of their respective hometowns, a cursor toggled sound levels on Ableton Live, scanned YouTube for footage of quicksand, and sifted through desktop folders. At the close of the two-hour set, Jaar pulled up a clip from a 1985 lecture at the United Nations by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. I remember the prosody of this moment: Krishnamurti’s urge that “Peace requires a great deal of insight, a great deal of inquiry without condemnation,” rhythmically colliding with the sound of young kids playing and Jaar’s own unreleased, flickering synths. It was then that I understood the virtual space Jaar had created—one in which sonic fragments from across the globe and throughout time converged in one place. Maybe this was electronic music’s power: its capacity to breathe new life into something with a history, to collapse several temporalities and places into one, to broadcast it back to a public scattered across the globe. There was a certain collectivity—as if the sounds we were hearing belonged to nobody in particular and all of us at once. A glimmer of possibility. Nico was generous enough to speak with me from his home in Europe about sonic negative space, learning without a path, and art’s place in unsettling the hierarchies of today.
Jaar: I’ve actually been making music the same way for 16 years. The only big difference recently is that I have worked with some people to create objects that I sample and make sounds with. I can’t call them instruments because it’s a matter of making the objects in order to sample them—not to ‘play’ them. But maybe that’s what’s changed; now I need a kind of alien physicality to what I make music with. I’m getting less and less comfortable referencing the past or distinct musical traditions. (But of course it's very hard not to!) Westfall: There is a sense of movement, place-making, and dislocation in the multilingual lyrics, sonic nods that reach far across the world, and direct references to political histories. What role do landscapes or geography play in your work, and what kind of geography do you hope your music imagines or constructs? Jaar: Whenever I used to try to accurately answer the question ‘where are you from?’ I would get stuck. I’m not American but I was born in [New York]. I’m not Chilean but both of my parents are and I lived there during my childhood. I’m not Palestinian but the Jaar family is. I think things got simpler when I realized that it didn’t have to ‘make sense’—that ‘sense’ itself was maybe the issue to begin with. In my last [live-streamed] set, I played ‘religious’ music from different parts of the world, and also a YouTube clip from [Jiddu] Krishnamurti, who questions the idea of anything sacred “originating in thought or any organization.” He speaks of “truth as a pathless land” which is maybe the best way I can answer your question in regards to 'geography.' I’m very moved by the idea of a ‘pathless land’ when I think of our particularly intense moment of global chaos. We need to learn how to learn without a path.
Westfall: You released the album Sirens just over a month before Donald Trump was elected, and Cenizas came out in the midst of a worldwide public health crisis. I wonder if you think the role of the artist feels significant in times like this, where there’s maybe both a collective sense of chaos and possibility. I am curious if you see music—yours or in general—carrying the +++ function or potential, a responsibility even, that goes beyond the scope of the music itself—and if so, what Alex Westfall: I’d love to know more about your time that might look like to you. at Brown and in Providence. How did your studies and creative practice shape one another? Jaar: I think there are multiple roles an artist or musician can have in a time of crisis. But...when has it not Nicolás Jaar: I was actually speaking with a friend been a time of crisis? from Brown today and I told him that I really regretted Of course, right now is an unparalleled time, but dropping out of this class called ‘Thing Theory’ that we for example, the disproportionate deaths of African shopped together. He stayed in it and it really shaped Americans and Latinos in the US due to COVID-19 his thinking in a beautiful way. Meanwhile, I’m just is the outcome of an ongoing crisis in the health and getting around to reading some of the books from that infrastructure of this country whose foundation is class now! A part of me wishes I had gone deeper into based on racist hierarchies set in place long ago and my studies, actually. It’s hard to realize how special it dutifully maintained over time. The causal chains that all is when you’re there. Little, insignificant things play led us to this moment are just as part of the current much bigger roles than they should, but I guess that’s crisis as the 'current crisis' itself. The inhumanity that just youth…! has supported the country for hundreds of years gets louder in moments like this, but it is just as present Westfall: The periods of silence in many of your tracks in times of 'normality' (a normality we could just call feel meditative, spiritual. What do these moments of 'neoliberal crisis'). stillness signify for you, and how do you approach As far as 'art' is concerned…I have difficulty incorporating this kind of “negative space” when separating art from life: if I was to do so, then there creating something? would be clear boundaries between what I make and who I am. For better or for worse, these boundaries Jaar: I never listen to my own music, but the other do not exist. In 2014-15, when I was making Sirens, I day, spurned by my sixth week in quarantine and frus- was very preoccupied with the rise of fascists movetrated by how Spotify aggregates everything in order ments throughout the globe. After hearing the horrors of popularity and creates playlists with titles like “This of the Chilean dictatorship firsthand during my youth, is X…” I decided to make a kind of ‘selected discog- I was (very naïvely) shocked that these forces could raphy’ playlist of the past 11 years and for the first time gain such grounds in our present times. And so, the I re-listened to some songs from five, seven or even entire record ended up displaying this shock and these 11 years ago. It was a very, very strange experience. preoccupations. I couldn't help it, it was present in all So many of the songs have this moment where every- I read and all I consumed. This is why there are songs thing breaks, fragments, and goes into a vacuum, and about Trump (“The Governor”), Palestine (“Three Sides then it all comes back again but in a different form. It’s of Nazareth”), the Pinochet dictatorship and its legacy comical how many of the songs do this; I didn’t know (“No”), racism against Muslims in the US (“Killing Time”), this. It’s all the same song, over and over again! But and my pessimism about the future (“History Lesson”). maybe this structure is my dream or hope for myself or A year after that record came out, the dystopian for us, to be able to experience complete disintegra- world of Sirens seemed frankly quite 'tame' compared tion and to build something new from a place of calm- to the reality of 2017. This new dystopia—with roots in ness and stillness. very old systems—gave way to something else for me, on a more intimate level. I felt that if I had grown up in a Westfall: Have discoveries in technology affected your society that could end up in such a state, there would production process? I’m curious if working digitally be aspects of its negative energies that also linger offers you something that working in analog can’t—and inside of me. This dissolution of 'inside' and 'outside' is how you might consider both forms in conversation. really what informs Cenizas.
