Words by Mathis Neuhaus
When reflecting on Chilean-American composer Nicolás Jaar’s artistic output, the term rhizome comes to mind. Coined by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guatarri in the 1970s, rhizome has since been an en vogue metaphor for describing a non-hierarchical organisation of knowledge. Its train of thought is based on presenting culture as a constantly sprawling map or network, with a range of attractions and influences that can refer to each other. The rhizome reacts to the complexification of the world by allowing to think about cultural production as an active, ongoing, processual activity that does not always predictably lead from A to B.
Since releasing his first EP ‘The Student’ for Wolf + Lamb in 2008, Nicolás Jaar’s work has sprawled out in many directions and drawn its own map. Sometimes prominently, sometimes in disguise, he has explored the possibilities of composing and presenting music that overcomes gratuitous and superficial classifications of genre, practice or audience. This does not mean his music occupies a context-less realm, though. In fact, Nicolás Jaar’s artistic output could best be described as a reflection on myriad meta-contexts that change and shift over time, just as the artist himself changes and shifts.
Born in New York City in 1990, Jaar first forays into performing music emerged while wandering the streets of the city with his friends, looking for electrical outlets into which they could plug their gear and present songs to an undefined and always-new audience. A piano-trained accordion player at the time, Jaar also explored the possibilities of programmes like Ableton for producing music on his own – while still in high school, sitting in libraries or maybe his own bedroom, to reference a notoriously applied term for young people who often work hardware-less and in solitude on electronic music.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/V-_c0o8LAaM
His critically acclaimed debut album ‘Space Is Only Noise’ from 2011 changed all that. Suddenly lauded as one of the most interesting and unique voices in contemporary electronic music, Nicolás Jaar became a globetrotting live performer (and often DJ) at the age of 21. The musician carved out a sonic palette beyond conventional reference points and struck a nerve: elegantly maneuvering his own musical world, occupied by hushed voice-fragments, sparse arrangements, and a multi-instrumentalist sensibility.
Even though ‘Space Is Only Noise’ was a benchmark at the time, Nicolás Jaar did not rely on it being exactly that. It may be a bigger hub on his ever-expanding map, but its popularity did not prevent Jaar from further pushing into new territories. Not interested in having just one tone, the musician continued on an artistic path marked by exploration, collaboration and constant progression. Up to this point, this meant releasing two more albums: one being ‘Pomegranates’ in 2015, an imagined 20-track score to Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 avant-garde film ‘The Colour of Pomegranates’; and one being ‘Sirens’ in 2016, an accomplished piece of political and personal songwriting that dealt with topics ranging from alienation to questions of identity and borrowings of surrealist poetics.
The stretches in between Jaar used for different means of exploring sound production and presentation. Together with multi-instrumentalist Dave Harrington, he formed the two-man supergroup Darkside, and on his own he founded Other People, a project often described as a label, but which goes beyond the traditional notion of what running a label typically means. The self-described “sound/image/data archive” constantly bends the implications of occupying the role as a music distributor and, consequently, gatekeeper in the 21st century.
Take the aptly named project ‘The Network’ as an example: structured as an expansive radio play positioned around a DJ at the helm of his own radio residency, the digital space http://other-people.network gives room to 333 different radio channels. All of them are made-up of more than 20 hours of Jaar’s own mixes and music that sit next to conceptual sound pieces focusing on Justin Bieber or the annual Forbes list of the world’s top billionaires. Spending some time in this rhizomatic network leads to serendipitous discoveries at the same time as providing the opportunity to reflect on the radio’s inherent possibilities as a broadcasting structure. The conceptual approach of ‘The Network’ is positioning it beyond traditional notions of music production and reception. It’s a fitting agent of Nicolas Jaar’s artistic agenda, which is likewise defined by using a multiplicity of convention-bending voices to fathom what it means to be an artist in present times.
Over the last few years Nicolás Jaar has ventured further away from composing music in traditional formats, instead immersing himself in more-freewheeling contexts and collaborations. Together with Mexican choreographer Stéphanie Janaina he performed the 3-hours live improvisation ‘¡MIÉRCOLES!’ that also makes use of a show-specific publication to mediate the creative process behind the two artists’ practice and collaboration. Expanding the territories of his practice, he even went underwater on the coast of Stromboli. In collaboration with Lydia Ourahmane, he realised the work ‘Music for Two Seas’ that the public could listen to for as long a duration as they could hold their breath.
The delicacy and unpredictable outcome of multi-disciplinary collaborations is what makes them exciting, and Nicolás Jaar is very much aware of these dynamics. He came a long way from tinkering with Ableton on his own private and intimate compositions to opening up and letting the world and all its influences shape integral components of his body of work. He has fostered connections with the world and in turn opened up multiple entryways to his body of work: one can consider Nicolás Jaar a performer, a collaborator, an enabler or musician. Or everything at once. By refusing to work in a singular medium or production strategy, he explores the full potential of contemporary music composition. It would not be an exaggeration to therefore describe him as a prototype artist for our present day and age.
What’s so appealing about Nicolás Jaar’s work is seeing an artist in flux: constantly formulating and executing new ideas and thoughts, there seems to be no fear for failure. As an intellectual risk-taker with seemingly endless curiosity, he appears to be moving and stretching in every direction at once; picking up what interests him along the way, joining forces with collaborators and considering the contexts that surround him at any given time. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in their 1980 book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”
Nicolás Jaar presents two performances and an Other People focus at this year’s festival. On Saturday, he takes the stage for a solo live/dj set and on Sunday he’s joined by an ensemble for his Nicolás Jaar & Group debut.