Nicolas
JAAR
The DANCE FLOOR hybridist WILL
serve YOU your SOUL for DINNER
JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, BIKER JEANS BY BALMAIN, AND SANDALS BY PRADA.
Written by Nick Parish Photographed by Tetsuharu Kubota
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SUIT AND SHIRT BY PRADA.
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INK TANGO JERSEY STRIPED DOUBLE-BREASTED SUIT BY GUCCI AND SHIRT BY TOM FORD.
’m waiting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art a little before
noon on the sort of chilly, misty day that gives question to spring’s purpose
when Nicolas Jaar materializes from a cloud of schoolchildren teasing
pigeons, downtown black-on-black jeans and leather jacket. He’s taken a
taxi from his home in Tribeca, and our plan for the afternoon is simple:
stroll through the Met and have lunch. But along the way I want to make
sense of something: How, upon rising to a position opposite popular EDM
superstars with a thoughtful, rebellious series of releases, the 23-year-old
Jaar will refine his future.
Jaar is fit and slender, with a handsome, angular face and heavy dark
curls that press his expressions toward neutrality. He hasn’t been to the Met
since high school, and he laments the plight of New Yorkers missing cultural
gems in the pursuit of their personal program. “[New York is] a great, amazing
place, everything is here, yet everything is so driven by what you’re doing
and planning that it’s hard to be utopic here,” he says as we wander inside.
“There’s too much reality.” Reality has changed significantly for Jaar in the last
few years; it’s arrived with touring, laurels from critics, and a measure of fame.
It’s appropriate here to step back to February 2011. After several small
releases on Brooklyn label Wolf + Lamb, Jaar put out Space is Only Noise
on Paris-based Circus Company. Deep house, dub, film score, downtempo,
electronica, trip-hop—the album drew on myriad elements of familiar genres
and chased away convention with its hypnotic pacing and solidity of form.
Before the year was up, Jaar also released a three track EP called DARKSIDE,
written with guitarist Dave Harrington. DARKSIDE stripped the vibe back
even further, with a trio of vamping, crescendo-less, Balearic-touched omens
in blue. It was music to give people mean looks to, from a young, talented
innovator raised between Chile and New York City by artist parents—a perfect
specimen for the scrutiny you’d likely find in these sorts of pages. But unlike
many electronic musicians, Jaar didn’t hide his personality behind a shadowy
persona or mushy press quotes—he challenged industry conventions and
spoke his mind about major labels, the inherent loneliness of clubs, and being
booed for playing his music the way he wants to play it.
As we move inside the Met, Jaar and I head upstairs to see a special
exhibition: Street, by British artist James Nares, is a video piece featuring
Manhattan captured in super-slow motion from the back of an SUV. Its 150
real-time seconds play for more than an hour in the gallery, with subjects
floating in and out of focus, and the city’s bizarre, complex life attenuated to
its finest detail. The film is cut from the same cloth as some of Jaar’s work:
familiar elements presented with different contexts to evoke an uncommon
reaction. Jaar wears a kind of doleful intensity and smells of cigarette smoke
while we watch it. Later, he tells me he had pulled an all-nighter in his studio
two nights before. “If you’re making music for eight hours in a row, by the
ninth hour, you’re not trying anything, you’re just doing, you’re just right
there,” he tells me. “It’s in the pocket.”
Jaar studied comparative literature at Brown University, and as his career
took off, he stuck with his degree. His recent graduation was a turning point, a
moment to finally accept the world’s harshness as material for his music. “It’s
hard to think about noise when you’re in a cradle,” he tells me. “You’re making
your own stupid noise, you’re in the cradle. You’re not listening to the noise
around you—you’re the one making the noise. You step into real life, which
is a different thing.” The cradle’s beaming ivory towers offered refuge, but
they also cast a shadow. “I guess I’m interested in the things that are harder
to talk about. Manipulation. Power. Noise. Unfounded or founded desire.”
Jaar’s directional update includes a gentle repudiation of what has come
before; that’s when you begin to notice “I don’t care” is a power phrase for
him. He seems to care a lot, or at least have thought a lot, about the stuff he
says he doesn’t care about. Especially when it comes to his musical output.
Despite being pleasant and cheerful, he’s quick to display a refreshing bit
of forthright aggression when he touches on self-criticism. “I don’t care if
something sounds super electric or super organic. I just don’t. The idea of
making a song with like a ridiculous piano solo is disgusting. I can’t believe I
did that.” He’s referring to “Encore,” which features an up-tempo Satie-esque
piano line with a sample from Marcel Duchamp’s The Creative Act that’s all
too self-aware. “I believed in it at some point, but I feel like I’ve grown up,” he
confesses. “So the very simple gestures I used to make don’t seem to explain
the reality I want to explain anymore.” The few critics who have taken oblique
shots at Jaar have hinted at the barely perceptible edge of pretense, where
something becomes artistic without substance or meaning, and colloquially,
climbs a little too far up its own ass. We head toward the back of the museum for lunch at The Petrie Court
Café, overlooking its sculpture court with tables full of ladies who lunch. Jaar
stands out, the leather coat at the country club. As I put my tape recorder on
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OVERSIZED SILK JACKET AND PANTS BY ETRO.
conspiracy theorists have called a false flag operation by the United States
government, gave him pause. “I thought, why would I alienate all these people,
and have them say, ‘Oh, does he think Boston was a false flag?’ Do I want to
have a say? I couldn’t care less if you know what I think about politics and
what I don’t. I don’t care. I want you to like the music. Sometimes I feel like
there needs to be a song out there called ‘False Flag’ and it needs to be a
very dark electronic song.”
Jaar’s self-awareness won’t be an impediment to connection with fans,
and projects like False Flag will have a safe space to live, he hopes. In the
coming months he’s dissolving Clown & Sunset, the label/art house he’s
been working through since 2009. The new item of focus is Other People:
a tiered community with layers of monthly subscription, from the voyeur
to utterly involved, featuring weekly music releases and perks for being
in the club. Jaar hints at a backlog of music that couldn’t see the light of
day on Clown & Sunset based on a business partnership gone awry, which
he says he can’t go into for legal reasons. Presumably he’s split with Noah
Kraft, his partner on the label, who ran Clown & Sunset Aesthetics, the
production arm. CSA’s first project was the February 2012 performance of
“From Scratch,” a five-hour improvised set from Jaar and friends (including Harrington, musician Will Epstein and Steven Spielberg’s daughter,
Sasha, who sang) presented with MoMA and Pitchfork at MoMA’s PS1.
CSA was also responsible for The Prism: a $40 aluminum cube with
minimal controls that housed 12 tracks of music from the label’s artists.
Given these previous projects, clearly the artistic sense of a covey of true
believers is appealing to Jaar. It would allow him to explore the darker
aspects of reality and disruption in a safer, more supportive space than
the web writ large. He’s eschewing the festival tromp, too, focusing on
“special” gigs, like a seated performance at the Cologne Philharmonic, or
a set at the Barbican in London, exclusivity which should make being part
of the club more appealing.
Will his moves, toward disruption chiefly, succeed? “He’s already
gifted, he knows the reference points, he knows how to dial it together, and
that’s emblematic of his generation,” says Sam Valenti IV, head of Ghostly
International, one of the world’s more influential electronic labels. “It’s
not about mastery, it’s about being an artist who can put together a hybrid
thing.” Valenti and his cohort have hybridized the music and the delivery
mechanism with Drip.fm, a service that 20-something independent labels
use as a subscription platform—similar to what Jaar seems to be aiming for
with Other People.
For now, Jaar must go. We’ve had our coffee, and his assistant arrives
back with news of a conference call in London about butterflies. He spots his
high school philosophy teacher across the cafe. For the first time, he offers
a tentative smile. “I was so non-open-minded. I thought clubs were stupid.
I thought fast electronic music was boring and cheesy. I thought a 4/4 kick
was lame. There’s something for everyone, and that’s kind of the place where
I’m at now. I just want to talk to the people that want to hear, that are there to
listen. I used to be more elitist, and I’ve been humbled—hopefully.”
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the table I can sense a dozen ‘Who is he?’ notes ripple through nearby diners.
For Jaar, the idea of constantly reinventing an evolving artistic practice
is, in part, how he received culture as he grew up. His father, Alfredo Jaar,
is an artist himself, working in architecture, film, and meta-media criticism.
He’s known for work including The Rwandan Project, a long-standing indictment juxtaposing representation of the country’s genocide with Western
responses, like Untitled (Newsweek) from 1994, which places sequential covers
of Newsweek against captions describing the genocidal activities in Rwanda
happening concurrently. His best-known piece, A Logo for America, took over
Times Square’s Spectracolor light board and displayed the outline of the
United States with “THIS IS NOT AMERICA” overlaid, and “THIS IS NOT
AMERICA’S FLAG” over the stars and stripes, before showing a pinwheeling North, South and Central America with “AMERICA” overlaid. Onlookers
were unsurprisingly provoked.
The apple of discord hasn’t fallen far from the tree. “It had to come
from somewhere,” Jaar says plainly, then expands on his shift in direction.
“I’m obsessed with the idea of disruption, with something changing all of
our ways of thinking,” he says. “I was obsessed with this idea of being able
to make house music that was 103 BPM, and was disruptive. You see how
that has a shelf life of six months—who cares after that?” Disruption can be
big or small, but Jaar yearns for the broad to disrupt our broader reality. “I
want something to happen that’s impossible to ignore. That the media cannot just ignore. I don’t mean this as tragedy. But something to shake up the
power structure.” The discovery of aliens, for example, would be something
that changes everything.
Our lunch arrives: salmon with quinoa for Jaar and egg farfalle with
three types of peas for me. The conversation shifts to marketing, and how to
present a darker, “noisier” direction—the new disruption—to fans. This is
especially pressing as there’s 50 minutes of new DARKSIDE music mastered
and ready to move. Jaar wasn’t happy with how a pair of tracks he considered
some of his best work (“Don’t Break My Love” and “Why Don’t You Save Me”)
were received, and he reckons it’s because he posted them to SoundCloud
rather than making a big deal of an official drop. “I put out something that
I considered a new phase, for free, and I think it might have been taken as a
free little thing that doesn’t really matter.” What does this mean for the new
DARKSIDE? Certainly not debuting the record at a rural agricultural confab
in the Australian outback, as Daft Punk had recently announced. “Let’s not
do anything gimmicky, or anything like that,” Jaar says. “Let’s just make it
easy for people to hear the record. And how are we going to do that in the
best way possible? That’s the question.”
Electronic artists adopt new personas frequently (which Jaar has done
in a sense with DARKSIDE). When they step into different terrain, they wear
new masks. But that doesn’t seem to interest Jaar in his own releases. It does
raise complications with challenging material that embraces the complexities and darkness of reality. For example, he had written an eight-minute,
dark opera track that he had wanted to call “False Flag,” after the concept
of paramilitary deception to spark conflicts. But the Boston bombing, which
PHOTOGRAPHER: TETSUHARU KUBOTA FOR BRIDGEARTISTS.COM. STYLIST: MAHER JRIDI AT MAHERJRIDI.COM. HAIR: CHARLIE TAYLOR AT CHARLIETAYLORPORTFOLIO.COM. MAKEUP: AYA KOMATSU FOR DEFACTOINC.COM USING CLINIQUE. PHOTOGRAPHY
“I’m interested in the things that are harder
to talk about. Manipulation. Power. Noise.
Unfounded or founded desire.”
OVERSIZED SILK JACKET AND PANTS BY ETRO.
STYLIST: MAHER JRIDI
HAIR: CHARLIE TAYLOR
MAKEUP: AYA KOMATSU
PHOTOGRAPHED AT ACME STUDIOS, BROOKLYN