Nicolas Jaar at Heaven, London, gig review: Spellbinding minimalism
Conventional gig tropes are disregarded completely
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Your support makes all the difference.Over the course of two full-length albums, a series of EPs, film soundtracks, a Krautrock-leaning side project Darkside and award-winning DJ mixes: Chilean-American producer and composer Nicolas Jaar has built a reputation as electronic music’s shapeshifting whiz kid.
The 26-year-old creates electronica that is more high art than dance-floor banger: Jaar once said it was his “job to try to make a type of music that hasn’t been heard before” and his intricate, complex work constantly strives for an intellectual hinterland.
This approach has extended to his live shows. Tonight, conventional gig tropes are disregarded completely: across a fluid set, tracks mutate, merge and change beyond recognition in avant-garde abstractions.
Take the first 30 minutes, which showcases Jaar’s penchant for the kind of oceanic space in his music that would have Brian Eno telling him to get a move on.
Shrouded in darkness at his equipment, Jaar’s music meanders along at a meticulous pace; fractured rhythms, piano flourishes and fizzing textures are only occasionally interrupted by his deep vocals, a blast of sax, or an unhurried, barely-alive club-music pulse. The minimalism is spellbinding.
And then, the release. “Variations”, from his debut Space is Only Noise, takes its Latin American-tinged loop as a starting pistol; a danceable beat drops; the leisurely revealed light show is finally in full glare, and Jaar, having deliberately ratcheted up the tension, fully lets go.
Not that he panders: “Swim” might be end-of-the-rave euphoric, but even more orthodox tracks from this year’s politically-charged album Sirens metamorphose: the Krautrock rhythm of “Three Sides of Nazareth” speeds up as if chased by the ghost of Alan Vega, before dissolving into John Carpenter-esque synths and back again.
The glitchy intro to last year’s EP “Fight” gives way to clattering drum patterns and incessant robotic grooves; the slow throb of “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See” is skewered, stripped bare and rebuilt into a wash of sound before it slowly drifts away, with Jaar left to sing the track’s refrain before slipping offstage without as much as a word.
It is mercurial stuff: as leftfield talents go, Jaar is a rare one.
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