Nicolas Jaar wants you to know what his musical interests are. He wants to sit you down, briefly explain what he likes, how he feels it all fits together and have you hear the results of his labors. And aiming for more than just an acknowledgement of his hard work, Jaar feels the need to intricately break down his songs influences and allow them to reconstruct themselves as he bends and twists and removes sounds and samples placed with a very purposed care, that he's willing to diassemble what he has created in order to have it resonate with the listener. He sees his songs are more like free-form jazz as opposed to strictly structured pieces of music--that these songs can suddenly change, can shift from tone to tone, even from genre to genre and still be emotionally felt by the listener. He creates with an aim to please and invite but also to explain, because without a primer we'd be lost among his scattered thoughts and musical alleyways. And in spite of all the random samples and strange loops, Jaar makes curiously inviting music which wants to be heard, which needs to be understood. Don't call it difficult music, or even music for those with a particular taste, to do so would be to do it an injustice, to sell it short even.
On Space Is Only Noise, Jaar builds on his already impressive resume of remixes and ep's and uses his considerable skills to craft an album of perplexing beauty and substance. The detail of this music is infinite. There is always some small detail, a stray musical ripple which hasn't been noticed before, as if each track subtly changes every time you listen to it. And as was evidenced on his previous releases, his ability to craft "pop" songs from what can be creatively called abstract parts is finely tuned here as well. And it's in this ability that Jaar manages to involve us on an emotional level as well as an intellectual one. Songs like the somber "Colomb", with its spatial use of silence wrapped around echoed, warped vocals and "Keep Me There"--which on first listen seems little more than a collection of samples strung together over a simple beat but that slowly unfolds and displays an understated relaxation and quietly emotive resonance that is truly tremendous--only hint at the creative depth that Jaar has at his command. With Space Is Only Noise, he has fully realized the potential of his earlier releases and created an album that feels so fully enamored of its own existence that it allows the listener the option of joining in or simply enjoying the passing wonders on their own terms.
Tracklisting:
01. Être
02. Colomb (listen to the mp3 below)
03. Sunflower
04. Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust
05. Keep Me There
06. I Got a Woman
07. Problems with the Sun
08. Space is Only Noise if You Can See
09. Almost Fell
10. Balance Her in Between Your Eyes
11. Specters of the Future
12. Trace
13. Variations
14. Être
No comments:
Post a Comment