​Nicolas Jaar: From Scratch
P.S. 1
Sunday, February 5

Better than: A just-press-play-and-hide-behind-the-laptop DJ.

The 21-year old American-Chilean electronic producer Nicolas Jaar has ambition. In the past two years, he's released seven EPs and the full-length Space Is Only Noise; he runs his own label and tours with a rotating cast of collaborators, who bring elements of live performance to his robust yet minimal compositions. This weekend, Jaar wrapped up a weekend of shows, among them a sold-out night at Music Hall of Williamsburg, with a five-hour set at P.S. 1 titled From Scratch. Jaar's music is an intersection between left-field electronic and contemporary classical music, and he leaves plenty of space between the beats for his music to breathe. The quality of the sounds used by Jaar are equally important to the sounds he constructs as harmony and rhythm, with melody taking a back seat as a compositional element.

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"A lot of the instruments I know how to play, I don't really know how to play."

​New York's own Nicolas Jaar has been creating a stir in electronic-music circles since he was a teenager; now, at 21, he's released his first full-length CD, Space Is Only Noise, on his own Clown and Sunset label. (Get a sample via YIMBY here.) Early singles like "Russian Dolls" and "Time for Us" were more dancefloor-friendly than the album, which is meditative and slow, with lots of acoustic instruments (notably some decidedly jazzy piano), sampled vocals, and even a drum solo (the 23-second "Trace"). Despite being assembled from several years' worth of recordings, it has a circular structure and a unified feel -- it's spiritual without being cheesy about it, psychedelic without requiring drugs for full enjoyment, and clearly the product of someone whose vision of himself and his music is ever expanding, but with a strong core concept. Like a lot of 21-year-olds, probably. Jaar recently completed a brief tour of the U.K. and Europe; now he's back to studying at Brown University. We reached out to get answers to a few basic questions.

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