Nicolas Jaar Tests the Limits of Dance Music (Published 2013) – The New York Times

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By Wm. Ferguson
When Nicolas Jaar was 17, he e-mailed a piece of electronic music, which he made on his laptop, to a record label in Brooklyn. He’d heard an interview with the owner of the label, Wolf + Lamb, who was going on about house music and “elasticity.” Jaar felt he knew exactly what the guy was talking about. Wolf + Lamb agreed to put out Jaar’s first E.P. and invited him to perform at a somewhat sketchy space called the Marcy Hotel in Williamsburg. At the time, Jaar was a senior at the Lycée Français on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
So on the evening before the last day of school, he went to his family’s apartment in SoHo, changed out of his school uniform, took the subway to Brooklyn and played a set that ran strongly against the grain of the techno of the time. Back then, Jaar says, everything D.J.’s were playing was 128 beats per minute. The stuff he was doing was almost half that speed, with improvised piano haunting the tracks. And it really resonated with the crowd at the Marcy, which happened to be quite high. “Everybody was on ketamine,” Jaar recalls. “They all kept coming up to me and telling me how amazing my music was.” Having never done drugs (let alone horse tranquilizers), he took the compliments at face value. It occurred to him only later that “elasticity” might have been referring to the effects of ketamine rather than to experimental house music.
After that night, things moved quickly for Jaar. Wolf + Lamb continued to release his music, but Jaar had so many completed songs that on his 19th birthday, he started his own record label. His debut album, “Space Is Only Noise” (2011), was hailed as an electronic masterwork. He has played before crowds of thousands at techno clubs and festivals all over Europe. He has also performed ambient sets at museums (MoMA PS1) and classical amphitheaters (the Cologne Philharmonic). He did most of this touring and recording while earning a degree in comparative literature at Brown University. He is now 23.
Jaar’s gift is for combining floor-filling club music and so-called difficult sounds: a techno beat with a loop of what seems to be Ethiopian jazz; a soulful bass line overlaid with light industrial glitches. Yet only a few months after winning skeptical dance-music fans over to his contemplative rhythms, Jaar was dismayed to realize that the tracks on “Space Is Only Noise” were no longer the outliers they once were. “Suddenly,” he says, “everything was 80 b.p.m.” Jaar’s response was not to speed up his songs but to add instruments — a truly perverse act for an electronic artist. He began performing live with a saxophonist, a drummer and a guitarist, each providing accents to Jaar’s spontaneous soundscapes. He is the rare electronic artist who never plays the same set twice.
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