Le grand Nicolas (Jaar) Nicolas Jaar - Space is Only Noise. Clown and Sunset's sounds. Does Nicolas Jaar's music defy description? What do you call Nicolas Jaar's music? The 20 year-old American may be closely associated with New York's Wolf + Lamb label, but the music he makes has only a tangential relationship with house or techno. For his debut release, The Student (you can listen to his music here), Wolf + Lamb had to request Jaar underscore this crumbling meditative piano piece with a beat, to give it dancefloor traction. Meanwhile, the man himself often takes his live club sets down to a jarringly slow 70bpm, interested, as he is, in creating atmosphere and emotional resonance, rather than physically moving the crowd.
"I never really made club music until I started playing in clubs," explains Jaar (pronounced "jar"). Jaar talks of dance music accelerating and shrinking through the 1990s; increasing in speed but narrowing its emotional range, in the process becoming a one-dimensional, escapist soundtrack. As befits the son of Chilean visual artist Alfredo Jaar, he explores clubbing at a conceptual level.
Nicolas Jaar - Playing With Tempo - Features - Music / Electronic Beats by Telekom.