Cosa rende un video interessante? Sicuramente girarlo sott’acqua. Certo, non è originale, ma fa comunque la sua bella figura. Grosso modo è questo quello che avrà pensato Nicolas Jaar per la clip del brano Noise. Il tutto è ospitato dal sito The Avant/Garde Diaries che ha fatto anche una chiacchierata con Jaar. Alcuni estratti interessanti.
How did you discover your sound?
Improvising has always been the most exciting way to get at something new and internal. Music allows you to be in a state of mind where you’re just letting go. I think everyone is that way, even a soccer player, for instance. The best soccer player can be seen as a combination of pure passion and method. The passion part of it is letting go, even though you know all the rules. You’re in the heat of the moment. The feeling of freedom that comes from letting go and allowing your mind and body to speak is very important for creating anything. I guess I’m obsessed with that freedom. The real beauty in music is finding something sacred deep inside, but I feel like the older I grow the more distractions there are.
What are the themes you’re exploring in your latest work?
There are themes I’ve been really obsessed with in the past year that I’m trying to comprehend through my music. The first theme is noise. It’s very obvious for our time, but I just can’t get away from it. And there are a lot of layers to the idea of noise. I think for the past ten or fifteen years gadgets have excited us. But in the last few years, I started getting very grossed out by technology for the first time. I wanted to get away from it. There is a sort of insanity about being connected. Anyway, what started slowly taking shape in my mind was this idea of broken technology. That’s what noise then became to me. What does a broken computer sound like? What does a broken anything sound like? Usually you end up with clicks and actual pink or white noise. You end up with static and dial-up tones. I think we’ve seen a lot of music that deals with these ideas of technological noise. We’re all trying to get away from noise, and yet we’re getting this immense amount of pleasure from the amount of noise we can have at any given moment.
Aside from noise, America has been another theme. America, what does it mean? When Obama was elected in 2008, I was a freshman in college. We had all voted for the first time. I thought there would be peace on earth. I don’t know why. This incredible campaign of change really got to my head. Fast forward to now, and I think things are pretty dark.
Is this dark perspective evident in your music now?
I was in a very idealistic place during my first two years of college before Obama was elected and when I was making my first album. You can hear it. Idealism in music can be very beautiful. But I can’t be in an idealistic mindset anymore. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that I feel like we’re living in dark times right now, or if it’s because I just graduated from school and realized the world is a big, bad, cold place. Reality just hits you. Everything that I was excited about when I was making my first record were these super idealistic things like: What is love? What is the sky? It’s not like I thought of these things explicitly, but you can listen to some of these songs and think of clouds, earth, rain, or water. Now, I can’t be in that state. I have to get this next project out of me, which is based around TV static, technology failing, and intensity. It’s not a passionate, beautiful, loving intensity, but the type of intensity that you don’t know how to be rid of. The place I’m in now is a much more difficult place to make music in. What I’m interested in saying is more complex. I’m just not interested in showing you a picture of clouds anymore.
