A recent review about Nicolas Jaar’s Space Is Only Noise states that the 21-year-old musician’s tunes were »everything and nothing, in a positive sense«. There’s not much to add to this praise. Nicolas Jaar has followed suit with his alleged kindred spirit James Blake and has broadened the horizon of deceleration within electronic music by his impressive debut album. While Blake, despite his classical piano-education, tends to drift off to the abstract by decelerating beyond all measures, Jaar’s14 tracks still seem to be breathing with a hint of something organic. On this basis, Jaar knits tracks no less minimal, which mostly reveal themselves throughout what is not said or heard – all in the sense of the title track Space Is Only Noise, which is complemented by the meaningful »If you can see«. All you need is willingness – and then the listener can understand and embrace the fascinating world of a laptop-songwriter with an enormous potential. Nicolas Jaar mixes cinematic scraps of conversations with atmospheric, even meditative noises from his latest stroll through the woods, which are then glued together with patches of Jazz and finally completed by warm basslines down below. What finally comes out of this masterful tinkering is totally determined and yet interpretable in so many ways, as hardly ever to be found in electronic music before.
Oh No Noh
As Late As Possible
Teleskop