Strictly Albums Of The Year: Space Is Only Noise
Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only Noise
Released 31st January 2011 by Circus Company
Chart Performance: Unsurprisingly the French Electronica star failed to chart in the UK.
What The Critics Said: “When Jaar chants “Grab a calculator and fix yourself” I don’t sit there and think, “Gosh, why am I listening to electro-acoustic downtempo future-jazz?”; I go look for my calculator.” Best New Music, Pitchfork
Electronica is often a serious and at times joyless business, especially when it’s removed from its dance roots. For all the shimmering warped beauty of a Four Tet, Oneohtrix Point Never or Tim Hecker record, there is rarely cause to raise a smile, let alone laugh. You instead melt into the music, and become transfixed as a cacophony of noise slowly envelops you.
Jaar is minimalist by comparison; less abstract, more sparse, but no less inventive, and as the chillingly crisp mist of album opener “Etre” slowly sleeks into action with spoken word fragments and disturbing rattles, you could be mistaken for thinking you’ve stumbled upon a distressingly down beat dystopian vision of Paris by night. Instead, the unease of “Colomb” and “Sunflower” gives way to the disturbingly sexy plods of “Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust”. Suddenly, you’ve enter an insalubrious world of warped soundscapes and muttered, understated, outburst of restrained, hidden joie de vivre.
Space Is Only Noise paints a portrait of monochrome desolation, but offers a sly back alleyway, a dank entrance into discoloured world where the protagonist grope at the borders of free expression. Jazz horns squeak and flutter unconvincingly, as if the players themselves are wary of being heard, and yet they still permeate and penetrate, bring flickering bursts of colour to the humdrum mummers of Jaar. Stifled, nervous, but intent to express and if possible exude.
Jaar finally cuts loose at the mid point with the deliciously deadpan “Problem With The Sun” and the frankly sensational “Space Is Only Noise If You Can See”, the moment when humour and ironic abandon are sudden unreleased. It’s an incredible moment of subverted sexuality, and snide assault on a mundane of life wasted indoors (in inside one’s own mind), losing time, losing interest in the outside world, drifting away into a drug or alcohol induced haze of detachment and depression. It’s sound putrids and claustrophobic, and while it bites, it’s hard not to laugh as you imagine a commentator, disgusted at himself, probably with one hand lodged in trousers sneering: “Read The News Baby, Read The News”.
Interpretation is the key, Space… may be tight, closed in, and knowingly stilted, but it’s also a sonic world that teeters on the edges of pre-existing scenes, never quite settling, leaving each listener to forge his way through finding his own narrative within Jaar’s world. David Hayter
