Nicolas Jaar has graduated - at least from the trappings of any young electronic music producer (his graduation from Brown University is 18 months away) defying categorisation in his captivating arcane artist album, ‘Space Is Only Noise’.
Four years after his debut on the Brooklyn boutique label Wolf + Lamb, and the much lauded follow up ‘A Time for Us’, who’s glacial slow-jam take on house sent journalists scrambling for adjectives, the 20 year old New Yorker by way of Chile returns to Circus Company with an uncompromising manifesto on traces of the past, love lost, and specters of the future, entitled ‘Space is Only Noise’.
Few are the producers of any age with the cohones to ride a sub-100-bpm tempo at peak time in the techno mecca of Berlin, and fewer still are those who receive an ecstatic hands-in-the-air response for their precocious efforts. It is precisely this sense of risk which elevates ‘Space is Only Noise’ beyond the realm of valiant first effort or crossover dance music oddity. Those looking to wade through the sea of Jaar’s potential influences will quickly find themselves flailing in the deep waters populated by the likes of golden age Factory records and the home spun digitalism of Mille Plateaux, Endtroducing era DJ Shadow and Eric Satie.