Nicolas Jaar holds Darkside against the light

(Nicolas Jaar & Dave Harrington)

The Chilean-American sound artist Nicolas Jaar has been influenced by Mulatu Astatke’s Ethio-jazz, Erik Satie’s repetitive piano, and the minimal techno of Ricardo Villalobos. In recent years he has carved out his own, innovative path. Space Is Only Noise, his groundbreaking 2011 debut, gave a new meaning to noise and silence. But the attention that came the 23-year-old’s way got to be a bit too much. How else can we explain his decision to hide behind the band name Darkside in a duo project with his regular live guitarist Dave Harrington?

“I wanted to break with that ‘typical’ Nicolas Jaar sound,” the New Yorker says of Darkside’s debut album, Psychic, which is somewhere between deep house and blues, between Pink Floyd and Can. “When I come up with something that sounds like me, I hate it. [Laughs] In music I’m actually trying to escape from myself. The sound that emerged when Dave and I were sitting together in the room was completely new for me. I never thought I would make a rock ‘n’ roll album.” [Smiles]

In your music you go looking for the minimal. Was it harder to preserve the essence with a “band”?
Nicolas Jaar: It sounds fuller, because the songs have a floor and walls. There are a lot more layers, so you discover new things every time you listen. But the intention is always to make your point in as simple a way as possible. That is minimalism for me, in whatever manifestation.

Where do those mechanical sounds in “Metatron” come from?
Dave Harrington: That’s the noise of old televisions. I love television and those old black boxes. When I lived in Providence, there were sixteen piled up in the living room. The way they feel, the sounds they make, the static electricity – wonderful.
Jaar: The cliché about the electronic musician is that he explores his soul with electronica and seeks out the confrontation between human and machine. Look at Daft Punk. But it’s just something you can’t escape when you’re involved in that kind of music.

You guys have remixed Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, one of the most talked-about albums of the year. A statement?
Harrington: Ah no, it’s just that we’re crazy. [Giggles]
Jaar: I do like realism. Really. I want to say something about now in my music. Capitalism is being questioned everywhere, but then Daft Punk makes an expensive, perfect sounding album like that, on which one of the titles is “Give Life Back to Music”... We add some noise to it.

There is an intuitive side to Psychic. Can you make music without thinking about it?
Jaar: You’ve touched a sensitive point there, as I’m always analysing things. That’s why Dave and I play together, so we can lose ourselves in it completely.

Does the name Darkside reflect your feelings too?
Harrington: The project took shape between two tours, in a hotel in Berlin. We were messing with our US speakers on the European electricity system. After a while, they started smoking; then they exploded and the power went off. So we were literally in a dark room. [Laughs] Look, everything has its dark side, something you don’t see. There is a sort of tension in that. Darkside is about feeling intensity in all its forms. Something that can make you fearful, but ecstatic too.

Darkside Feat. Nicolas Jaar & Dave Harrington • 9/10, 20.00, SOLD OUT!, Ancienne Belgique, boulevard Anspachlaan 110, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-548.24.24, www.abconcerts.be