9/10
New York based artist Nicolas Jaar blesses his audience with another masterpiece of an electronic concept album. The Album explores styles influenced by improvised jazz and avant-garde and combines them with his contemporary dance electronic style, the result is a fully immersive 3-dimensional stereo experience that takes the listener on a journey through the meditative emotions that the artist is feeling through the isolated and scary times of 2020. The music flows seamlessly from one song to the next, and is nicely peppered with little glitches and time changes that keeps the drone and one tone nature of the album interesting. The sudden endings and seamless changes also help to capture the attention of the listener and adds to the rich and lush sounding atmospheres that Jaar creates. The album itself is a cry to a higher power, to save the world from its current state of isolation and loneliness. This is evident by the gloomy and meditative atmospheres that the listener is confronted with, along with the chanted lyrics “savior come down” early in the album (Vanish) and later by the lyrics “hello, chain” in the song (Hello, chain), which suggests that the artist is ready surrender to that higher power in exchange for some kind of release from his prison of isolation during these crazy times, or perhaps that this loneliness and isolation is the chain itself, that he greets like an old friend by now, accepting himself as a slave to his humanity and the emotions that come with it. The album is not without moments of beauty however, the harmonies that Jaar uses manages the difficult feat of being rich and warm, at the same time as being dark and lonely in its nature. He achieves this by removing all other instrumentation during sections, and by stripping it back so that its bare in moments leaves the music very vulnerable and longing. Listening to the album from start to finish, it seems to get brighter and warmer with the more experimental and improvised sounding songs like Agosto, Gocce, Vaciar, and rubble, which is especially interesting to me because often those styles are much more difficult to listen to. In this rare occasion, these songs seem to glue the entire album together while bringing a feeling of warmth, curiosity and wonder to the listener. The combination of all these emotions; dark, gloomy, meditative, curious, beautiful, warm, could it be that Nicolas Jaar is attempting to warmly embrace his audience as he forces them to experience a selfreflective meditation? The album art (a head with the face turned inward) seems to support the idea that he wants his audience to look inward. In the eyes of Nicolas Jaar, perhaps the world is in desperate need of saving. This album serves to create change in the world through the individual by creating an atmosphere where they can come to terms with their humanity and look inwards. Jaar knows that the solution to the issues that we face as people is often found within our own being, and rather than confronting those issues aggressively, his taken a passive stance and invited his audience on a journey of self -discovery in hopes that we will all find a better way to coexist. An absolutely wonderful album and work of art! -Daniel Ohm
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AuthorMy name is Daniel Ohm and this section will include my research into music theory, experimental ideas, Mixing techniques and lessons learned from creative forums and musical endeavors. Archives
September 2022
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