I caught Darkside last week at Coachella and it made me feel like a ancient Bedouin watching a comet streak past. Some freakish slip n’ slide of divinity. That sounds overwrought in daylight or via LED screen, but there’s something futile in searching for the proper vocabulary or a scientific debunking. Sometimes delusion is preferable. […]

Max Bell choo-choo-chooses you. Not every Nicolas Jaar release is deeply, inexplicably resonant, but all are distinctive, wholly and uncompromisingly his own. He doesn’t crib from contemporaries, though I’m sure he’d rework a Zaytoven beat better than Jay Electronica jocked the Migos flow. Compare his solo work to any Darkside track. Even with Dave Harrington’s psychedelic […]

For all the Jaar heads out there. Darkside, live at the Boiler Room. The noise you hear in the background is them hollering Pink Floyd back. Been a minute since I revisited Meddle or Obscured by Clouds. Jaar on a previously Boiler Room below the jump. Via GVB

Alex Koenig set the controls for the heart of the sun. Like a vintage, blurry black-and-white Polaroid picture you discover in your cobwebbed attic, the enigmatic songcraft of Nicolas Jaar conjures a thousand words, memories, and inflections. Pitchfork’s Mike Powell qualified it as “Purring, spectral music with shades of R&B and an exquisite attention to […]

Nicolas Jaar in full trip-hopping “Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust” mode. Dave Harrington with the bluesy psychedelia. The Darkside duo do not release anything less than excellent songs and manage to invalidate all ideas about bluesy guitar riffs and a Pink Floyd influence being a deal breaker. It’s not the ideas themselves […]

Shlohmo remixes “Avalanche,” complete with requisite falling debris, pianos that feel like they’re pressed on your spine, and the watery percussion that feels like a rip tide taking you down. Gravity is the operative agent. If you seek the mixed metaphors, this is some graveyard, smoked out and staring at the smog music. Use this […]

When I interviewed Nicolas Jaar, he professed an unapologetic love of Pink Floyd and psychedelic music. In retrospect, it should seem unsurprising. You can hear the woozy patience of Meddle in the moody builds and abstruse sounds he incorporates into his songs. He also named his project with Tim Harrington after the British stoners’ most […]

Jonah Bromwich is a jaarhead. An awkward metaphor for you: Random Access Memories is like a chair made out of oak, crafted by those with knowledge of the ancient and highly esoteric craft of chair-making. It’s a solid, dependable album and it’s about as exciting as a well-made place to park it. Spoiler alert, Thomas […]

Nicolas Jaar: God’s son. These sets are becoming the stuff of legend. The fanbase of Jaarheads is becoming a legion. Shouts to the esteemed Gorilla for the heads up.

What do you know about standing in line outside for fifteen minutes to gain entrance into a slammed record store (Vacation Vinyl, Silverlake), only to discover that the one record you wanted for Record Store Day was already sold out. 20 copies gone before 12:30 p.m. I suppose I can chalk this up to the […]