News
Nicolás has written the music for Dea Kulumbegashvili's 'Beginning'. The film has been selected at Cannes 2020, and premiered at Toronto Film Festival and San Sebastian Film Festival this month.
The opening show of this year’s edition of Unsound is WEAVINGS, a durational improvisation conceived and co-curated by Nicolás Jaar, structured in the manner of a long fabric of sound, with performers playing with the artists coming before and after them. Performers so far confirmed include Aho Ssan, Angel Bat Dawid, Dirar Kalash, Ellen Fullman, Księżyc, Laraaji, Ka Baird, Paweł Szamburski, Raphael Roginski, Resina, Rolando Hernández and Wukir Suryadi & Rully Shabara of Senyawa.
On 19 September 2020, Het Nieuwe Instituut opens Lithium, an exhibition in which the eternal human search for energy is highlighted through the work of researchers, designers and artists. Nicolás worked with Godofredo Pereira for his section of the exhibit, entitled 'The Ends of the World'.
The Ends of the World addresses the socio-environmental destruction resulting from the extraction of brine for the production of lithium. Focusing on the microbial and symbiotic ecologies of the Atacama Desert in Chile, our contribution to the exhibition looks at salt lakes or salares as environments that both live and give life. More than an analysis of lithium, we aim to re-frame the ways by which resource extraction is to be understood and debated.
'The Ends of The World' is the title of a book by anthropologists Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, where the authors notice how the western fixation with the end of the world is predicated on ignoring all those – human and other than human - for whom the world has already ended due to colonialism and extractivism. The end of the world also marks a politics of exception, where the end supposedly justifies all means, a justification that has been crucial to the continuation of resource extraction at a global scale.
Within the race for the underground frontier, the Atacama desert is a unique planetary attractor. Due to its mineral riches it has been systematically destroyed by the multiple cycles of mining that ravaged the desert since the colonization, from silver and gold, to nitrates, copper and now lithium. With each mining boom come new forms of land appropriation, new forms of environmental destruction, new forms of violence over the peoples and beings of the desert.
Biologist Lynn Margulis argued that instead of competition, it is alliance and symbiosis that are at the heart of creative evolution. Environmental semiotics allows us to trace some of these shifting relations of coexistence. The pink colour that permeates the exhibition is one such semiotic register, moving from mineral to bacteria, from there to algae and ultimately to the feathers of flamingos. We could say that colour is a maker for material relations of coexistence.
Symbiosis, affinity, unnatural alliances are the topics of our intervention - a multi-screen installation emerging from the work being developed by the Lithium Triangle Studio at the MA Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, and its collaboration with Alonso Barros and the Atacama Desert Foundation in Chile.
Interviews with Alonso Barros, Cristina Dorador and Rolando Humire look at the pressure of extractivism over different ecologies of existence in the Atacama. Musician Nicolás Jaar contributes with a speculative soundscape recreating the elusive ‘voices’ of bacteria that can be heard at moments of drastic temperature shifts in Salar de Llamara. At the centre of our intervention is an animation where Mingxin Li explores the unique stromatolites - sedimentary rocks produced over 3.5 billion years by the accumulation of layer upon layer of cyanobacteria - as monumental environmental architectures.
For us, The Ends of The World is a lens through which to see the many worlds that make up the world, locating the ‘green transition’ in relation to non-western ecologies of knowledge and of existence. What worlds are ending is firstly to ask what worlds exist.
Telas is out today. It was made between December 2016, and January 2020. You can find it here = https://nicolasjaar.bandcamp.com
Special thanks to Somnath Bhatt (art) , Susanna Gonzo (voice) , Milena Punzi (cello) , Heba Kadry (mastering) , Abeera Kamran (website), Mario Zorio & Anna Ippolito (custom instruments), Andrea Zarza & Matthew Kent (Mana) and Mark Byrne (Other People)
Local Palestinian artists as well as the Radio Alhara founders will share mixes during the 80 hour, three day anti-colonial and anti-racist broadcast called 'Fil Mishmish". Nicolás' set will feature "Telencima", "Telahumo" from forthcoming album Telas and a new song called "Cangilón". Here are the lyrics to "Cangilón" :
hay agua en el poso también hay armas, restos de guerra no me sorprendería, si habrían muertos silvando ahí adentro
traeme el cangilón que tengo que tomar tengo una sed no importa si hay sangre
que pasó aqui? que vamos hacer? todo lo que puedo decir, lo dijo la mujer.
As of today, Other People will begin directing all its profit from record sales and streams towards a list of organizations battling causes we believe in. The first batch of organizations we will be donating to are active in the fight against systemic racism in the US, help the rights of protesters putting themselves on the front lines in order to demand justice for victims of racist crimes and invest resources in the health and well being of black communities.
End White Supremacy. Black Lives Matter.
Organizations:
The Bail Project / Assata's Daughters / Loveland Foundation - Therapy Fund / NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
www.other-people.net
First 'Telas' stream will begin tomorrow (May 23) at 20:00 Central European Time (2pm NY) link : https://yamakan.place/palestine/
Telas (Veils) is multiple things at once. It's a visual terrain created by artist Somnath Bhatt. It's a record by Nicolás Jaar, with key contributions from Milena Punzi (cello), Susanna Gonzo (voice), Anna Ippolito & Marzio Zorio (instrument makers), and Heba Kadry (mastering). It's a digital terrain created by Abeera Kamran where the sounds and illustrations of Telas live in their primordial states. The site was imagined by Abeera, Somnath and Nicolás as a panspermic terrain where no matter -whether existing in thought, physical form or other- has a solid or unmovable origin.
Multiple parts of the music were first played during two shows at The Kitchen in NYC in the fall of 2017, alongside performances by Africanus Okokon and Patrick Higgins. (https://thekitchen.org/event/other-people-presents-two-shows)
Telas is Nicolás Jaar's 6th full length album, and follows Cenizas from earlier this year.
Tracklist:
- Telahora
- Telencima
- Telahumo
- Telallás
Telas is out on July 17th on Other People. The physical edition of the album will be handled by Mana Records
Available on Bandcamp: https://against-all-logic.bandcamp.com/album/2017-2019 (Illusions EP feat. Lydia Lunch and FKA twigs is also on vinyl)
All upcoming shows for 2020 have been cancelled.
You can listen to the new album here
Cenizas is comprised of 13 songs and can be pre-ordered here: https://nicolasjaar.bandcamp.com/
listen here: http://open.spotify.com/album/75vFTgDgdfVhbniLoyCNKh
RTE is a performance by Vincent de Belleval and Nicolás Jaar based around 10 rotating parabolic reflectors that capture and emit sound and light. The reflectors scan a building’s interior volume, creating an ever-changing ecosystem of reflections and feedback chains. Due to their parabolic shape, the reflectors emit focalized transitory sound fields, encouraging an active and ambulatory listening. It was developed with Pantxo Bertin & Adam Paikowsky. https://urvakan.com/
First aired on NTS Radio on January 27 2020, you can find it archived here.
Más de 4 mil personas asistieron al concierto cultural que celebró los 10 años del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos. El evento recorrió la historia de la institución durante estos diez años, artistas como Los Coros Ciudadanos, Inti-Illimani junto a Quilapayún, Grupo Congreso, Ases Falsos, Nicolás Jaar, Manuel García, Javiera Parra, Zaturno, Joe Vasconcellos, y Moral Distraída invitaron al público a reflexionar sobre la memoria, la migración, los pueblos indígenas, la diversidad y los derechos humanos a través de sus canciones. https://ww3.museodelamemoria.cl/
Recording starts at the 1h 18min mark https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000bgvb AEAEA is Nicolás' duo with composer Patrick Higgins
Nicolás will be performing at the first Sharjah Architecture Triennale. The 1h 15 minute piece will consist of 16 speakers buried underground and placed in a circle around the audience in the archeological site of Mleiha Fort. More info: https://www.sharjaharchitecture.org/pages/featured/-1
This is a collaboration between Vincent de Belleval & Nicolás Jaar (with help from Pantxo Bertin) and it consists of 10 large rotating reflectors. The parabolas create an ever-changing environment of interlinked reflections and feedback chains. The title alludes to light and sound diffusion, signifying how the energy of the sound and light is kept in its reflections but not in its source. Due to their parabolic shape, the reflectors can also focalize sound, creating hallucinatory surround fields.
Nicolás worked on 7 of the album's songs alongside Twigs. The album comes out November 8th.
The light + sound piece takes over the entire 200 meter long tunnel in the basement of the former ammunitions factory. 'Incomprehensible Sun' will be on view in Zaandam from September 18th until December 21st. Tickets here: https://hethem.nl/en/Tickets
Nicolás Jaar and Patrick Higgins will play at the opening concert of this year's Le Guess Who festival in Utrecht under the name AEAEA. (https://leguesswho.nl/)
For the first time, Dave Harrington, Will Epstein, Nicolás Jaar and Tlacael Esparza bring the Bladerunner project to Europe for 8 intimate shows in the basement of het HEM in Zaandam. Starts Thursday the 10th of October. more info : https://hethem.nl/en/
Nicolás will be working with the Shock Forest Group, an ensemble of 12 researchers from various different fields, for the next three months. They will be investigating the sounds, histories and stories in and around Hembrug, an ex-military terrain in the north of Amsterdam. A log of the operation can be found here.
From August 5th-11th Rolando Hernandez will be staying and working at the Dar Jacir Studio in Bethlehem. He is Nicolás' second guest at his new residency program in the West Bank.
More info at The Wire
For Dar Jacir's inaugural exhibition on the 21st of June, Nicolás installed a 6 meter water pipe from Hebron that broadcasts the resonant frequency of the Jacir Studio mixed with the natural droning of the pipe. This frequency was mixed with the live amplification of the naturally occurring droning of the pipe. The piece is entitled "Echorot". Other artists in the exhibit include Ayed Arafah, Duncan Campbell, Sam Durant, Jumana Manna, Tai Pomara, Mohammed Saleh and Vivien Sansour.
The first resident of the new Dar Jacir Studio is chilean sound artist and composer Sebastian Jatz Rawicz. From the press release: When Sebastián first entered the small square building made of stones in Dar Jacir´s garden, he perceived it as a sacred structure, a hiding place from which listening would be possible without being seen. A protected place for silence and contemplation. A place of geographical convergence, where the wind rises perfectly towards the four walls. In order to bring his experience back to Santiago, Sebastián decided to create a narrative of the Sound Studio building, tracing its coordinates through sounds and voice recordings. An archive of the work created in the studio is in the works via Other People.
For his residency at the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, Nicolás transformed Dar Jacir’s storage space into a sound studio for the creation of site specific sound pieces. Throughout his two weeks in the space, Nicolás met with musicians from Bethlehem, Ramallah and Haifa and also had sound workshops with kids from Aida and Dheisheh refugee camps. These sound workshops introduced children to the practice of music and sound´s creation, experimenting with instruments and tools available in the new studio. A residency program for international artists will be curated by Nicolás for 2019-2020.
¡miércoles! will be performing at CA2M in Madrid for their Picnic Sessions.
¡miércoles! the collaboration between Nicolás and choreographer, artist and dancer Stéphanie Janaina will be performing at Sarāb festival in Wadi Rum on June 8th
Nicolás will be improvising for 9 hours at the Oude Kerk Church in Amsterdam on Sunday May 12th. A dozen+ surround speakers + two organs will be in use. (first function: 6am-9am, second function: 4pm-7pm, third function: 10pm-1am)
The main theme from 'Voula' a piece commissioned by the Oude Kerk church in Amsterdam will be playing every hour at the bell tower carillon for the next 5 months.
Nicolás will be the artist in residency at the Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research (دار يوسف نصري جاسر للفن و للبحث) from the 22nd of April to the 5th of May 2019.
¡Miércoles! will be performing in Rome on October 5th 2019 for Roma Europa Festival.
Against All Logic live for the first time and Nicolás Jaar & Group performing in Tasmania in June.
On March 26, Nicolás will be joined by Norwegian saxophone player Mette Henriette (ECM), Italian percussionist Valentina Magaletti – who will be playing new instruments created by Turin based artists Anna Ippolito and Marzio Zorio – Hamlet Nazaretyan and Ivane Mkirtichyan, who will be playing duduk and Johan Lindvall who will round out the ensemble on piano. (https://clubtoclub.it/en/other-people-night/)
Nicolás will DJ at Elysia in Basel on March 28. He will be joined by Patrick Higgins, VTGNIKE and Ancient Astronaut. http://elysia.ch/
6 hour NTS mix archived here, available for download
All of the Nymphs EPs from 2011-2015 collected in one triple vinyl. https://nicolasjaar.bandcamp.com/album/nymphs-triple-lp-pre-order
Tremlett presents Nicolás Jaar’s multi-channel radio network as an installation across the rooms of a five floor medieval tower in Spoleto: http://www.mahler-lewitt.org/events/public-program-artists-books-program-2018
Nicolás will be performing new works at Rewire Festival in The Hague.
Nicolás will be performing a live audio visual piece at Unsound Adelaide on December 14th.
more info here
¡miércoles! Is a live project by dancer Stéphanie Janaina and Nicolás. The premiere, entitled "Fiesta desde el Vacío" will take place on November 21st 2018 in San Cristobal, Chiapas (Mexico) for the contemporary dance festival 4 x 4.
Nicolás will be doing a residency at the Oude Kerk from the 15 to the 21st of October. He will be working on a piece for two organs and electronics which will be premiered in the Spring 2019, alongside a piece by Philip Glass. The residency will be closed to the public. more info : https://oudekerk.nl/
Farah Nayeri will conduct a live interview with Nicolás for Unfinished, in Bucharest (Sep 27-30)
Pomegranates, Nicolás' ambient 2015 record is out now on vinyl through specialized shops.
Artist Lydia Ourahmane and Nicolás present "Music for Two Seas" an underwater sound work in the coast of Stromboli
Video of Nicolás performing 'Three Sides of Nazareth' Live in Ramallah on September 30th 2017
Nicolás will be performing at the Kitchen alongside Bush Tetras, James Chance, JG Thirlwell & ensemble, Veronica Vasicka, and Lydia Lunch on May 16, 2018.
Nicolás is no longer represented by WME, Windish, Geist or We Are Free. For all further requests, please email inquiry@nicolasjaar.net