A gesture somewhat apposite for his meticulous approach to music-making, in 2017–2019 Chilean-American electronic composer Nicholas Jaar makes a punctual two-years-to-the-day revisit of the ‘Against All Logic’ alias he debuted with the 2012–2017 collection.
I don’t seem to be alone in preferring this sample-focused side-project to Jaar’s wider body of work; it’s less cerebral, perhaps, but there’s something brought out of him when he toys with random snippets from the last forty years of music and film that leaves us with a more varied, and undeniably more exciting, listening experience.
The clearest difference between this album and the one that preceded it, a mood noticeable without any kind of prior context in fact, is the urgency you hear on 2017-19 – a reflection of how much the world around him accelerated between the two periods, it’s tempting to say.
Creating a wonky and at other points aggressive bass soundscape to climb from ‘Fantasy’ to the apex of the seventh track ‘Deefer’, there’s a tense energy to this thirty-minute ascent that flatters the long-play format, forming a not-too-on-the-nose sense of progression that invites attention all the way along.
This is impressive, because it often tends to be quite difficult for artists to play off so many soundbites against each other for the length of an entire album without it all sounding a bit incoherent, mismatched, or worse, just annoying. The likes of The Avalanches and Boards of Canada managed to make this work a couple of decades ago by casting samples around an overarching theme of woozy atemporal haunting, but Jaar takes a different tack, instead casting a spine through these tracks with some of the atmosphere building many will recognise from his extended club mixes.
Particularly strong sellers on here come in the form of opener ‘Fantasy’, which bounces at a leisurely pace through some Senni-esque breaks and arpeggios before falling into the darkness of the rest of the record, and ‘If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard’, a riff on a monologue by no-wave icon Lydia Lunch that’s probably the most techno-y number Jaar’s done under this moniker to date.
An album that feels like an answer to and a complete rejection of the sunny disposition of its predecessor, this short serving is another well made case for Nicholas Jaar’s continued celebrity within the world of electronic music, and a release that just about manages to distil the finer idiosyncrasies of the late 2010s post-club movement.
benedict tetzlaff - deas. 