Nicolás Jaar is a Chilean-American composer and recording artist based in New York. He is born in New York in 1990 and spends much of his childhood in Santiago de Chile before returning to New York as a teenager. His work centres on electronic music, including minimal, deep house and techno.

Early work and first releases

Jaar starts making organic electronic music in 2004, when he is 14. At 17, he debuts with The Student EP on Wolf + Lamb Music, with remixes by Seth Troxler and Kasper. At 18, he continues producing and performs live at Club der Visionäre and Arena in Berlin, the Marcy in Brooklyn and Mutek in Mexico City, alongside artists including Deadbeat, Flying Lotus and Guillaume & the Coutu Dumonts. At 19, he studies at Brown University in Rhode Island.

He also has releases lined up on Circus Company, Wolf + Lamb, and his own label, Clown & Sunset, which he founds and owns.

Space Is Only Noise and early recognition

Jaar spends four years in underground dance circles making rough house music with hip hop influences, including tracks such as “Love You Gotta Lose Again” and “Angles”. He also records two Spanish-language songs, “Mi Mujer” and “El Bandido”, which he originally makes as jokes but later decides to release in 2010.

His debut album, Space Is Only Noise, comes out in 2011 and receives strong critical acclaim. It is named Best New Music by Pitchfork, receives four stars from The Guardian, and is ranked album of the year by Resident Advisor, Mixmag and Crack. He tours the album for three years with guitarist Dave Harrington, who later becomes his collaborator in Darkside, and keyboardist Will Epstein. During this period he is voted Resident Advisor’s number one live act for the three years he tours the record.

Live projects and collaborations

In 2012, Jaar introduces a live concept called From Scratch, in which he samples records bought on the day in front of an audience. The first performance takes place at MoMA PS1 in Queens as a five-hour concert with Will Epstein, videographer Ryan Staake, dancer Lizzie Feidelson and singer Sasha Spielberg. He also performs the concept at the Museum of Modern Art in Denver and in Montreal.

He makes his BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix debut in 2012, and the mix is voted Essential Mix of the Year. In 2013, Darkside, his project with Dave Harrington, releases its debut album to critical acclaim and tours through 2014.

Jaar works as producer and writer with FKA twigs on Magdalene from 2017 to 2019. He also collaborates with Somnath Bhatt, Abeera Kamran, Patrick Higgins, Lydia Ourahmane, Vincent De Belleval, Mette Henriette and Carminho, and commissions remixes from Brian Eno, Cat Power and Florence + The Machine. His song “Killing Time” is later sampled on The Weeknd’s “Call Out My Name”.

Other releases and soundtrack work

In 2015, Jaar releases Pomegranates, a largely ambient record intended as an alternate soundtrack to The Color of Pomegranates. Later that year he scores Dheepan, Jacques Audiard’s film about a family of Sri Lankan refugees in the suburbs of Paris. The film wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Labels, collective work and research projects

Jaar founds and runs the New York label Other People, which releases work by Lydia Lunch, DJ Slugo, William Basinski, Valentin Stip, VTGNIKE, Lucretia Dalt and 12z. The label mainly issues vinyl, also offers a membership that gives access to new downloads and the archive, and publishes creator-owned music while splitting record sales profits equally with artists.

He is part of DARKSIDE with Dave Harrington, ¡miércoles! with dancer and choreographer Stéphanie Janaina, and the groups Just Friends, Nicolás Jaar Group and Earth Sounds Now. In 2019, he assembles Shock Forest Group to explore the history and future of a military complex-turned art institution in the Netherlands. The resulting exhibition, No Camouflage at het Hem, uses archival material, data gathering, performances and sound installations to examine colonial, ecological and institutional violence connected to the site.

Work in Palestine and teaching

Jaar is part of the team at Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, Palestine. There he transforms the food shack into a sound studio, runs sound workshops with children from Aida and Dheisheh refugee camps, and helps establish a residency programme for international artists from 2019. He also gives workshops at RCA Architecture Program, Werkplaats Typografie, 4x4 festival in Chiapas, Sonar Barcelona and Berklee College of Music.