Darkside makes risks pay off

By Greg Kot Chicago Tribune (MCT)
Posted January 26, 2014 at noon
CHICAGO — Electronic composer Nicolas Jaar and jazz bassist Dave Harrington describe their collaboration in Darkside as an accident. And if the genre-warping music they created on their acclaimed 2013 debut album, “Psychic” (Matador), was surprising, the acclaim it received was even more so.

“I like and believe in weird music,” Harrington says, “and what we did is secretly a bit strange. We made what we wanted to hear, with no regard to who else might like it. So the response has been kind of unexpected. But then nothing about this project has been expected.”

Darkside yokes electronic music to guitar rock with an elastic sense of time and rhythm, informed as much by jazz, world beat and even classical music as it is various pop traditions.

Jaar, who lived with his family in his father’s native Chile for a few years as a child, grew up in New York City in a household steeped in music from around the world. “The most important thing my parents gave me in terms of music is they made me realize there is a music world very centered around the U.K. and America, which is interesting and exciting and dominating, but it’s not the only world, those are not the only rules, and this is not the only way music functions.”

In his early teens, he became fascinated with electronic music and by the time he was 20 was already a celebrated DJ and electronic composer. “I really enjoyed the process of it, creating a virtual band out of all these electronic sounds,” he says, which led to a brilliant 2011 debut album, “Space is Noize.” But Jaar quickly tired of what he saw as electronic music’s insularity.

“Little by little I got less excited by all the strange rules that electronic music gives itself,” he says. “All these people obsessed with subgenres and talking to each other, but not really to anyone else. I wanted to bring in other musicians, create a more jazz-oriented electronic project that didn’t sound like lounge music.”

The concert performances that followed “Space is Noize” saw Jaar touring with a small band, blending electronics with more traditional instruments. It was here where he first met Harrington, an accomplished jazz bassist. But Jaar wanted him to play guitar instead.

“I’d only dabbled in electronic music until that point,” Harrington says. “But part of the reason I was excited when I was first introduced to Nico was that it was not going to be more of the same. I hadn’t played guitar in a band ever in my life, so it was like, ‘Let’s see how it goes.’”

It went well enough that the two began experimenting with a duo project, at first just as a way of killing time in a Berlin hotel room between gigs.
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