Amidst lockdown in 2020, producer Nicolás Jaar staged a performance at the live stream edition of the Unsound Festival that took the shape of a durational sound art piece. Challenging his own dexterity as a producer, Jaar invited collaborators from all over the world to provide pieces of music and sound to him via Zoom and audio plug-ins, and then proceeded to mix the whole thing in less than 24 hours. Recorded in one entire sitting, the resulting mix was live streamed directly from Jaar’s computers as Unsound’s opening performance. Jaar called the piece Weavings, a continuation of his recent investiture into the qualities of fabric and material matter, following his albums Telas and Cenizas. The act of weaving is inherent to the cultural history of Jaar’s native Chile, where the Mapuche people are known to weave fabrics as a form of cultural archiving. Taking this practice as his conceptual thread, Jaar weaved together the pieces of 13 different collaborators into a singular, sweeping tapestry. These collaborators are Aho Ssan, Ka Baird, Angel Bat Dawid, Ellen Fullman, Dirar Kalash, Księżyc, Laraaji, Resina, Paweł Szamburski, Juliana Huxtable, Rolando Hernández Guzmán, Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara of Senyawa. Weavings is the unabridged recording of that performance, and perhaps Jaar’s most striking endeavour to date.
Jaar has always toed the line between sound art and music, his work often leaning toward abstraction but maintaining just enough to form to pass as dance or dub. Weavings allows Jaar to fully surrender to his experimentalist instincts, and it’s a fascinating look into how he understands and designs sound. Weavings is a work that relies on Jaar’s architectural skill; while there’s an element of improvisation, there’s an element of comprehension that is essential to creating something that isn’t complete chaos. The opening segment, which weaves together contributions from ten different collaborators, flows through strings and drone synths with moments of industrial clatter and static noise. It unfurls slowly into a gently sung vocal refrain and concludes with the warmth of a breathy sax. This trickles like water into the crystalline Part 2, which flows through drones into a cacophony of twinkling keys.
Download and stream Weavings here
Where there is chaos, it’s intentional. Part 3 weaves together darker, more ominous sounds of crackling electricity and sliding strings, at its conclusion allowing waves of noise to take over as Jaar layers monstrous growls and strange, chopped vocal samples. It’s the darkest moment on Weavings, and possibly the darkest sounding thing Jaar has created. Elsewhere, there’s touches of playfulness and humour on Part 5 as Juliana Huxtable delivers a nonsense spoken word bit while Jaar adds echo to each syllable. The bottom part of Weavings is more distinctly Jaar, the tapestry beginning to find its way toward his signatures and sonic interests. Interestingly, the part of Weavings that sounds most like Jaar features no contributions from him except the mixing. Part 6 is filled with desert wind beaten guitar plucks and dubby bass, a familiar motif in Jaar’s work. The twenty-six minute conclusion to Weavings, Part 7, is blinding in its scope. Growing slowly from drone ambience created through one-note strings and wind instruments, Part 7 expands into a staggering vortex of sound at its climax. There’s something ritualistic about it, with a distant voice chanting behind the layers of strings and distortion, and the rattle of ceremonial seed shakers in the foreground. It’s like a hit of sonic DMT that gently peters out into nothingness.
Weavings is a striking and gorgeous work that feels like an important entry into Jaar’s canon. The way the work flows is something to behold. That this was created from disparate threads makes one think about the notion of connection and cosmic synchronicities. Like those who weave threads to pass down the history of their culture, Jaar weaves sound to connect us in the contemporary moment. To have created this work at a time where the world was at its most disconnected speaks toward the unifying power of sound itself, and reveals Jaar as one of our foremost keepers of this sacred knowledge.
Listen to Part 1 of Weavings below.
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