"All sounds have an effect"
Nicolás Jaar on the revolutionary potential of music within an exploitative system
Nicolás Jaar is an electronic producer and musician who creates and performs work solo (as Nicolás Jaar and under the Against All Logic alias) and as part of the psych-prog band Darkside. He released his solo debut album Space is Only Noise in 2011 to universal praise, and the following year his BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix immediately became one of the most celebrated in the series. A string of critically acclaimed albums and projects followed, including a radio play, the music from which formed last year’s double LP Piedras 1 & 2, Jaar’s most stunning and personal work yet. It connects his Chilean and Palestinian heritage through a fictionalised narrative that pays tribute to both his grandmothers while making a powerful statement about dispossession, colonial violence and revisionist histories.
Prior to Piedras 1 and 2, Sirens was probably your most overtly political work, and at that time you were questioning whether or not dance music could be a site of protest. Eight years later, do you think it can be? Do you think there is revolutionary power in dance music?
Hi, thank you for this question Annabel. I have to say it’s very hard to answer this, I don’t think I can give a sure-footed answer, but I can try to show where I’m at at the moment.
I think the first thing I would want to think through is the definition of “revolutionary power” in your question. What does that mean? I think I would broadly define it today as the power to structurally transform the various interlinked systems — of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, patriarchal and misogynist education, carceral-border-military industrial complex, extreme resource extraction — that violently oppress people and land. With that definition in mind, I think that most dance music today does not create structural transformation on its own. I think the culture industry can be, at times, quite narcissistic and self-serious about the amount of change it thinks it brings about in the world. That being said, all sounds have an effect. How people digest different things is impossible to really quantify, so it's hard to tell the effect a song can have on someone or on a movement, just like it’s hard to say how a tree changes the way a conversation goes if you sit under it.
I have definitely been changed by certain songs. For example: Construção by Chico Buarque. The lyrics speak of the last day of a construction worker’s life, who dies while working on the job. The lyrical structure of the song is a set of fixed sentences and a set of words that change with each stanza so that each time a new stanza begins, it’s as if we see the same scene but from a different perspective. Structurally, having a replaceable word in each stanza within an unchanging fixed sentence calls to mind the structural violence of replaceability of these workers whose death is but a mere “nuisance to the traffic" (first stanza), “nuisance to the public” (second stanza), “nuisance to the Saturday” (third stanza) in the context of far-right dictatorship rule happening in Brazil at the time (backed by the USA). What does this song demand from its listener? I take it as saying: under these conditions, constantly modify your viewing angle, notice how the political structure needs the replaceability and disposability of the working class. He uses the mechanical logic of neoliberalism but subverts it and exposes it in the musical and lyrical structure of the song. It demands close reading and expects a certain amount of active engagement from the listener.
If I had to think of “revolutionary power” in music, for example, my mind goes to the coded songs Palestinian women sang (“tarweedeh”) during the “Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939” (and after) near British jails where large numbers of Palestinians were taken prisoners by the British colonists. By adding “L” sounds in the middle of the words (a practice called mlolah), they could communicate with prisoners and send secret messages for potential escape. These are songs that have a material insurrectional quality to them.
There are so many examples in the world where music, poetry and dance are used as both conduits to political awareness and as one of the backbone rituals of social cohesion and harmony. As songs age, they then turn into archives of the political motivations and desires of a people (as has happened with the Teshumara movement, for example). In a sense, a song’s potential as an archiving medium, which can both conceal and reveal while providing spiritual and emotional cohesion between people, makes it a powerful tool in insurrectional contexts.
Contemporary dance music, particularly in illegal raves, unites a few things that gives it potential for insurrectionary activity: an autonomous concentration of people moving in unison, claiming a space of land, safe spaces for sexual freedom, etc. For some, this is “revolutionary” enough because it shows a glimmer of potential agency “outside” of certain systems. Is it enough? Is anything ever enough? For some, nothing will be enough until the current world system of constant exploitation is made inoperative. I think I’m more in this camp, with all the contradictions that it entails as a touring musician who releases music on streaming platforms.
Ultimately, I think political music should be judged on what it is asking of its listener, what kind of demands it makes on the world. These can be political demands but also spiritual demands, often they can be both. So I would say: no sound is innocent. But also: no sound is ever alone. Revolutions and uprisings have always been constellations of sounds, spirits, martyrs, food, jokes, stories, cleaning, dancing, and blood.
Do you feel less of an affinity with club music than you used to?
No, I don’t. I love a lot of dance music. I like dancing with friends. It’s essential for me. I think a lot of Piedras 1 & 2 is pretty dancey actually.
Piedras 1 and 2 are remarkable, stunning albums. The pair of albums has been described as your magnum opus; does it feel this way to you? Were you always planning to turn the radio play into an album, or is this a development that became particularly important to you over the past year? Tell us about your grandmothers, to whom the album is dedicated.
Thank you for asking me about my grandmothers! So, Archivos de Radio Piedras is a radio play I released in 17 episodes between 2022 and 2023 on the Telegram app for free. It’s a story which begins with a child who survives a fire by entering a watery subterranean cave, and then it follows two radio announcers as they remember their friend and musician Salinas Hasbún who disappeared. The radio play had a bunch of songs in it, kind of like a musical. And so once I put out the radio play, I decided to take the songs and bundle them together for people who may not have heard the radio play, and have no intention of listening to it since it's long and all in Spanish. That’s what Piedras 1 and 2 is.
The play is dedicated to my grandmothers because in the time I worked on it, between 2020 and 2023, both of them passed away which meant I spent a lot of time in Chile, where they both lived. I named the protagonist of the play Salinas Hasbún, which is a composite of my two grandmothers’ last names. One of them comes from a Palestinian family from Bethlehem (Hasbún). The other (Salinas) was born in Temuco, a city in the south of Chile in the Wallmapu territory. Wallmapu is the ancestral home of the Mapuche people who have been resisting Spanish and Chilean colonization for hundreds of years. So Salinas Hasbún unites both of my grandmothers in a name but also geographically unites these two territories: Palestine and Wallmapu. Both have been subject to settler colonial violence and still are to the present day, often using the same Israeli military equipment actually. Israel was one of the biggest exporters of arms to Chile during the military dictatorship and today a lot of the riot gear and drones used to surveil, control, and intimidate people in Wallmapu are made by Israeli companies. As you can see in this link, Israeli military firms sold arms and provided assistance to many of the dictatorships or military regimes in Latin America of the past century: in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras and even Stroessner’s Paraguay. This century, Israeli drones and riot gear have been routinely used in police violence against protesters and for surveillance purposes. One of the reasons Israeli weaponry is popular among other far-right regimes is that they come with a “battle-tested” seal.
In the play, I sought ways to connect these “seemingly” disconnected territories. For example, the song “Song of Hope” in the play is background music over which Nekul Núñez, an activist and archivist from Temuko, narrates a fictional (hopeful) story of all Mapuche political prisoners breaking out of jail. This echoes the episode “Agua pa fantasmas” which alludes to Israel’s administrative detention practices against Palestinians in the West Bank. This practice echoes the “Ley anti-terrorista” in Chile, which is used to criminalize Mapuche land defenders. For the episode "Radio Chomio", my friend, the violinist Eli Wewentxu and I made music together and on top he speaks about the sounds of the military drones above him in Chomio, Gülumapu-Wallmapu; drones which are made of the same Israeli brand as those used in Palestine.
Where are you living at the moment, and why? How do you feel about the rise of fascism globally and especially in the US?
I’m currently living in London because my partner got a visa to be here. While times are certainly extremely harrowing at the moment, I think that fascism has been present in the US and Europe all along, from the foundations of capitalism in settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and erasure of indigenous livelihoods to its echoes today in the form of our carceral and border policies, greedy extractivism and military interventions.
I’ve been dismayed by the violence — both physical and psychological — against people who the system calls “immigrants”, which in and of itself is a violent term. I’m perturbed by the general rhetoric around immigration, because it’s a space where white supremacist ideas can most easily enter the public consciousness by the creation of the illusion of a kind of “security” which acts as a cure to societal problems (labour shortages, poverty, theft) that do not primarily stem from illegal immigration. It’s particularly hypocritical given that it is white Europeans who emigrated all over the world to colonize it and who created massive forced migrations of enslaved peoples and indentured workers for centuries. Today, it’s no surprise that those most invested in the continuation of racial capitalism make borders the central topic of their political agendas.
Your father’s family migrated to Chile from Palestine around the 1920s, I believe. Do you remember being taught much about Palestine as a child, and did you have much contact with the Palestinian community and culture when living in Chile? What are your memories of these experiences?
My grandma made Palestinian food and we would all convene often in her house up until the moment of her death to eat together. Unfortunately my grandfather, who lived part of his life in Palestine, passed away when I was 13 so I didn’t hear too much about it directly from him. Chile has a huge Palestinian diaspora, it’s quite normal to meet people with Arab last names. I was actually shocked when I arrived in the US in 1999 and most people didn’t know what Palestine was and those who knew told me Palestine didn’t exist.
It’s never been terribly popular for musicians to support Palestine (I suppose this is true of anyone who fears that speaking out will impact their profits). There are notable exceptions, of course, but the overwhelming majority are still silent, or have taken a very long time to say something, and even then it tends to be mild. I noticed too that some of the musicians who showed strong public support for Palestine in 2018 and 2021 have been silent since October 7. Have you been surprised by the ways in which musicians have responded or failed to respond to the genocide?
I don’t think social media posting should be the only barometer for someone’s involvement or attitude towards something. Often, actions speak louder than words. I have met people who have fasted for weeks to protest Israel’s genocide on Gaza who don’t post on social media. So I try not to be judgmental of people’s social media presences or absences tbh.
I read about your experience of giving a listening course in Munich last year (forgive me if these facts aren’t 100% accurate, it’s from the YouTube transcription in English of your interview with AJ+ Spanish) and of how the course was cancelled after you posted about the 75 years of occupation that preceded October 7. Did the German press really write in articles that you were a Hamas fan? Where was this written? It’s crazy that you were cancelled from a “politics of listening” course for saying these things.
The short story is that basically I taught a month-long class at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Art Academy) in Munich, Germany, and we were going to present the work of the students on October 18th or something like that. On the 8th of October, I posted a story on Instagram saying that the October 7 attacks were not “unprovoked”, as the mainstream American and European media were trying to push. I said the attacks were a reaction to 75 years or more of dispossession, land theft, murder and structural violence, giving some data about the countless human rights violations Israel had committed in 2023 alone, prior to October 7th.
A student was horrified by this comment and quit the group. Then, the university cancelled the public presentation. The students were then pressured by a journalist into publicly saying they had all “distanced themselves from me”, scaring them into thinking they would have to bear the professional consequences if they didn’t. This all culminated with this journalist writing an article in the second biggest newspaper of Germany saying I was a Hamas supporter. They put this in their headline and they placed this headline in all the bus and subway screens of Germany for a day. The German electronic music magazine Groove basically copy-pasted the article and shared it to their many followers without seeking any info nor speaking with me. I threatened to sue both the newspaper and the magazine, since they categorically lied, and they got scared and changed their articles.
One of the first questions I asked the students in my first class with them (two months before Oct 7) was: “What other places need to be loud for Munich to be so quiet?” I kept asking this question to the group over and over throughout the class, thinking of all the places and people Germany has extracted from and exploited in order to have "peace and quiet" at home.
This question would continue to echo in my mind long after the class was over. In 2023, Germany was responsible for 47% of Israel's total conventional arms imports and they were and are at the very forefront of silencing Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. What other places need to be loud for it to be so quiet in Germany?
The loudness of genocide — murder and ethnic cleansing through bombings, shootings, explosions, raids, demolitions, the "zanana" (drones), tanks, bulldozers, F-15s, F-16s, F-35s, sonic booms — is only made possible by silence elsewhere.