Much ado has been made – progressively emphatically – about the sparsity within the work of the almost unfeasibly juvenile
Nicolas Jaar. First and foremost the hype and hubbub around tonight's sold out show in the capital's finest musically-orientated establishment is, superficially, equally inconceivable: commuters haggle for spares on bustling tubes and every spluttered word centres upon the man who, at the wondrously tender age of twenty-two, is over to showcase his very own label and multimedia outlet, Clown & Sunset. The venue itself meanwhile is ideal in that it is later to give superlative sounds from the evenly excellent Space Is Only Noise LP of yesteryear ample room to breathe and in turn grow and evolve, to respire and writhe in smoke-filled, herb-perfumed air.
Keeping things spatial in a rather more cosmic sense are Acid Pauli and previously, the increasingly impressive Ethiopian Soul Keita whose deep and darkly dreamy 808-addled set is tidier than the workspace of an obsessively compulsive office worker. However irregardless of the patent excellence and impressionistic visions of Keita, it's he who signed him who elevates all to yet another astral level: tonight, largely single-handedly (guitarist and fellow component of Jaar's latest project Darkside Dave Harrington emerges only intermittently, most notably adding an inescapable air of Ennio to the faintly lugubrious Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust), Jaar quite immaculately rejuvenates the chilling sentiments and sounds of gurgling synth to genuinely reconstruct the general aesthetic of material ensnared within the grooves of black wax, conjuring something that's altogether more organic. Lending to this sense of the biotic are sepia-soused reels of twilit, spindly-fingered forestry as his set begins slowly yet with the steady blooming of quietly greening verdure.
We're around fifteen minutes in before a stupefying wash of ambience morphs into a rip-roaring Wouh, the track splashing in your sense of consciousness and startling like some almighty gas guzzler falling from the sky and thwacking the tranquil surface of the Med. It's greeted, befittingly, by much whooping and wailing, whispering embers of methodically assembled cigarettes and other such stuff ablaze overhead as they were in
a blacked-out basement back at Sónar. He was then accompanied by a comprehensive backing band yet tonight, jouncing intensely behind a bank of electronica-emitting electronics, he appears as focussed, as intent on throwing up moments of the genuinely staggering as ever, for which scour no further than the sultry downtempo skulk of Colomb. For Jaar has become the master of stretching an often barely elastic tensity until agitatedly taught, elongating every sensation, every niggling compulsion to convulse to his every clattering rhythm before releasing it – and us therefore – in crescendoes and drops that, mystifyingly, truly border on the melodramatic. An astronomically admired artist in his own right, Clown & Sunset created a universe in this spheroidal, celestial space in a mere few hours, and it's one that's more than meritorious of seething, sold out habitation.
