Nicolás Jaar would likely take offense with the same old dutiful recitation of his credentials—you know, the Chilean-born, Brown-educated electronic wunderkind, Clown & Sunset label head, serious artiste behind BBC’s Essential Mix of 2012, musical cubes, and a five-hour MoMA performance in a geodesic dome. In our interview from earlier this year, Jaar wanted to shed his past reputation, and that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t hope to be seen as a different person at 23 than they were at 21? But that's the kind of C.V. you only play down if you're worried about being called an elitist or running for public office. That might not be so far off the mark in regards to Darkside, Jaar’s partnership with guitarist Dave Harrington. The name alone triggers an automatic word association with an album owned by over 50 million people and recognized by nearly everyone who’s made it to 10th grade. The prismatic, black-lit aura of their fascinating, endlessly explorable debut Psychic doesn’t try to stop anyone from making that connection and if you spot Jaar’s stated influences of Can and Richie Hawtin, that’s fine too: Rarely has a record held such appeal for the high-minded while welcoming the simply high-minded.
Though a logical extension of the prog-dance fusion explored on Darkside’s self-titled EP from 2011, it makes their curious reimagination of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories from a few months back feel like their true debut. Upon initially hearing it, one could easily think of Daftside as an academic work rather than something meant for listening pleasure—a foment of the bubbling resentment towards the original’s Gatsby-esque confluence of ostentatious extravagance and genuine, if self-serving, benevolence; it was a hell of a party that left a lot of up-and-coming producers feeling like they were locked out of East Egg. However, Psychic and Daftside have the same essential goal, guided equally by artistic reverence and crackpot scheming. And that aim is to emulsify the disparate record industry obsessions that dominated right before the advent of the compact disc: opulent disco and ornate prog-rock, yacht-pop and astral funk, the former of each almost exclusively singles mediums, the latter beholden to the LP and all sounding like the sole province of bearded, flamboyantly lapeled millionaires.
On the gargantuan opening gambit of “Golden Arrow,” Darkside spend 11 minutes misremembering the ground rules for music neither of them were alive to hear the first time around. The heartbeat pulse serving a baseline for those distant, whirring synthesizers and hollowed-out drones is pure space-rock, but the gorgeous overlay of sighing cello and digital disintegration is not. When the beat finally drops after about four minutes, it’s a slack and stumbling disco interloper—high on pot, not blow. Those palm-muted funk guitars have After Dark bloodshot tincture, but that label would never allow this much modernist, bit-crushing babble in their proudly purist Italo, let alone that undulating synth bass. And then, Harrington’s falsetto takes off like an apparitional Gibb brother and... are we sure this isn’t disco? Do these guys have any clue what they’re doing?
Thankfully, the answer is “hell no”—they have a plan, but no ground rules or precedents; Darkside aren’t recreating anything. The subliminal bass shadowing Jaar’s vocals on the confounding, starched-shirt blues of “Paper Trails” has its own gravitational pull, it only exists in music made by Nico Jaar. Nor is there a session player capable of conjuring the panglobal percussion that morphs throughout “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen,” the impossibly lush layering of cymbals, snares, bells, and claps joining the hands of church choirs, marching bands, and Buddhist monks. Even Harrington’s rudimentary, blues box guitar soloing gives Psychic crucial, humanist grounding—those slowhand Dire Straits leads are the last thing you’d expect a forward-thinking electronic musician to incorporate into their mission statement, but amongst all the retro-futurist discovery, it’s the sound of rediscovery, similar to the reclamation of saxophones on Destroyer’s Kaputt or Bon Iver’s electric-piano vindication of “Beth/Rest.”
Psychic is rife with extraterrestrial atmosphere and alien texture, but it never strays into pure ambience. Bust out the beanbag chair if you want, but in a record that fits an incredible amount of music into a compact 45 minutes, the silences are moments of active listening, too. “Sitra” initially registers as a necessary comedown from the stern demands of “Golden Arrow” until it pans completely in the left stereo channel. Darkside anticipate the very moment right before the disorientation of the unbalanced mix would be unnecessarily confrontational and drop you right into “Heart”, a traipse down the yellow brick road set to unsettling tribal drums. And just when you think it's getting kind personal on its one narrative (“Paper Trails”), the album drifts off into staticky calm.
That tranquil moment gets blown open thirty seconds later by “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and that’s just the first half of Psychic coming to a close. Side B only gets weirder as it hews more closely to Jaar’s associations with proper dance music. Up to this point, “space disco” typically meant one thing—airy, pretty, generally envisioning a brighter, cleaner future. “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” and “Freak, Go Home” imagine what dance music could spring up from our future lunar cities if they’re every bit the dense, intimidating, metal monstrosities they are here on earth, teeming with both life and decay, flesh and rust. The most innovative and intriguing sounds on Psychic are almost entirely dedicated to its rhythm section—panned tambourines whizzing through “Paper Trails,” gooey snares on the hot-buttered closer “Metatron,” “Freak, Go Home”’s constant fluidity between acoustic and digital percussion. Though Psychic is the kind of immense and immersive experience typically described as “monolithic”, Jaar and Harrington ensure it’s more like the bubble gracing its cover—translucent and dense, electrified and organic, holding a form while constantly being prodded into new shapes.
When a record spends this much time reveling in pure sound, it’s understandable to ask, “Where’s the humanity?” The most instantly memorable lyric comes on “Paper Trails”, when Jaar intones “I want a house to live in/Baby to take care of,” though in that voice of his, you never expect him to mean exactly what he says. Psychic doesn’t talk a whole lot about its feelings; true to its title, it’s not looking for a heart-to-heart so much as a telepathic exchange. And in trying to read Jaar and Harrington’s minds, you might think a little differently about things you already know, which can be just as important as being moved. Though the psychedelic density and classic rock touchstones of Psychic are ostensibly a negation of Jaar’s breakthrough, the quizzical, minimalist Space Is Only Noise, reconsider his intimidating biography and all of a sudden, Darkside makes a ton of sense, establishing connections between listeners and genres rather than pronouncing differences—people dance to Ricardo Villalobos, start record labels because they want to make music with their friends and, yes, Ivy League kids like to get stoned and listen to Pink Floyd. At least for the duration of Psychic, everything under the sun is in tune.
