W h e n W o r ld s
New York Based duo DARKSIDE have been adamant that people should discover their debut album on their own terms. Number 17 on our albums of the year top 40, here they discuss combining improvised electronic music with the ideals of jazz to create ‘Psychic’ p h o t o g r a p h e r - Ti m J o n e s
Nicolas Jaar’s rise and rise of the last few years owes a lot to a creativity and focus that pushes beyond his 23 years. They’re qualities that helped make 2011’s ‘Space is Only Noise’ such a cinematically experimental success, and those drip-feed beats and fastidious dedication to sonic exploration also run deep with DARKSIDE. It’s undeniably a project moulded by Jaar’s intense identity but there’s also clear emphasis on the collaborative; the influence of guitarist Dave Harrington (pictured right) colouring the lines between the dead space. It’s a Diff’rent Strokes approach, with Jaar’s ruminative production colliding with Harrington’s impressive guitar work, and collision, exploration and excitement are running themes throughout their debut album, ‘Psychic’, and indeed this interview. They don’t feel like buzzwords, though, more the triumvirate that’s come to define DARKSIDE and underpin how Jaar and Harrington view the band.
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RY: You had worked and played together previously but was there a point where the shift in dynamic became more definitively collaborative? DH: It just kind of happened very naturally. That was partly because the first time I met Nico was when I was playing in his band three years ago and that was already a collaborative endeavour. It wasn’t like I came in and he gave me a stack of sheet music and demo tapes and said, ‘go learn this stuff ’; it was more developing a way of playing together, putting the band together with an identity in mind, so from the very beginning, even though it was Nico’s band, I was welcomed into it to do this thing together. Everything grew from there. RY: So did giving the work a name help to crystallise everything for you? NJ: I think it definitely helped to have a name, it made it very real for us. But honestly, it’s just a title and it could have been any combination of numbers or letters. It
doesn’t really matter as long as it focuses the intent of the music and that’s really what Darkside did for us.We were interested in the hidden things, the underside. We don’t know what that means, and whatever that means musically, we’re just trying to explore that. That really helped us and gave us that focus and sometimes you need something very simple like a name to jumpstart something. RY: Has it always been a case of you two sitting in a room and improvising or has it become more structured than that? NJ: I’m not sure how it can get any more structured than that [laughs]. We’re not trying to say anything specific with us, it was more the idea that we’d combine the place that I come from, and the place that Dave comes from, and see where it could go. It surprised us, and took us to a place that was exciting and we feel like we’re exploring new things.