Nicolas Jaar - Cenizas

March 27, 2020 - Other People

Cenizas finds electronic producer Nicolás Jaar sinking into tonality and space. Cenizas, which translates to “ashes,” is a study on what movement in music sounds like, what atmospheres are possible when a song is relieved of its traditional forms. Ashes provide the leitmotif for the album, which emulates the remains of what burns up—be it a body, a vessel, a world—left either to float or to rest on what has not been eviscerated; contextually, this tends to leave us with air or scorched earth. Cenizas explores the oscillating relationship between sound and silence when the hooks, choruses, and refrains are burned away. And as a departure from form, Jaar’s latest effort arrives at inner space, a meditation.  

Jaar begins with ‘Vanish,’ a long, languished exhale of woodwinds and a single lyrical request, “Say you’re coming back.” 'Vanish’ threads together space for the numinous, a reliquary for what remains after one comes in contact with the divine, or what a secularist may be more comfortable calling the sublime. There’s a tinny quality to the upper pitches of the wind-notes. A fading in and out of each breath draws one’s attention to the choral nature of the instrumentation. Keeping in mind we’re dealing with an electronic producer, the digital space has need for breath, no need to weave the layers to accommodate for what flutists or oboe players require—the inhale. And yet here it is. Composed because the need for air produces a sound also, the lack of a sound also inlays the tapestry of sound. 

Quiet briefly interludes the 'Vanish’ and the second track, ‘Menysid.’  Search queries for the title mostly turned up webpages of admission to NYSID: New York School of Interior Design. One effort to translate found “menys” in Catalan translated to “less” or “minus” in English. Breaking the title apart renders “minus id,” for any Freudian delvers. Both offer interesting lenses when paired with the lyrics, a parroting of Nas’s 2011 hip-hop track, ‘I Can.’ For context, Nas’s song features a children’s chorus and is primarily geared towards uplifting youth in the black community, although its message had ubiquitous applicability, albeit some ideas that may be considered sideways now for their lack of sympathy regarding the nature of addiction. Jaar’s ‘Menysid’ opens with a cavernous moan over a white noise. The moan picks up a second voice, and again Jaar is laying on his audience a doleful chorus in a vacuous sound-space composed of tonal clicks and peripheral string plucks. Slowly, the ambient sounds suggesting hollow space become the percussive backbone for ‘Menysid’ as the sparse sounds knit together a sputtering rhythm. It’s not until the track is nearly finished out that one realizes the haunted non-syllabic chorus is the only voice that could’ve delivered the purported lyrics. 

The title-track ‘Cenizas’ is third. The atmosphere established, Jaar’s baritone poeticizes a darkened life. A rough but imperfect translation looks like this: 

“in the ashes  

we are going to love  

to know nothing  

is better  

there is no room for anything  

but we are together  

without news  

from the other world  

and every day  

our world  

shrinks  

or collapses  

and the only thing that ... 

I have been told on the matter 

is that it is the common sense of an arrow  

And the only thing that... 

I have been told  

Is that it is the common sense of an arrow 

and because common sense does not respond  

I cannot use its language  

its language, its language, its language” 

Again, the musical elements have spread out to create the parameters, only to seal in and therefore provide space for Jaar’s reverberating voice. In terms of dynamic, ‘Cenizas’ follows suit from the previous tracks, lilting yet unpredictable. The tessellation of noises fold in again and again towards an unidentifiable end. A steady rhythm breaks into the long outro of ‘Cenizas.’ 

Following the enlivened end of ‘Cenizas,’ jazzier elements peel out of ‘Agosto.’ A xylophone or an affected keyboard lets off three staccato chords. Something writhes, hinting at insects in the background, and a synth trills. Every now and again, a cymbal hit punctuates a deep horn running up and down its scale. It’s August, “Agosto.” In the North East United States at least, the insects are fully alive in August. The album has perhaps cast its first look outward. At only two minutes and forty-eight seconds, ‘Agosto,’ plods through the heat which brings on the movement of smaller life. Small twinkling noises end the song. 

‘Gocce’ comes along with similarly life-emulating percussion. A stand-up bass pulls the track forward while bongos, taught and loosened, create ebbs of tension and release. Jaar introduces a flourish of strings, a whirlwind which gathers up all the preceding elements into one harmonious twirl. The bass remains steady while a plethora of other strings find their low note and go rushing off again into a trill. The bongos continue to stretch and compress into tight finely-packed beats. At times it seems like only sympathetic curiosity keeps a listener at Jaar’s side.  

Yet in his past three tracks, Jaar has created a space in which an audience is willing to be lost, to be only curious about where we are and where we are going, comfortable without knowing and comfortable without knowing why. One cannot peel away from the spiritual context, even if one wants to disavow the context, Gregorian chants nearly always looming somewhere nearby.  

‘Mud,’ is next. A single conga and didgeridoo pair to tribal effect. Jaar reverbs his own voice so that both the beginnings and ends of his words multiply, but don’t quite stutter. It’s the closest to anything danceable that’s come up and finds more traditional song structures that rely less on atmosphere and more on rhythm. ‘Mud,’ is a pivot for Cenizas. But it’s not complete.  

‘Vacíar,’ which also opens with mixtures of electronic and more indigenously-suggestive wind instruments, reminds us of the album we’re in, warns its audience not to get comfortable with a four-on-the-floor conga. It is not yet time to move our bodies. A short abstraction, ‘Vascíar,’ translates to empty, and interstices the more digestibly rhythmic, ‘Mud’ and ‘Sunder.’ 

So with the short space of ‘Vascíar,’ wrapped up, ‘Sunder,’ begins slowly piecing itself together with pipes, then with Jaar’s dissolving vocals. Slowly, a melody emerges. Whatever is sundered is also reduced to its component parts; there’s a tangible link between sunder and ashes—both describe the remains of something ravaged. “Now I see right behind my eyes,” Jaar repeats in the opening stanzas of ‘Sunder.’ The words become a mantra, the mantra leads inward, and inward leads to the pieces of the whole. “In the words of a prophet, sunder/ In the shape of the first and last, sunder.” Jaar has begun to tell us what he’s up to. He’s borrowing from liturgical lexicons for verse. He’s searching for what’s meaningful in the emptiness contingent to any whole.  

Space is the substance of holiness in Jaar’s Cenizas.  

‘Hello, Chain,’ pulls the trick that ‘Menysid’ pulls. A host of beautiful words available to a reader as lyrics but available to a listener as unintelligible moans fills the track. The remainder of the album is a search for the proof that’s already come up. Permutations on a thesis. Though the rest of the songs are not laid out here, each one has something to offer. Again and again, with a poetics of noise, Jaar bolsters the argument for self as something divested of its moving parts. A little bit, a listener’s understanding of what music is capable of, and how music accomplishes the things it’s capable of, stretches under Jaar’s guidance. In dance music he found the trance, in his more recent evolutions he’s found what spiritualists seek. In what vanishes, and peels a thing away from itself, he’s located something akin to a metaphysical truth. Jaar has taken a match to electronica and found its ashes provide sustenance still, that the simplest form of what’s left behind—the barest minerals have everything required. ⛰️