The Chilean American producer’s latest album is his most probing and existential, taking influences from all over his career and placing them into grim atmospheres that slip in and out of reality.
Nicolás Jaar wrote much of his arresting third album in isolation, holed up in a remote corner of the world without booze, cigarettes, or caffeine. It was an attempt to rid himself of negativity, the electronic musician said, but the solitude didn’t work as he planned. Negativity haunted him, as did his ego, and eventually Jaar realized the only way out was through: that he’d have to face his flaws in order to heal. (Indeed, the optically deceptive cover art suggests a turn inward.) Cenizas latches onto this revelation and burns with suspense, fury, and sadness. It isn’t a work of clarity but of cleansing—of reckoning with constructive anger—and offers little relief aside from a few fleeting moments that are so vivid and lovely they almost hurt. It’s Jaar at his most interrogating and existential, exploring grim atmospheres that feel both hallucinatory and troublingly real—a relatable image in a disorienting time.
Occasionally, the audacious way Jaar strings sounds together—warping melodies, skewing rhythms, stretching soundscapes into horizons of feeling—can make you question your perception. How can it sound both noisy and minimal, mournful and alive? Layer by layer, he reveals new dimensions and expands our understanding of what this album is: a cerebral study in sound design that insists upon asymmetry and atonality; a storm of texture and tension that refuses tidy resolution; a heady, meditative glimpse into Jaar’s widening third eye; a quietly radical political statement about inequality and resistance. It is a world in which future jazz, warped psychedelia, ambient noise, and monastic chanting coil together like vines–an example, perhaps, of the producer’s own vision of coexistence.
Jaar, a Chilean American who grew up between Santiago and New York City, appears to be feeling a heightened sense of geopolitical dread. Both countries are in states of violent unrest, albeit of different forms—riots and uprisings across Chile, a slow and ugly unraveling in the U.S.—and it’s hard to find an interview where Jaar doesn’t sound distressed. (His father, the activist-artist Alfredo Jaar, looms in his work.)
Over time, Jaar’s music has become increasingly confrontational and politically charged. His 2011 debut Space Is Only Noise introduced listeners to his disruptive spirit and global tastes. Sirens, his ambient-leaning follow-up, conceived partly in reaction to the rise of Donald Trump, illuminated the cyclical nature of power and the illusion of democracy. Jaar now runs a handful of musical operations—the excellent techno-club alias Against All Logic, the Dave Harrington team-up Darkside, and his own label, Other People—all of which delight in dissonance and rage against cliché. Outside of his solo projects, he’s worked with FKA twigs on her 2019 album MAGDALENE, crafted pipe organ compositions for a cathedral in the Netherlands, collaborated with sound artists in the West Bank, and performed through speakers buried in the Arabian desert for an installation about land rights and climate change. Jaar is determined, he’s often repeated, to explore electronica as a form of protest: “Can electronic music talk about the world around us? Can we get out of this abstract bubble? How can we resist?”
All of these endeavors show up in Cenizas—the choir in “Hello, Chain,” the monastic humming in “Xerox,” the references to saints and sin in “Sunder”—but Jaar’s environmental efforts also trickle in. After completing an artist residency at Amsterdam’s Het HEM, he participated in an exhibit questioning the military’s use of local forests and quoted anthropologist Anna Tsing: “These livelihoods... show us how to look around, rather than ahead.” The line reappears in “Faith Made of Silk,” the album’s absorbing final track, where it doubles as a call to action. “A peak is just the way towards a descent,” he warns. “You have nowhere to look/Look around not ahead.”
Given all the technical ground Cenizas covers, Jarr is an impressively meticulous guide. Every pluck, ping, buzz, scratch, and whistle is intentional, a bump in the tunnel as you slide down the rabbit hole. Once you’re there, he makes even the most discomfiting sounds—a frantic glissando after a tirade of keys, the squawk of a bow dragged across muted cello strings—feel natural. As these foreign environments begin to feel familiar, the less attached you become to your reality.
Jaar seems eager to make you question your instincts. On “Gocce,” he plays with order and chaos, control and surrender, until you’ve suddenly forgotten which you prefer. Do you sink into the meditative loops of “Garden” and rock in its hammock of major-to-minor keys? Or do you prefer the spontaneous turbulence of “Rubble”? Your impressions might shift as you venture deeper. “Agosto” mystified me the first four or five listens, so fitful and deranged. Now, I’m dumbstruck by its strange, serpentine beauty. Every mysterious element of Cenizas—the prickly stimulations, slithering melodies, unnerving atmospheres, and imposing instrumentation—feels designed to get under your skin and stir you awake.
Despite the urgency that permeates the album, it never feels sanctimonious or preachy. Jaar is subtle and ambiguous, sometimes frustratingly so; even his rage is rendered in mournful tones and heaving, negative space. “Mud,” one of the few tracks with a steady beat, marches right up to conflict but doesn’t engage, evaporating into high-pitched hums and electronic vibrations. You can’t help but wonder if Jaar is holding back, and if that in itself is a form of resistance. As he indicated on Sirens, his mission isn’t to further an agenda as much as it is to implore us to act—to speak truth to power, to save ourselves. Cenizas is an album for inner battles, where it’s even more important to keep the faith. Jaar uses the Spanish word for ashes because of its duality; it’s a reminder that destruction generates renewal.
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