Dark Dance

When Nicolas Jaar answers his hotel-room phone, on the road in Oxford, he's wary, defensive, frosty. Then, suddenly, it dawns on him. “Oh, wait, this is an interview?” the 24-year-old laughs. “Sorry, I thought you were just some weird guy calling up my hotel room. Sometimes, they somehow find out where I'm staying and they call up – and they'll get put through. There'll be this weird silence and then they'll say, 'Is that you?' And I'll say, 'What do you mean is it me? Of course it's me!'”

Jaar isn't sure what these stalker-fans want from him – “I have no idea, and they never really say; it's best to not think about it” – but, symbolically enough, these days he's a wanted man. The son of esteemed Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, he's struck out on his own as electronic producer/composer, beginning with his 2011 debut solo LP, Space Is Only Noise, an outsider house record that charmed both dancefloors and critics. Since then, he's founded the duo Darkside with guitarist Dave Harrington, and their maiden album, 2013's Psychic, has been just as warmly received.

Since Darkside's debut dropped, Jaar has been living life on the road; the fact that he's in Oxford, soon to board a plane to Australia, is just a part of his daily life. “I consider myself lucky that I get to see so much of the world every year; I truly enjoy the path of exploration that touring allows you to embark on,” Jaar says. “[But] you have to realise that it's not real life. It's not normal that anywhere you go people are there waiting for you, waiting to listen to you, giving you free meals, and hosting you. It has a very different set structure to what I think real life actually has.”

Touring with Darkside has, for Jaar, offered him a shocking range of opinions on who or what people think his new project is: from speaking to critics, to hearing from audiences, through to the architectural psychology of the venues they're booked in. They've played warehouse raves, churches, rock dives, techno clubs and theatres, and been told they're both Ibiza-friendly and undanceable. Jaar has long wanted to subvert expectations; his early house productions deliberately pushed down the tempo. Now, his subversion is not so reactionary, but more complex. “With this Darkside thing, what I'm saying is: 'here you are, you're going to come to this rock show, and you're going to get something that can pass for rock'n'roll, that's very psychedelic, but is actually secretly very club'. But it's club music that hasn't closed itself off from the world; it's club music and everything else at the same time. I'm no longer interested in subverting whatever closed-off community of dance music is the predominant sound of the time, I'm interested in a much broader kind of subversion, where it's not music that is just one thing, or in contrast to something else. That it's music that is many different things, and offers many different experiences.”