Jaar does the rounds

On Thursday the 3rd of February, my flatmate and I decided to take a risk. We decided to pay for a gig that cost more than £15 and wasn’t run by ATP – a risk we would come to bitterly regret. The gig in question was Nicolas Jaar’s _Clown & Sunset _showcase at Roundhouse, a pretty large venue. As far as we had gathered from all of the promotional material, more than just a Nicolas Jaar show, this was an opportunity for him to showcase the talent from his new label. Disappointingly, the gurned up north London hipsters, with too much money to piss away on gigs they seemingly don’t even care about, apparently didn’t agree.

Soul Keita, an extremely talented 18-year-old from Ethiopia, was performing his first ever live show. A fantastic blend of minimal beats, jazz and soul samples, and at times odd drum patterns and vocal samples was accompanied by a massive screen filled with mind boggling visuals and quotes from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. We struggled to listen over the incessant talking from everybody around us – there was no way to shush as everyone around us was talking. Not only did it completely ruin the (as far as I could tell) promising performance, I felt it was incredibly disrespectful to a man who has just travelled all the way from Ethiopia to give his live debut. We hoped that the actions of the audience would be a one-off, but sadly they were a sign of things to come.

Soul Keita’s brilliant live set was followed by one and a half hours of average DJing from Acid Pauli. Apparently this was when the drugs kicked in for the rest of the mugs as they felt a DJ set of tracks pretty similar to what Soul Keita was doing live was more silence and dance-worthy than the interesting live set that had come before. As if a higher power was just trying to anger me more, on top of the extreme irritation caused by the idiocy surrounding me, the set was ended with remixes of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear us Apart’ songs I found interesting when I was 11. Obviously these tracks were met with great joy by the rest of the audience.

Everything implied that the rest of the audience was pumped for an upbeat, dancey set from Nicolas Jaar. We derided their idiocy, assuming that his live set would be similar to his studio work – quiet, subtle, beautiful – but we received a slap in the face when it turned out the idiots were right. He opened with an ambient number, which was met by repeated whopping and yelling by the audience. I tried to get some sense of respect by shouting “shut the fuck up” at a particularly loud guy, but sadly this just fuelled him on further. Apparently bored by the only track bearing much resemblance to Jaar’s studio work, he shouted “drop a bassline Nico!! YEAAAAHHHH!!!” I remained silent this time, hoping that Jaar would come through for me and provide a set full of minimal beats, subdued piano and hushed vocals. He then proceeded to destroy all of my dreams by launching a huge beat, destroying the nuance that makes his tracks so different.

Eventually I managed to get into this style of presenting his material (although my flatmate was so sickened he had to move out of the centre to the edges) and did have a good time dancing. I couldn’t help but feel, however, that if I wanted to dance about to some thumping 4/4 bass with a bunch of pilled-up morons I could have just gone to a club night, which these days I try my best to avoid. Luckily, toward the end of the set, and much to the dismay of everyone else, Dave Harrington came on and performed the Darkside EP in its entirety, with some lovely pedal work on the guitar and a little more subtlety to the music.

We left during the second encore as it was starting to get a little needy, and generally I appreciate some modesty from artists. Also, one hour and forty minutes of being surrounded by people doused in sweat and smashing into me constantly was beginning to get a little tiresome. I would surmise that if you like Nicolas Jaar’s music for everything that makes it good, and wouldn’t say while listening to his albums “GOD I wish this had more bass on it”, you should probably never see him live; especially not for £22 a ticket at the Roundhouse.