Nicolas Jaar has been pegged as a dance producer, but it’s a lazy label (as most of them are).  His tracks won’t lead listeners to the dance floor.  They wander towards the back of your head, exploring the undefined space between what you hear and what your mind wants you to hear.

At times the rhythms are spry and leap like frogs over water lilies.  Other times, they’re amorphous and unresolved, lonesome travelers puttering about the edges of a far continent.

Here is Jaar’s latest EP, Don’t Break My Love: Nicolas Jaar – Don’t Break My Love (Free Download Link Inside) by Double Post

Like his early 2011 full-length Space Is Only Noise the EP’s two tracks, “Don’t Break My Love” and “Why Didn’t You Save Me,” abound with a dizzying atmosphere of melancholy and readjustment.  The tracks swell and burst, deconstructing and reassimiliating while smoky crackles and warped vocal snippets whisper behind the fog.

Not surprisingly, Jaar’s musical influences don’t lie in dance music (although he does count Ricardo Villalobos as an inspiration).  Instead, his true bass forefathers are instrumental hip-hop artists such as Madlib and J. Dilla. As he told Interview, Jaar’s work is “going against the really fast, harsh techno sound, against the whole clubby aspect of it. It’s also going against the drug aspect of it and the wasted aspect of it. It appeals more to emotions.”

Like Jaar, many U.S. producers are rapidly stepping away from the confines of trance and techno music and moving electronica into a more intimate world of beauty and introspection, less about dancing and more about moving.  Jaar’s latest EP Don’t Break My Love as well as Space Is Only Noise has set the wheels in motion.  Where the train stops next is anyone’s guess.

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