Nicolás Jaar - Piedras 1 & 2 (2LP) [Other People]

Format: 2LP + Mp3.

The initial seed of this project was planted in 2020, when Nicolas Jaar wrote the song “Piedras” for a concert at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. Between 2022 and 2023, it took a new form as a radio play titled Archivos de Radio Piedras, which was shared through a dedicated Telegram channel. In 2024, the work became a 24-channel installation at the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City, where it was exhibited for five months.

Piedras 1 & 2 is a collection of the tracks included in the radio play, all new music by Jaar, but presented in part within the work as the music of Salinas Hasbún (a composite name in homage to Jaar's grandmothers, Graciela Salinas and Miriam Hasbún). The radio play follows two friends who mourn the disappearance of Salinas Hasbún, a musician and writer who vanished in the early 2020s. Although they live in a future where technology has advanced, they resort to homemade radio methods because the anonymous group "Las 0cho" has launched a global attack on undersea internet cables, causing a worldwide digital blackout.

The central theme of the work revolves around the idea that truths, memories, and identities emerge from cracks or intermediate spaces. This concept is reinforced by how much of the narrative unfolds: in the liminal spaces between radio frequencies. The instability and transient nature of a constantly shifting radio dial not only become a metaphor but the very structure of the work. It is in these moments of noise, static, and interference that the story's deepest revelations emerge.

This fragmented and constantly transforming medium reflects how memory and trauma operate within the work: non-linearly, slipping through gaps, appearing in fragments or everyday moments, rather than being directly transmitted as "official" accounts of history. This idea culminates at the end of the narrative, when a text is discovered in which Salinas speaks of finding a new number in a small pond inside a cave mentioned in the first episodes of the radio play. Embodied in the salt flats of northern Chile, home to the world's oldest bacteria, this accidental discovery disrupts the rigid order of binary code, paving the way for a transformation of digital life.