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

Format: 2x12" 180g in printed sleeve + download card.
CAT: OP078

The initial seed for this project was planted in 2020, when Nicolas Jaar wrote the song “Piedras” for a concert at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile. Between 2022 and 2023, it took on a new form as a radio play titled Archivos de Radio Piedras, which was shared via a dedicated Telegram channel. In 2024, the work evolved into a 24-channel installation at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, where it was exhibited for five months.

Piedras 1 & 2 is a collection of tracks featured in the radio play, all new music by Jaar, but presented in part within the work as the music of Salinas Hasbún (a compound 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. Though 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 interstitial spaces. This concept is reinforced by the way much of the narrative unfolds: in the liminal spaces between radio frequencies. The instability and transitory nature of a constantly shifting radio dial become not just a metaphor, but the very structure of the work. It is in these moments of noise, static, and interference that the story's most profound revelations emerge.

This fragmented, ever-shifting medium mirrors 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 narrative's end, when a text is discovered in which Salinas speaks of finding a new number in a small pond within a cave mentioned in the radio play's early episodes. Embodied in the salt flats of northern Chile, home to the world's oldest bacteria, this serendipitous discovery interrupts the rigid order of binary code, paving the way for a transformation of digital life.