THE WORLD'S GREATEST PSYCHEDELIC BAND
Darkside leans into the flux with sophomore effort
In the spring and summer of 2014, the psychedelic deconstructionists Darkside embarked on a series of performances so spellbinding that the most logical response to witnessing one was to quit your job, invest in a tasteful all-black wardrobe and follow them across several continents like the new Grateful Dead.
It was sound as seance. A double-sided, Moon Mirror towered centre stage, created by a mysterious Dutch and Norwegian duo named the Children of the Light. This supernatural-looking glass refracted tricky golden beams, absorbing tesseracts of analogue and Hd-video projections, dosing the audience with what felt like liquid LSD submerged in a blazing infinity pool.
Then, it all abruptly vanished. By the fall of 2014, Darkside had reached the precipice of whatever passes for contemporary mainstream success. With one more album and tour, they could've headlined festivals and sold out arenas. Instead, the band declared an indeterminate hiatus. Temporarily abandoning the prospect of mass adulation and yacht-club wealth, the duo of Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington pursued intimate and personal solo endeavours.
Darkside's new sophomore effort, Spiral, ends the seven-year sabbatical. Another towering achievement, it's a cinematic portal that sounds vaguely like a lost jam among the mid-'70s Grateful Dead, Tuareg guitar sorcerers Tinariwen, Nick Drake and if the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi made beats. But it's quintessentially Darkside, full of bruising, demotic grooves and vaporous delicacy. A soundtrack to a disco buried beneath shifting sand, underneath the ruins of a demolished world.
“We had been so deep inside of it for (three years straight) and we just realized that we had taken this chapter to its end,” says Harrington, the experimental jazz multi-instrumentalist turned Darkside guitar Orpheus, who created a recondite solo body of electronic and jazz odysseys in the intervening years. “There were so many other things that we wanted to do ... We did what we set out to do, and neither of us felt compelled to push it any further.”
He's speaking in late June from the patio of Club Tee Gee, a bar in northeast Los Angeles, where Harrington, 35, moved a little over a year ago from his native New York. In early July, Harrington's partner in Darkside, Jaar, the Chilean electronic composer, echoes an identical sentiment via Zoom from his Berlin home.
“We each have sides to our music that the other isn't as interested in. If Dave wasn't making his solo projects or if I wasn't making some more experimental things, I don't think we could go on to do this record,” Jaar, 31, says, alluding to the seven revered solo albums released during the Darkside interregnum.
Spiral finds Darkside reclaiming a crown they'd never seek: the world's best psychedelic band. The duo manages to be innovators in a bland retro-fetishizing playlist landscape. Jaar is the brooding and enigmatic son of internationally renowned artist Alfredo Jaar, raised in Santiago and Manhattan. He croons velvet wraithvocals in Romance languages and crafts resistance symphonies of fuzz and static. Harrington is the affable and joyous Big Boi, who believes in fun as a noble pursuit, the son of two journalists, raised in Manhattan, whose jam band ardour and guitar heroics ground Jaar's avant-garde levitations.
What's so striking is the sense of alchemy.
“It's like A + B = grapefruit,” Harrington says, laughing.
“If you're on the same wavelength, where you're speaking the same language but are from different places, then you find the things you love together. Working with Nico, it's so much easier to go toward the things that I love in music than when I'm on my own,” Harrington says. “We met inside the music and built the spiral from the inside out. It's not like we were 16 and decided to start a band. We already had ideas about music and those ideas started talking to each other.”
Delirious word of mouth and critical raves made them the mustsee band on the 2014 festival circuit. That run reached its climax inside a sweltering, dangerously packed Los Angeles Sports Arena in late August when the band made the dozens of others playing FYF Fest irrelevant with a performance that practically suspended time. After a 56-minute shadowland odyssey, the machine drums reached a headbanging pitch; Harrington's guitar squealed and ascended into gorgeous crescendo. Then it happened — Harrington, wreathed in Druidic smoke, hoisted his guitar above his head and pickaxed his instrument into the guts of the mirror, shattering it into oblivion. The arena rock cliché of the smashed guitar subverted into something original, the mirror destroyed in a similar way the band had dismantled psych-rock tropes, stripping them into elemental parts, adding Bitches Brew and West African desert guitar reveries, and resuscitating it into previously unreachable forms. Within a week, shards of the sacred glass were selling on to the highest bidder.
Had Darkside never played another note together, the mirror destruction would've been their equivalent of Michael Jordan hitting the game-winner in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals.
“In creating music, I love jamming and coming from a place of `unthinking.' I love being really in the flow with someone. I love long conversations and really being present,” Jaar says. “With Dave, I get to make music with someone who I can really be in a space that is our space. It's a very loving feeling, and that's why I really get a lot out of it ...”