Letter to Nicolas Jaar

As time rolls on, life plays many tricks on you. The cruelest of which is how, looking back, things seem to go by so fast but while you're experiencing it, everything moves at a glacial pace. Especially the experiences that are boring, or have no meaning. I can't think of one day at work in the last 2 years, but remember almost every brilliant experience in between. Concerts, parties, familial bondings; I look at old pictures of family members and I am immediately transported back to that moment in my life.

Throughout many years, around 6 and a half, I have listened to your music and have been transported through the shaky walls of memory into a new instance of a remembrance. Your Essential mix is the one I played over and over again in 2012, starting with that lovely twin peaks theme and being taken aback to how much you could do with so little. I have, of course, lived in your music ever since, particularly loving Darkside's album Psychic, and the corresponding show you played in FYF the year that album came out.

I read an interview of your father, and he said something I think of often now; about how human beings have grown desensitized to imagery, about how imagery is now so colossal that a mortal mind cannot process it properly. Imagery, even particularly powerful imagery, becomes a distraction and loses meaning when there is so much, just like how Stalin once said that one death is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic.

I think of that when I listen to your music, which one note that a lesser song would exploit for a humdrum sequence, rings out like a sore thumb that doesn't know how sore it is, lost in it's pursuit of truth.

I shook your hand once, at an event you have no shot at remembering, the Regent in 2017 in LA, because to you it was probably not ceremonious, but to me it was the very definition of ceremony. I shook your hands, which were filled with blood and soft, your androgynous hands that defied all judgment, and fled in the face of being found.

I told you thank you and you didn't know what to respond, so you just glared at me and pierced my soul, and something told me to stop shaking your hand. I waited to have my mind blown by you later that evening, which you did like it was a routine job. It was my sixth time watching you, and my friend and I had our jaws collectively dropped as you somehow commented on the refugee crisis with a DJ set, politics intertwining with music not in lyrics, but in spirit and tone.

I remember feeling like I was in Gaza that night, with the whole crowd buzzing like it were a machine, and you were a Jewish Schlinder giving us our way out, not through escape but through meaning.

I remember feeling weird when the concert was over, I never liked endings but they lead to new beginnings, and all of a sudden I started recalling my past lives. You witnessed all of this, but understood none of it, which is the great tragedy of an artist, and indeed humanity in general, how we can incite but never understand.

You go out and play music with the intention of changing peoples' lives every night, and I have no way to repay you, but I can only express to you here, (because it is impossible to contact you), how difficult and lonely a job that must be. When you are the shaman, and I am the child, learning how to live.