VMP Magazine

DARKSIDE started with a bang, not a whimper. More literally, the joint musical project between Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington began with a small electrical fire in a hotel room. Jaar had just released Space Is Only Noise, his intricate, minimalist debut following a series of crackling, widely lauded singles, and was spending the summer of 2011 in Europe touring the record. On a day off in Berlin, Jaar and Harrington — a member of his live band at the time — decided to channel their excess creative energy into early sketches of a DARKSIDE song. Harrington plugged his guitar directly into a computer interface connected to some small external speakers. After a few hours of jamming, they had almost completed what would become DARKSIDE’s first song, “A1,” when their speakers exploded. Released two years after that initial spark, DARKSIDE’s debut album, Psychic, is a fitting manifestation of that smoke-filled room, a record that simmers with the hazy, slow-building textures of blues, psychedelic rock and dub-heavy electronica.