Nicolás Jaar (born January 10, 1990) is a Chilean-American composer and recording artist based in New York. Among his notable works are the albums Space Is Only Noise (2011), Pomegranates (2015) and Sirens (2016). Since 2011, he has embarked on multiple explorative directions, performing a five-hour improvisational concert at MoMA PS1 and releasing a large volume of experimental recordings through his label, Other People, including works by Lydia Lunch, Pierre Bastien, John Wall and Lucretia Dalt. He scored Jacques Audiard's Dheepan (winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2015) and Pablo Larrain's 2020 film, Ema. Jaar is half of the band Darkside (Psychic, 2013) and has released two albums under the alias Against All Logic.
Jaar was born in New York to Chilean artist and architect Alfredo Jaar and Chilean mother Evelyne Meynard. "Jaar ascribes the melancholy in his music to the time when he moved at the age of 2 with his mother from New York to Chile." In 2007, he met Gadi Mizrahi and Zev Eisenberg who ran the legendary Marcy parties in Brooklyn, New York. After hearing his early works, Mizrahi suggested 17 year-old Jaar put a 4/4 kick drum underneath his largely experimental compositions. This was Jaar's first foray into dance music, documented in his first release on Mizrahi's label Wolf & Lamb, entitled The Student. "Back then, Mizrahi says, everything D.J.'s were playing was 128 beats per minute. The stuff he was doing was almost half that speed."