Piedras 1 & 2

Chile, late 2022. You’re listening to a radio show broadcast by a shadowy anarchist group called Los 0cho, who have severed the undersea internet cables and plunged the world into a Before Time where FM waves are the only means of communication. The radio show plays in fragments, telling the story of a child who disappears in the desert. It turns out to be a piece from the artist Salinas Hasbún, who vanished mysteriously on October 25 of that year, leaving only a breadcrumb trail of compositions in their absence, mirroring the infamous disappearances of citizens under the Pinochet regime in the 1970s. Across these broadcasts, which sketch a rough and impressionistic outline of Chile’s colonial history, the radio waves are invaded by the ghosts of Palestinians and eerie animal calls.

That’s the story behind Nicolás Jaar’s new double album, which started as one song commissioned by Santiago’s Museum of Memory & Human Rights for an exhibition about the Pinochet regime and blossomed into a full-blown radio play distributed via Telegram and other online platforms. Jaar eventually released the whole thing as an audio dump on Bandcamp, with proceeds donated towards charities supporting Mapuche communities and Palestinians in Gaza. Now, the project reaches its final form, stamped on two slabs of wax and whittled down to its musical highlights. That explanation makes Piedras 1 & 2 sound messy and sprawling—an epic side quest—but in reality, it’s something like Jaar’s magnum opus, combining his talents for abstract sonics, deadpan pop, and performance art into one dizzying whole.

The songs from the fictional artist Hasbún—whose name is a portmanteau of Jaar’s grandmothers’ surnames—make up the majority of Piedras 1. These are among Jaar’s most inviting and catchy compositions, sultry grooves that riff on indie rock and reggaeton, with thought-provoking lyrics meted out in a lilting deadpan. On the deceptively jaunty “Aquí,” Hasbún asks, “What does it really mean to be from here,” framing “here” as a place whose truth “isn’t written on paper.” This thread unravels on the centerpiece, “El Río de las tumbas,” where Jaar/Hasbún outlines the history of the Magdalena river. The elliptical prose references everything from Einstein to Palestine, highlighting the global impact of colonialism and the cyclical nature of life and death: Hasbún is presumed dead, thrown into the river, but the river is also the source of life and renewal.

In the album’s most haunting passage, Jaar outlines the connection between the colonization of Chile and the Holy Land. (Chile is also home to the world’s largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Middle East.) He compares the name of the Magdalena river, bestowed by Spanish colonist Rodrigo de Bastidas, to the ancient Jewish city Magdala, later an Arab village called al-Majdal which was destroyed and replaced by the Israeli settlement of Migdal. Jaar highlights the importance—and brute force—of (re)naming:

You say that you’re by the Magdalena river.
And I speak to you about Palestine.
Which is no longer Palestine.
And the Rio Grande is no longer Karacalí,
No, the river is no longer Karihuaña
It is no longer Guacahayo.
But it still is Guacahayo! It’s the river of tombs!

Does a place change when you rename it? Does it become something else? These feelings of loss and confusion are underlined on another highlight, “Mi Viejita,” a reminiscence on places that can no longer be reached. These are people who leave their lives—each other, their farms, their livestock—to go to war for a colonial entity, only to be oppressed by a military junta and a strict curfew that offers them no thanks in return, redefining the land they fought for as something that no longer belongs to them. The song’s emotional upheaval is soundtracked by a broken beat that sounds almost drunken, too slow and staggered to stand up straight, and chatter in the background only enhances the chaotic atmosphere.

The music behind the vocals on Piedras 1 is impressionistic and grayscale, with bursts of noise, barking dogs, and synths that sound like angry elephants marking the themes of alienation and identity in flux. Piedras 2, on the other hand, collects interstitial music from the radio play and veers from cerebral experimentation—like the elegant, slightly jazzy “Radio Chomio,” featuring the Mapuche artist Eli Wewentxu—to all-out club mayhem, like the closing “SSS” trilogy, which harks back to Jaar’s early days as a club-kid upstart. Only now, the music is frantic and claustrophobic, as if trying to break out of its own rhythmic structures, a violent form of self-assertion.

Jaar has a way with creating space and distance in music, which lends itself naturally to building narratives. Elements like kick drums or voices often sound like they’re coming from the next room over, until things suddenly, briefly, snap into focus, a device Jaar uses over and over to emphasize the most important parts of Piedras. It helps the double album feel a little more direct, a foil to Jaar’s usual aloofness.

You can listen to the album and appreciate its drowsy grooves from a distance, but the subject matter is captivating, sometimes even gut-punching, like the line about cows on “Mi Viejita.” It’s a feature of the radio-play style that works in Jaar’s favor, outlining the stakes at hand in historical crises like Chile’s, which continue to play out around the world. This is the thing that so many people don’t realize about the history of dictators, despots, and genocidal regimes: The damage lies not just in killing people in the streets or locking them up; it’s also the trauma of disappearance without explanation. It’s the impossibility of finding the truth, or even the will to try. People, things, places—they all just vanish without explanation, as if they never actually existed. Sometimes it’s under the cover of night, other times it’s broadcast on the news and across the internet.

Learning my way around Piedras, I kept coming back to this haunting couplet from “Aquí”: “If it’s written on the walls, it’s not written on paper.” This becomes a rallying cry for the play’s characters, who are working against a system that wants to erase them. But like so much of Piedras it also feels universal, starting in Chile and spiraling outward, from Palestine to Sudan to Ukraine, where records are kept in bloodshed and dueling narratives compete for supremacy, fueled by hatred and racial animus.

Mirroring Chile’s colonial history, political brutality, and historical denial with the near-century denial of displacement and genocide in Palestine, Jaar underlines truths some would rather ignore. The project’s full impact comes out in the full radio play, in all its messy too-muchness, but Piedras 1 & 2 offers something more concrete, almost insidious. These sultry songs worm their way into your brain, phrases and lyrics that lay the groundwork for real reflection repeating to danceable beats. What does it mean to be from here? Who decides what here is, and who has the original claim to here, there, or anywhere? Jaar doesn’t have the answers, but Piedras underscores the necessity of pondering such questions, against the backdrop of a world where even truth is disputed and fought over.