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The initial seed for this project was planted in 2020 when Nicolás Jaar wrote the song “Piedras” for a concert at the Museum of Memory & Human Rights in Santiago, Chile, which commemorates the victims of human rights violations during the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet between 1973 and 1990.
Between 2022-2023 it took on a new form as a radio play entitled 'Archivos de Radio Piedras', which was shared on a dedicated Telegram channel. In 2024, the play was converted into a 24 channel installation at the University Museum of Mexico City (MUAC), where it was exhibited for 5 months.
Piedras 1 and 2 is a collection of the tracks featured within the play, all new music by Jaar, but partly presented within the play as the music of Salinas Hasbún (the name a composite homage to Jaar's grandmothers, Graciela Salinas and Miriam Hasbún).
The play follows two friends mourning the disappearance of Salinas Hasbún, a musician and writer who vanished in the early 2020s. Although they live in a future where technology is advanced, they resort to DIY radio methods because the anonymous group “Las 0cho” has launched a worldwide attack on undersea internet cables, causing a global internet blackout.
The play's central theme revolves around the idea that truths, memories and identities speak from the cracks (“rasgaduras”), or the "in-between" spaces ("en el entre"). This concept is supported by the way much of the narration unfolds - in the liminal spaces between radio frequencies. The instability and transitory nature of a constantly shifting radio dial becomes not just a metaphor but the structure of the play itself. It’s in these moments of noise, static and interference that the deeper revelations of the story emerge. This disjointed, ever-changing medium mirrors the way memory and trauma operate within the play - non-linear, slipping through the gaps, found in fragments or ordinary moments, rather than direct transmissions of “official” historical accounts.
This notion reaches its climax at the end of the narrative, when a text is discovered in which Salinas speaks of finding a new number in a small pond in a cave mentioned in the first episodes of the radio play. This pond, inside the “cochlea of the world”, is seen as a way to introduce real-life randomness to computation. Embodied in the salt lakes of northern Chile, home to the world’s oldest bacteria, this randomness disrupts the rigid order of binary code, paving the way for a transformation of digital life.
‘Chilean-American electronic musician continues to stun. 90 minutes of sprawling ambient, outsider pop and frazzled dance grooves. Piedras feels nothing less than Jaar’s masterpiece’ - 4/5 MOJO
‘Condensed from a five-hour radio play, Jaar’s 2xLP weaves a story of Chilean colonial history, military dictatorship, and Palestinian erasure into a dizzying mixture of abstract sonics and avant-pop.’ - 8.3 PITCHFORK
Tracklist
A1 / 1. Cangilón
A2 / 2. Piedras
A3 / 3. Aquí
A4 / 4. Agua pa fantasmas
B1 / 5. Rio de las tumbas
B2 / 6. Viento
B3 / 7. Mi viejita
B4 / 8. No Hope
C1 / 1. Radio Chomio (con Eli Wewentxu)
C2 / 2. Rio radio correspondencia anfibia
C3 / 3. 3eee
C4 / 4. F Collect
C5 / 5. Even heaven is uneven
C6 / 6. El azar
D1 / 7. I, you
D2 / 8. Heterodina
D3 / 9. Sin Conexión
D4 / 10. SSS1
D5 / 11. SSS2
D6 / 12. SSS3