JASSS

“It’s not the best moment to be an artist,” Silvia Jimenez says plainly. “Especially if you don't really seek stardom, if you appreciate the niche, and you don't have any kind of disdain for the mundane.” Better known as JASSS, the Spanish-born, Berlin-based musician has spent the better part of a decade making music that resists neat classification.

Her 2021 LP A World of Service slipped between percussive flourishes, both raw and auto-tuned vocals, and noise-laden guitars — although, even those descriptions feel a little inelegant for its shape-shifting form, bringing together elements from trip hop to trap. It marked a notable shift from the largely instrumental, industrial-techno leaning album Weightless, which first brought Silvia critical attention alongside a relentless period of DJing that followed.

Visibility doesn’t necessarily translate into sustainable support, however, especially when the work doesn’t conform to easy packaging and mass-market scalability. “If you’re not really interested in luxury,” she continues. “And therefore feel very uncomfortable going into a more commercial direction that’s force-feeding a particular kind of success, it’s not a great time.”

The signs of a creaking musical ecosystem – at least for those pushing less conventional sounds outside the gates of Tomorrowland and Lollapalooza – abound. Across the United Kingdom, a historically buoyant and diversified music culture, thirty-nine festivals have already cancelled their 2025 editions, bringing the post-2019 toll of lost events to 249, according to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF). All the while, more profitable indie festivals offering artists larger, more reliable payment are hoovered up by venture-capital firms and monopolistic industry giants, then repackaged for broader mainstream appeal rather than the left field — much to their shareholders’ delight.

This pressure is also felt earlier in the chain. A recent survey of more than 3,200 European clubs found rising energy and staffing costs are forcing many to trim “innovative and diverse programming”. In Silvia’s base of Berlin, nearly forty-six per cent of the city’s 150+ clubs are considering closure by the end of 2025, citing rent hikes and noise-complaint litigation as two key factors.

Those disappearances slowly shrink the circuit where artists like Silvia can stage ambitious work, such as the audiovisual performance she unveils with visual artist Ben Kreukniet at non-profit festival Rewire the day after we speak. “The moment something takes a bit of effort – technical setup, rehearsal time, and especially a larger budget – bookers may not go for it,” she notes. “Everything is very replaceable right now.”

Rather than bow to industry machinery, Silvia’s answer as JASSS is neither retreat nor capitulation, but a tempo entirely her own: Eager Buyers, out on 19 September via her new Awos imprint, was written by “practising intuition without wondering so much as to why.” Produced amid what she dubs “mixed feelings amidst the modern malaise,” the seven-track album traces memories of promised futures that never arrived, sketched in low-end bass and overdriven electronics reminiscent of post-rock, and features contributions from james K and Alias Error. Rather than mourn, however, Silvia invites listeners to sit with the complexity of multitudes. “Sometimes it’s hard to define emotions,” she says. “We feel multiple things at once. Music can be more like an invitation to get there.”

The emotional territory Silvia is exploring on Eager Buyers doesn’t come from nowhere. Like many who came of age in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, she internalised the capitalist optimism of those decades without fully realising it, what she calls “a system of beliefs and hope for the future.” But promises of security, stability, and upward mobility have gradually collapsed into an “existential void,” leaving her generation with a strange kind of nostalgia for something that never actually materialised. “I’ve been coming to terms with life, being uncertain by definition, by design,” she says. “Realising uncertainty is the structure itself, when things central to supporting your life crumble around you.”

Silvia doesn’t present herself as uniquely insightful on this front; rather, she acknowledges her privilege in even recognising these broader structural failures. “In fact, this has been the normalcy for many other people for a very long time,” she concludes. That sense of delayed awareness is increasingly apparent in the West, where the once-true model of ‘degree > job > house > retirement’ has all but collapsed, leaving many ambitious millennials feeling betrayed as a result. While the creative sector has largely lived askew to the civilian rat race, such work doesn’t sit outside the orbit of capitalism. 

The same pressures of rising rent, soaring energy costs and slashed public funding, amid stagnant wages, have been coupled with music-specific troubles like a decline in physical sales or growing national visa-restrictions (and their accompanying costs). As those barriers have risen, what once seemed like a secure future is revealed as always more fragile and contingent than it seemed.

In a cultural sense, this process has become almost everyday, seeping into the very words we use. Silvia points to gentrification as a telling example. “People joke about it,” she says. “We’ve already integrated it into day-to-day life – sometimes even enjoy parts of it, as this kind of joke about our lives – but it’s actually terrifying.” When the term is tossed around as a meme, the underlying reality gets masked. In its wake, ‘entrepreneurs’ profit off desperation, offering ‘financial freedom’ in stock trading groups, or peddling digital nomad schemes that urge well-paid outsiders to relocate to lower-income cities and countries — leveraging their spending power while inflating local prices and leaving resident wages behind. 

“At some point, we started treating this middle-class digital-nomad lifestyle as normal, but it’s not true that it should be this way,” Silvia argues. “Of course, in the creative world the majority of people are moving around a lot, that makes it appear normal sometimes. But there’s a way to do it ethically: are you moving to upscale your lifestyle independently or are you integrating, spending locally? Maybe your whole social support system is there, your security net. It’s not the only way.”

That broader reckoning with how late-capitalist logic distorts cultural life also informs Awos, the new umbrella under which Eager Buyers, the Rewire show, and future projects all sit. “It’s the same project, although it morphs in content and shape,” she explains. The name can stretch to encompass a record, an audiovisual work or a radio strand without forcing each iteration to masquerade as a brand-new identity. “You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time,” she says. “Things change but remain the same at the same time. We grow, but we’re still the same, you know.” 

Independence, though labour-intensive, is a cornerstone of the project. Awos allows her to move at her own pace and, crucially, to share that infrastructure with others. “I’m looking forward to releasing my friends’ music,” she says. “Complete independence is a lot of work, but it lets you decide what matters.” In a culture fixated on perpetual novelty – indeed, you could argue that as the conceit of this very interview (in reality, dear reader, it was an impromptu encounter) – Awos is conceived as for the long-game, with porous boundaries and space for projects that might not fit a quarterly release schedule.

The same patience shapes JASSS’ creative process in the studio. “I don’t know what I’m doing when I begin,” she explains. “I’m not so much of a ‘producer’ in that sense, unless it’s for somebody else. But with my work, I’m just doing this thing that makes me feel in a certain way. I’m not fully conscious of it. It’s exploring an idea, following it through — and even then, you don’t really know why you have this idea. You’re just following a train of thought and sometimes it magically turns into something concrete.” 

In practice, that sees Silvia gathering fragments, whether that’s bass tones that feel like irresistible “blankets of sound” or scraps of field recordings on the move, before following the thread on some manipulations that gave her an initial flutter of insight. Silvia says this approach pushes back against what she calls the “autopilot doubt” she feels is common in her, and women more widely. “Decision-making can be very mysterious,” she ponders. “At this point in my life, I’m not so keen on learning what the mechanism is that gets activated and makes me go here and there. There’s not a precise way, but I am subconsciously and consciously trying.”

Her deliberate holding space for intuition and uncertainty also applies to her ongoing collaboration with Ben Kreukniet. Built over several years and approximately “ten-thousand conversations” between the pair, the latest iteration of their audiovisual performance (which premiered at Rewire) exists in the same Awos universe, but remains a distinct entity. “The show is its own thing,” she explains. “It’s not about my music first and visuals after. We’ve really been working together on this, even if we’ve often been physically apart [between her in Berlin and Ben in Amsterdam]”.

The show itself has been carefully constructed. Silvia likens it to a non-narrative movie, or semi-installation. Something physical, experiential, but never fully resolved into easy entertainment. On stage at the festival, she’s deliberately obscured behind a translucent screen, framed by footage – often that she herself has shot like urban nightscapes, blurred interiors – which flickers across multiple layers and is punctuated by an intense, custom-built LED bar that spans the width of the stage. “I’m not a great entertainer,” Silvia admits with a small laugh. “I’m not doing backflips on stage. So, it’s extremely nice for me to be out of the picture a bit, and hand over almost full control of the visual narrative – something I don’t really want to explore personally – to someone who deeply cares. All while still being there, and helping create this sense of place.”

That close attention to visuals is precisely about building a deliberate environment over mere spectacle. Silvia is clear on this distinction as I broach the topic of a seeming over-emphasis of visuals in music and the overburden on artists themselves to cooperate, from the live arena to an Instagram page. “I’m not annoyed at the use of visuals themselves,” she responds. “I’m annoyed when they’re used as a psyop, as a distraction. When visuals are used people need to ask themselves: is this important as an element, or is it just an accessory? So many things are just accessories, a need to keep people distracted.”

The show at Rewire sees Silvia and Kreukniet resist that superficiality, crafting a show that demands more patience – as well as sunglasses, at points – to consider it in its whole, from the most intense crescendos to lower-level spectral noise. She emphasises the importance of such pacing, silence, and even boredom: “You have to get bored sometimes. If you’re entertained all the time, that means you’re not really paying attention.”

Safeguarding that space for boredom can be as much a personal necessity as an aesthetic choice. Years of near-weekly DJ itineraries, Silvia admits, had the opposite effect, dulling her appetite for sound entirely. “For a person that DJs a lot, a lot of stuff has to go through me,” she says. “The volume you filter in or out is overwhelming,” she says. “It makes you lose a little bit of the passion for music.” At its worst, the fatigue felt can seem irreversible: “It’s not something you can train: if you lose it, you lose it. Whether you feel something or you don’t is out of your hands, and that’s tragic.” 

The subject of burnout brings to mind a recent interview with fellow producer Nick León, who described a similar numbness from endless touring. Nearly a decade on from renowned DJ Avicii’s death – his depression reportedly deepened by the grind of playing more than 250 shows a year – the warning signs are hard to ignore. In an ecosystem squeezed by shuttered venues and shrinking fees, the temptation is to accept every offer, pushing body and mind until nothing about music feels joyful. Serious industry reckoning is still scarce in 2025, but the cost of carrying on as usual grows clearer with each exhausted set and premature farewell.

Still, there’s always a choice to make. For Silvia, stepping back from constant touring and giving what became Eager Buyers the slow gestation it demanded became her way to reclaim listening as a deliberate act. What rekindled that feeling was not new gear or a fresh plugin, but simply a return to past loves; primarily music that demands long, undivided listening. “I’ve been obsessively listening to Lustmord for the last five years — it’s my happy place,” she says. His cavernous low-end frequencies, alongside Scorn’s experiments on the industrial doom-metal genre, another of Silvia’s foundational favourites, reminded her what she loves about music in the first place: “Timeless music is always heavy on the low for me; it never gets old, it always gives me what I want.”

That recalibration also looped her back to the head-space of Weightless. “When you find yourself doing something you haven’t done for a while, you realise it was this specific moment when you did it last time,” she reflects. The new record doesn’t mimic the 2017 LP, but it carries a trace of that earlier freedom. “It’s not about sounding like Weightless,” she stresses. “I don’t think I could literally remake that sound again anyway, as the way I was working was different. I had gear which didn’t even have knobs, and I was using presets to get the expensive Moog-type sound I wanted after things were recorded. It’s more about feeling what I felt then. I’m feeling spiritually closer to Weightless than I was five years ago.”

Above all, Silvia repeatedly acknowledges the privilege embedded in all these quieter realisations she’s had over the near-five years since her last JASSS release, particularly the privilege of being able to work slowly, deliberately, alongside people who truly care. “Sometimes towards the end of a show, when everything went fine and you’re relaxing a little, it really hits,” she says thoughtfully. “You look around and think: How nice is this? How nice to find someone as amazing as Ben – and all other people that I’ve also worked with on this and other projects – and actually spend a bunch of time, years even, to work on something you care about. How privileged is that? What a nice use of your time on Earth.”