Watch Jacco Gardner perform 'How To Live Again' on Brighton beach
2013 has been something of a renewal for the many iternation of psych music. The Horrors and Tame Impala might have been the first to really scatter some of the elements from the experimental mid-60s guitar scene into their music but that’s given way to even purer forms of psych with the likes of TOY, Charlie Boyer and Temples all pitching their own distinct takes.
It comes as something of an irony then that the sound of Jacco Gardner – ostensibly closer to the folkier brand of British psych than anything else we’ve heard this year – comes to us from the Netherlands. Gardner cut his teeth with freakbeat duo The Skywalkers but his solo project sees him engineering a sound that more suited to a summer field in Dorset than the playa at Burning Man.
The word baroque has been bandied about but Gardner’s approach to production – in which he basically plays and does everything – adds a unique contemporary aspect to his package too and and as with the most pristine and pretty things, there’s inevitable darkness and a sinister undercurrent just underneath the lyrical surface (album track ‘Lullaby’ find him singing “I will bury you where the sun goes down/deep within the night/when stars are bright”).
We met Jacco on Brighton Beach for a session take on ‘How to Live Again’, a track from Gardner’s former band The Skywalkers.
Cabinet of Curiosities is out now via Trouble In Mind.
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