David A. Jaycock – David A. Jaycock (2011​-​2022)

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For the last few years, David A. Jaycock has been taking his practice into increasingly experimental and hauntological territory, and it is a joy to behold. His experimentation is of a quiet kind; his music reflects on landscapes and histories but without shying away from technology or from the possibilities of the future. His idiosyncratic path through folky electronica, ghostly soundscapes and wonky Englishness can be partly traced on this new collection, which brings together more than a decade’s worth of material and can be thought of as a companion to last year’s Outtakes, Reimaginings and Unreleased pieces (2003​-​2006).

Given Jaycock’s pick’n’mix approach to his back catalogue, the release has a surprising flow to it. Opener Carpobrotus Pigface picks out a careful electronic melody over hiss and warble with the delicacy of a nascent flower. It melts into The Merman and His Muse, a sweetly psychedelic ditty that combines intricate plucked strings with an evocative wash of synths. The result is like some kind of dream collaboration between Syd Barrett and Four Tet.

This kind of music is all about subtle destabilisation. On one hand, Jaycock is able to take a strange or esoteric subject and turn it into something uncannily recognizable. This is particularly evident on disarmingly sweet instrumentals like St Cleer Pyre More Air where the plucked strings have a rustic charm that conceals an eerie, pagan heart. On the other hand, he can take something we all know well – a nursery rhyme like Rock A Bye Baby or Ring Of Roses, say – and twitch its threads until it begins to unspool into something less familiar. He explores various degrees of this unspooling, and each time rewards us with a subtly different experience. These destabilising techniques are key to what has become known as hauntology – they create a musical world where ideas of nostalgia and utopia twine around each other but rarely meet head-on.

Even in the more structured moments – album standout Home Late, for example, where an electronic fuzz seeps in at the end to envelope an otherwise more conventional-sounding piece of songwriting – there is a feeling of strangeness, of travelling in eerie landscapes real or imagined. Light Part 2 takes a similar trajectory from comparatively solid ground to a deliciously uneasy conclusion.

All of this amounts to an overarching feeling of dreaminess, or rather of fugue states. Lark’s guitar soundscape – partly indebted to post-rock – feels mysterious and difficult to pin down, while Arrow’s double-tracked vocals seem to exist in a space between waking and sleep. It brings to mind the Edwardian symbolism of certain strains of British psychedelia, with its alarm clocks and its sudden slips between one world and the next. This is the music of the looking glass, and Jaycock captures it better than anyone.

Order via Bandcamp: https://jaycockburge.bandcamp.com/album/david-a-jaycock-2011-2022