Our Song of the Day comes from David A Jaycock, with The Merman & his Muse, a track from his new album ‘David A. Jaycock (2011-2022)‘, an anthology of sorts, featuring mostly unreleased rarities. In his own words – Made from Folklore tapes, a Monorail bonus CD, an unreleased EP from 2017 and lots of other things including wonky nursery rhymes, folk arrangements and a little synth-pop that leads us right up to 2022.
David’s outputs are always relished here. In 2020 his album, Murder, and the Birds was released on Triassic Tusk Records and reviewed by Thomas Blake who concludes: “Jaycock has previously recorded with James Yorkston, and Yorkston has called him ‘a great English outsider.’ That is the perfect little phrase, really. His music exists both inside and outside of the English tradition. The undeniably beautiful songs of Murder, And The Birds relish the ugly and the odd, and aren’t afraid to document the violence of our history. Jaycock is a master of carefully managed contradictions and a true original.”
His 2018 release, The Decline of the Mobile Library, celebrated another great service lost to funding cuts…”Jaycock’s approach is abstract but heartfelt. He sees the mobile library as a kind of liberating restraint – its limited stock often gives the reader a chance to focus on something they wouldn’t normally pick – and he uses this idea of restraint as a musical starting point.”
Something Jaycock is not short of is a sense of invention, something that’s ably demonstrated on The Merman and his Muse, a hauntological gem which is also our Song of the Day.
David A. Jaycock (2011-2022) is released on Human Geography Records (a label run by Jaycock and Andrew Burge) and is available via Bandcamp here as a Limited Edition Cassette and Download.