DAVID A. JAYCOCK
HOLD. STAR. RETURN
THE NEW ALBUM, RELEASED MAY 19th
VIA JAMES YORKSTON’S DIY MICRO-LABEL CRAWS
Vinyl still available ffrom
davidajaycock.bandcamp.com/album/hold-star-return
“CORNISH PSYCHEDELIC MASTER” – Q
“AN OUTSTANDING GUITARIST” – THE GUARDIAN
“TRULY BEAUTIFUL, STRANGE AND UNIQUE” – MOJO
“QUITE BEAUTIFUL UNEASE” – THE WIRE
“CAREFULLY MANAGED CONTRADICTIONS... A TRUE ORIGINAL” – FOLK RADIO
Renowned for his critically acclaimed collaborations with singer Marry Waterson, from the legendary folk family the Watersons, David A. Jaycock is a Cornish [???] two-times BBC2 Folk Awards nominated guitarist and composer whose psychedelic, haunting and wildly eclectic sonic explorations know no boundaries. His latest solo album is an imaginative sidestep into synth pop and experimental electronica, inspired by the music of his early youth – from Japan and Eurythmics to Kraftwerk and Vangelis. Titled Hold. Star. Release, it will arrive on limited-edition 12” vinyl and via digital services on March 27, 2023 [TBC], on the CRAWS micro-label, run from Cellardyke, Scotland by Jaycock’s long-time friend and collaborator James Yorkston.
Where David A. Jaycock’s albums in the past have seen a fine balance between acoustic and electronic instrumentation, Hold. Star. Return represents his first full immersion in a world of charity shop synthesisers, trashy vintage keyboards, drum machines and tape effects – a world which has fascinated him since his teens. String machines, arpeggiators, bleeps and crackling soundscapes lay the foundations for subject matter wide and bountiful, from displacement and family breakdown to car crashes, spontaneous human combustion and living in the back of a Hillman Avenger Estate. Lyrically the album is dark, and yet, it’s often joyous and expansive in its musicality –steeped as it is in spectral memories of a half-remembered age when electronic pop felt fresh, futuristic and full of possibilities, from the stereo panned layers of ‘Dare’ by the Human league, to the synth drums on ‘It Feels Like I’m In Love’ by Kelly Marie. “Music that reminds me of walking to school in the snow in the late 1980s,” as Jaycock puts it.
David A. Jaycock’s adventures in music making began aged 15 on an Argos guitar bought for £7 from a mate. “I got obsessed,” he remembers. “I learned to play from books and records from the library.” His first electronic experiments were on his sister’s Casio VL-Tone. “I loved that little keyboard; it went weird when the batteries ran out, which was pretty interesting.” He released his first solo record in 2007, The Improvised Killing Of Uncle Faustus And Other Mythologies, a sparse, haunting electro-acoustic collection influenced by The Wicker Man and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. “I like to flit between and around the edges of folk and experimental music,” Jaycock reflects.
Jaycock has gone on to release a slew of further mysterious, atmospheric, and evocative music on respected underground labels including Static Caravan, Folklore Tapes, One Little Independent, Triassic Tusk and Blackest Rainbow, gaining many new friends and admirers along the way. In 2015, Two Wolves, the first of two folk records Jaycock made with singer Marry Waterson, was released. Hailed as “her finest album to date” ★★★★ by The Guardian, and “truly beautiful, strange and unique” ★★★★★ by Mojo, it went on to garner two BBC2 Folk Awards nominations. A second album with Waterson, produced by Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley and titled Death Had Quicker Wings Than Love, swiftly followed in 2017, to yet further acclaim. Jaycock has scored and provided music for Richard Heap’s feature film The Runaways (2019) and documentaries Consumed: Inside the Belly of the Beast (2011) and Dragons Back Race (2013).
An important creative foil and champion throughout much of Jaycock’s career has been Scottish singer-songwriter and Domino Records recording artist James Yorkston, whom he first met and recorded with in 2009 as part of Sheffield folk/experimental ensemble Big Eyes Family Players. “We then went on tour,” Jaycock remembers, “I’ve been recording on and off with him ever since.” The two pair up again on Jaycock’s latest album Hold. Star. Return – an album which Yorkston not only contributes to creatively, but which he is also helping to release via his DIY micro-label CRAWS (Cellardyke Recording And Wassailing Society). “We play a lot of Scrabble and stuff,” explains Jaycock, of his multi-faceted relationship with James Yorkston. “He puts me on to some great music. He gave me a kick to keep at this record and add lyrics and found time to add spoken word and backing vocals with some dulcimer thrown in. He is one of the most supportive, generous with thought and time musicians I know. He is a great listener.”
Recorded intermittently over the course of many years in ad hoc locations ranging from big halls to an airing cupboard, and additionally featuring playing from drummers Paul Bullock and Sam Kelly, Hold. Star. Return is an immersive sonic journey, fascinated by cinematic, cultural, and political effects on the imagination. Characters glow with violence and intelligence, blood and glass. Subjects visited from a deeply personal ‘dream-stateʼ perspective range from macrobiotics, religious tendencies, gurus, politics, and the effects of Thatcherism to class, community, and the differences in urban and rural nurture. There are stories of hitchhiking, being down and out in Paris, strong and fading friendships, loneliness and the growing realisation of mortality.
The album’s strength from a musical perspective is Jaycockʼs treatment of melody and counter melody. With its mono synths and sonic layers, there is an evoking of the idea of the haunted generation*, and yet, multi melodic vocals and vocal harmonies are also redolent of the condensed and immediate motifs of early 1980s synth pop. Analogue, FM, and digital synths create an almost psychedelic sonic palette, driven by both electronic and acoustic drums. Minimal electric guitars disguised as synthesisers augment the instrumentation. Whilst side A often masks its lyrical darkness, by the middle of side B, the melodies make way to a more sinister sonic and lyrical reality.
As with Jaycockʼs other works, this record is preoccupied with place and identity and geographical opposites. North or south. Town or village. Rich or poor. It conjures up bonfire nights in an industrial town or a post pub fight on a Sunday, observed from the bushes with the sea as soundtrack. The embers of memory both black and bright, bloodied and sharp. A foray through the imagination of a musician-composer at the peak of his playful, mercurial talents.
*The phrase ‘Haunted Generationʼ was used by British broadcaster and writer Bob Fischer in a 2017 article of the same name. It discusses his childhood exposure to a 1970s popular culture thematically preoccupied with mysticism and the supernatural. At the time, the prohibitive cost of media technology meant that most people did not make or own recordings of television programmes. Fischerʼs generation is ‘hauntedʼ, then, not only because of the supernatural themes of the TV they consumed in childhood but also because of their subsequent imperfect but persistent memories of this consumption.
released May 19, 2023
