Once you step away from the mainstream, you can never go back, or so they say. I’ve no idea who they are but they might well be right as explorations in the more esoteric areas of the musical biosphere are likely to make you forget how to get back to Adele. As if to provide an example, the concept behind “Music For Space Age Shopping” by David A Jaycock is apparently to muse upon that most wondrous creation of modern times, the shopping centre.
The shopping centre – or shopping mall to those who live on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean – has never held any appeal to me and these concrete altars to the now feeble God of consumerism would seem most unlikely sources of inspiration for music or, indeed, anything remotely artistic. Would “Music For Space Age Shopping” therefore be haunted by the ghost of re-recordings of the sixties sounds of Gerry and The Pacemakers of, even worse, reinventions of the hits of Tiffany or Debbie Gibson? Fortunately not, for David A Jaycock has instead looped his way inside the grey artificiality of those once stalwart structures and combined it with the discontinuities that inevitably accompany their demise and decay to generate a, somewhat wistful and sentimental, soundtrack to these present and former daycare centres for the consumer.
Perhaps as a result of his concentration on what is left rather than what these structures once represented, there is an emptiness to be found. Not the open space kind of emptiness but a rather melancholic interpretation of the loss of something ephemeral for which there will be no real replacement and, in consequence, that makes this an album that enhances, or perhaps even causes, reflection.
Like I said at the start, once you wander from the path to the Arndale Shopping Centre, you may find yourself thinking more about music than you normally would. I can’t say if that was David A Jaycock’s intention yet it is what it is and, the deeper you dig, the more you will find that the past isn’t there anymore.