MEMBERS: Jacco Gardner
FROM: The village of Zwaag (north of Amsterdam) in the Netherlands
YOU MIGHT KNOW HIM FROM: The late ’60s baroque pop of his debut album Cabinet of Curiosities
NOW: Touring the world on the heels of his sophomore release—the mysteriously cinematic Hypnophobia
Jacco Gardner is not afraid of sleep. In fact, you shouldn’t pay much attention to the literal definition of the title of his second album, Hypnophobia. “It’s more of a symbolic meaning,” Gardner explains over the phone. “It’s about what’s in between reality and the dream world. Most people are not aware of that place.” Gardner sure is. Listening to the haunting, whimsical work of the twenty-seven-year-old Dutch multi-instrumentalist is like reading a map that leads you there.
Consider Jacco’s (pronounced Yah-ko) favorite piece of musical gear at the moment: the Optigan. It’s a Seussian console organ that appears on almost all of Hypnophobia’s ten tracks. The Optigan was manufactured in the early ’70s by Mattel (who, as Gardner points out, “also make, like, Barbies”), and it has all the trappings of the time—retro wood paneling, plastic keys in muted colors. But the real magic happens under the hood. The instrument’s sounds come pre-recorded on transparent discs of flexible celluloid that are inserted into the front. When a key is pressed, the Optigan produces sound by shining a beam of light through the corresponding waveforms on the film, not unlike the way a needle reads the grooves of a record. Due to the Optigan’s exclusively mid-range, lo-fi timbre, the device never took off, and Mattel ceased production in 1976. But for psychedelic-minded nostalgia hunters like Gardner, these rare, outmoded Wonka machines are sonic treasures.
Gardner’s taste for the peculiar lends his music an unmistakably eerie, cinematic quality, and his reverence for art from an age past becomes clearer when he starts talking about film. He cites the ’70s surreal horror of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Suspiria as influences for his new record, and also nods to ’80s Disney movies Something Wicked This Way Comes and Return to Oz. “In the past, people were not afraid to let the darkness that’s in everyone’s imaginations shine through in movies,” says Gardner. “These worlds blended together. It’s something I see less and less in both music and movies nowadays.”
This world-blending is a theme that runs throughout Gardner’s latest album. Childlike curiosity goes hand in hand with sinister foreboding on tracks like “Find Yourself,” in which a hushed, harmonized verse erupts into an arcing chorus with all the grandeur of a main title sequence. “Before the Dawn,” meanwhile, is an eight-minute journey down a rabbit hole of pulsing rhythms and spiraling keys. It’s an evocative mixture of invitation and danger that lends itself readily to visual interpretation.
“Films are a reality you live inside while you watch them,” says Gardner, circling back to the topic of cinema. “You use your imagination—it’s the same part of your brain that you use to be creative. If you’re not creative while you’re watching a movie, it won’t be enjoyable, because you can’t really, you know, feel it. In that sense it’s very similar to dreaming.” FL
