David A Jaycock - Music For Space Age Shopping (2024)

"David A. Jaycock has achieved something quietly spectacular: an album rooted in highly specific locales and timeframes which nonetheless allows you to drift into nostalgia or to imagine better possible futures."
KLOF review
klofmag.com/2024/11/david-a-jaycock-music-for-space-age-shopping/
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This record explores the relationships between mid century architecture, consumerism and community. The gradual or sometimes brutal removal and change of places in the name of progress. These changes leave traces that people have to deal with on a psychological level but probably never really acknowledge.

This record explores loss of community and loss or unsympathetic altering of shopping spaces. When something is unceremoniously knocked down or altered and something else replaces it then the thing before it becomes ghost like and is at risk of being forgotten. Not dissimilar to when the Christian faith built their buildings upon Pagan sites. It has a similar purpose (to pray or to shop in this case) but the older thing becomes dreamlike and is confined to folklore. The community is always fed the propaganda of progress but looking back, I certainly cannot deny the beauty of what has now gone. Maybe there is a sense of dissolution and denial about such matters.

The record is also interested in the sense of community of these past spaces and how shopping centres have generally declined mainly due to the rise of neo liberalism and tech giants.

When you see old footage of these spaces in their prime, you get a sense of a space age future, everything looks new but paradoxically the people look to be from an older time. Today I can see real poverty and complete disenfranchisement from being in these new spaces. It's not all doom and gloom though as spaces, especially the ones in Plymouth are not that much altered and could be brought back to the architects original dreams.