Jacco Gardner
Cabinet of Curiosities

I remember the Dutch National team in '74 and its total and somewhat inconclusive football, I remember a final or semifinal just minutes from kick-off, a goal born from their own area with 3-4 first-time touches of divine beauty, the opponents motionless and frightened by those sublime plays.

Historical recollections and that total football born from another model, the Hungarian one that 20 years earlier gave way in a World Cup final, the socialist football of Gustav Sebes.

But it was no coincidence that a relentless West Germany clipped the wings of 2 legendary teams twice in a World Cup final…

I remember Jacco Gardner, that 24-year-old Dutch guy at his first recording appearance, the facial features of a young Johan Cruijff and some elusive alien amber shadows on the face reminiscent of Syd Barrett, the fairy-tale release of Cabinet of Curiosities after a brilliant raid in the '60s freakbeat with his first band The Skywalkers. Debut work with his best friend Hugo Van De Poel, a handful of hilarious sixties jams worthy of their Dutch Freakbeat/Nederbeat ancestors, be they The Outsiders or Golden Earring.

Then that album or rather that aberrant cover –Cabinet of Curiosities – that concoction of fairy tales and nursery rhymes that you don't know if they're golden like bedtime stories or sinister, reminding you that in the golden courts of our realms, amidst princesses and Kerastase commercial golden curls, coexist executioners overwhelmed with work and decapitations on assignment. Like that chrysalis that opens to the world at dawn under a sweet and golden glaze bubble but that is immediately overshadowed by those majestic acoustic hums in Watching The Moon, with the nocturnal listener burdened by the weight of that daytime catacomb that dissolving faints while Death in that sinister refrain whispers "I will bury you".

The essence of the journey is all in what we have "inside", in the most arcane depths.

And it's no coincidence that Jacco Gardner's miniature pocket odyssey in that Other Wood is fueled – as on the album cover, with Little Red Riding Hood Lost in the Forest – by the lysergic content of that basket or rather by what kind of grandmother he found among his ancestors, with all those substances and that vintage sensibility that is so impossible to find in your favorite Digital store. De-listed from catechism lists, from SIP listings and groups, and mailing lists but infected by that solitary passion for those home recordings among harpsichord, optigan, mellotron, and harpsichord all played by the Dutch baronet.

24 ans. Pas de plages dorées sur la Côte d'Azur

Pas de Maxibons et de dunes émues par des fesses divines au bord de la plage...

There are truly no golden beaches in this music but spinning threads sewn by the skillful fingers of a young craftsman, paradise and its collateral hell in convivial and bacchanal in a two-room apartment in a suburb in an industrial area 40 minutes from Amsterdam, in a work of historical and semi-anthropological recovery of the mystical-musical visions of those Sixsties studio wizards, Curt Boettcher, Van Dyke Parks, Arthur Lee.

And in Clear the Air the Dutch alchemist magician finally catapults us inside the Palace of Versailles, in that temporal chiaroscuro a moment before dawn and shortly before the sunset of the Sun King, like kittens still in love, with those beautiful eyes mixed with agate and metal, in that great hall, in the trembling warmth of that fire that continues to burn...