‘Cities #1’ is the second album by Jackie Denardo, and the second to be released in 2021.

The album was made quickly, using more advanced techniques than on ‘Continuums’. It is a concept album - of sorts.

The album is entirely instrumental, with the expanded song durations allowing each piece to slowly unfurl. Lighter in tone than its predecessor, 'Cities #1' incorporates a broader variety of musical styles and influences to the point where conventional genre labels such as ‘dark ambient’ or ‘glitch’ are even less relevant than before. Perhaps ‘cinematic’ is the most useful word to describe the music, especially given the governing concept behind the album - details are listed below.

The original vision for Jackie Denardo was to create long, psychedelia-tinged shapeshifting songs that made no demands on the listener. Minimal, ambient music. The kind of music that could accompany fantastical docking sequences in sci-fi movies set in space. In fact, the original moniker for this project was ‘Sigh-Fi’.

As I developed as a songwriter, aided by an ever-expanding roster of hardware and software to support my music-making, the temptation to create more complex, beat-driven compositions steered me down a different and ultimately more exciting path. And yet, I had an itch to scratch.

I was going to make an ambient album bearing the Jackie Denardo moniker. It's what I had set out to do, and my thinking was that "If I don't do it now, I will never get around to it".

I set some parameters, the most important of which was that I would write, write, write for two weeks and mix and master afterwards; I would not tinker. What I created during this period is what would be released. I also set out to complete a song a day, working solely on a single song at a time, but abandoned the approach on day three. I instead completed one song at a time, which is the next best thing.

Another idea that in hindsight was destined for the scrapheap was to entirely forego percussion. Stripping the songs of beats did allow them to breathe in a way that I liked, to create a meandering aspect that wrong-footed the listener to not know where the songs were going. This helps to zone out. It may not surprise to disclose that I spent a lot of time listening to My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Glider’ when working on this album. Including a miniscule amount of percussion gave a lot more depth to the songs and made the rare moments with cymbal crashes, sub-kicks et cetera more impactful. Also, I quietly observed that ambient albums with no drums tend to be conceptualised as just that. Recent releases from Autechre and classic releases from Aphex Twin tend to be referred to as either ‘the one with drums’ or ‘the one without drums’.

The real driving force behind this album was the creation of a loose concept – to create soundtracks for moments spent visiting cities. This came about by accident. By this point, the global pandemic had kept me holed up at home for well over a year, with all planned holidays long since scrapped and with no indication of when another might happen. Whilst recovering from an operation, I had some time on my hands to dig through old hard drives, searching for some old projects to pick up for keeping me busy. It was at this time I discovered loads of folders of holiday snaps.

With light at the end of tunnel in terms of the ease of restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic, and with the weather picking up, I found myself getting excited about the prospect of going on holiday again. One of my favourite things to do is to wander around a new city, alone, listening to music. There’s something strangely beautiful about the serendipity of hearing familiar music paired with unfamiliar sights, smells and other sensations. I have a vivid memory of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Up the Beach’ kicking in on a particularly sweltering summer day in Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. Psychologists might call this a ‘flashbulb memory’.

And so, I got to work. I pulled up photos from weddings, honeymoons, business trips, festivals, et cetera. It made me happy, up to a point. What if the lingering legacy of the pandemic, in conjunction with the climate crisis, makes it nigh on impossible to go on such travels again? Indeed, watching videos of me in crowded cities made me feel incredibly anxious, such is the game-changing nature of being trapped inside your house for over a year with no physical contact with anyone. Just going to the supermarket was like a game of Pac Man.

As I spliced up audio with converted video to create audio ‘field recordings’ in the vein of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, I attempted to layer instrumentation on top of the sounds of my wife and I at New Year’s Eve on the strip in Las Vegas in 2013, days after getting married. There were over 250,000 of us there, right on the strip. They close the roads to cars on New Year’s Eve. So many people. Or from Bondi Beach in Sydney, New York City’s Central Park, et cetera. I found that the moods generated from the field recordings was resulting in the music being tense, dissonant, dark – not quite was I was hoping for. I wanted this album to be different from other Jackie Denardo music which, for the most part, is tense, dissonant and dark. And so, I removed the field recordings more or less altogether. All that remains are the sounds of animals in Zoos, but good luck picking them out – they have been manipulated beyond recognition.

Though removing the city sounds effectively killed the concept behind the album dead, it also stopped the music from sounding like a pale imitation of David Holmes sublime ‘Let’s Get Killed’. And this is a good thing.

And so, what remains is a series of songs that are about as deeply personal as you can get without words and lyrics. In an alternate reality, a ‘Director’s Cut’ of this album exists, complete with the sounds of drunken debauchery, subway cars, volleyball games and pinball machines. These are just some of the sounds that you will find in these cities, and just some of the sounds that I miss so very much.