"To say that the last few years of Gareth Dickson’s life have been tumultuous would be an understatement. In 2007 he fell in love with a girl from South America, packed up a few essentials from his life in Scotland, and moved to the Argentinian countryside. It didn’t turn all fairy tale at that point, however. While there he was shot at, attacked by dogs, and was involved in a very close call when the passenger plane he took to a little town in the Andes was forced down after an engine caught fire. The bullet missed, the aircraft landed, and the dog bites healed; he survived intact, albeit a little more aware of his own mortality, and a good bit more anxious.
“The bullet in all honesty was never meant to hit” he states calmly, it was a robbery gone wrong and he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The incident in the aircraft was far more terrifying because there was the agonizing time to think and reflect during the plane’s unintended descent. “It’s interesting to find out how you would react in that situation. Faced with the possibility that it’s really time up, I felt an overwhelming sense of this having been destiny, that it was impossible that I had boarded this aircraft by chance.”
...Gareth often gets comparisons to Nick Drake but it’s important to mention the influence he takes from experimentalists like Brian Eno, Bert Jansch, and Glenn Gould. His music is characterized by an intimacy gleaned from his dream-like approach to singing and playing guitar as well as the immediacy of being captured shortly after being written by whatever recording device is closest at hand, be it a cassette machine, handheld recorder, or 4-track. His use of analogue delays and reverb add to this soft, spacey vibe. The lo-fi nature of his sound harbors all of the cracks, flaws and rough edges of humanity, soul, and the deeply personal circumstances that surround the creation of art. ...Up until this point Gareth had been traveling as one of the mainstay’s in Vashti Bunyan’s touring band" 12k
