The Reverend Marco D 'Andrea The Garden

Geej is pleased to present the debut album by installation artist and mystic minister The Reverend Marco D’Andrea. The Garden is an album which began as an installation project fusing the objects of the vague Canadiana of his childhood: tents, vintage speakers and the hippie totems that line the basements of 70s suburbia.

D’Andrea’s sound art has in the past made use of various antiquated sound technologies, both dissecting and distilling old psych and classic rock records to an ambient core of shamanistic drone. In part, The Garden is a meditation on the Canadian tradition of camping, in particular Marco’s own memories of camping in the 80s in Ontario provincial parks.

“My dad had a 70s canvas tent, which has a specific feel and smell. I decided to find a vintage canvas tent for my installation and since this piece was about childhood and my father, I decided to use my dad's favourite albums as the basis of the sound. There were a few heavy psychedelic songs that made a strong impression on me as a kid.”

The Garden album is conceived as a mirror to the psychedelic sounds of the late 60s and early 70s, in particular the eponymous debut album of certiain heavy metal originators that will be obvious to keen eyed fans.

Each piece of music is an attempt to get to the raw essence of psychedelic rock, beyond musicality and the phallic narratives of indulgent hedonism, and rather to a place of reflective worship. As such the music draws into view the essential baroque grandeur of classic rock stripped down into its essential tonalities. The title, a reference to the Hieronymus Bosch painting on the cover, is also an allusion to the biblical garden and a comment on the contemporary experience of nature as a garden that we keep for ourselves and do what we want with. This idea extends to the revolutionary aspirations of psychedelic culture, which for all its spiritual expanse and openness, was easily commodified and used to sell everything from cars to toothpaste. The lasting legacy of 60s counterculture is a lost path: as Bosch reminds us, the garden can be a dangerous place to leave.

Marco D’Andrea is an artist and an ordained Reverend based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His artwork incorporates sound art, audio recordings, sculpture and installation where objects, sounds and environments form a relationship and create meaning in the moment of listening and experiencing. D’Andrea was born in the small town of Sharon, Ontario and as a first generation Canadian, grew up with a unique mix of Italian Catholicism and hard-rocking, working-class Canadiana. D’Andrea was ordained as a Metaphysical Minister in 2017.