In 1990, Jane’s Addiction told us that “The world is loaded / It’s lit to pop and nobody is gonna stop,” which in retrospect might be viewed as presaging the explosion of exciting music in the early 1990s. Grunge was launched in 1991 with Nirvana’s Nevermind and Pearl Jam’s Ten, a year that also saw the release of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and Slint’s Spiderland. Hot on the heels in 1992 were the amazing debut albums by Rage Against the Machine, PJ Harvey and Liz Phair. One could go on and on.

An album that belongs in this rarefied company is Nowhere by the band Ride, released in 1990 and regularly hailed as one of the quintessential albums of the Shoegaze genre, typified by whooshing distorted guitars and hypnotic vocals. Ride went on to release several more albums before imploding in 1996.

A key component of Ride’s sound was the guitar and vocals of Mark Gardener, who will be performing at SOhO Restaurant & Music Club in Santa Barbara, on Thursday night in what is being intriguingly billed as a “solo acoustic loop show.” Gardener told Noozhawk what we can look forward to, and also had some reflections on Ride’s ride.

Click here to purchase tickets to the show, which is from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. at SOhO, 1221 State St., Suite 205. Click here for the full interview with Mark Gardener.

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Jeff Moehlis: What can we look forward to at the upcoming show?

Mark Gardener: New, old and middle-aged songs! I’ve recently finished a new Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins) / Mark Gardener album that I’m very happy with, so I will reveal some of these songs for the first time but will, of course, play a few old songs for the nostalgic element.

JM: Perhaps you know that you’ll be playing an “early show” at SOhO, from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., then Thurston Moore and Sebadoh will be playing a “late show,” starting at 10 p.m. Any chance that there will be some musical cross-pollination between you and the others?

MG: I just found that out. There has already been some musical cross-pollination as Thurston Moore and Sonic Youth, along with Sebadoh, have both been influences on me musically. I was a fan of both of those bands so I’ll hopefully stay around that evening and watch the late show. That’s a great coincidence or maybe it’s fate that we all play the same venue on the same night! (Click here to purchase tickets to Thurston Moore and Sebadoh at SOhO.)

JM: I’m a big fan of the Ride album Nowhere. What are your reflections on that particular album?

MG: Well, it was the first album we had all recorded together. We recorded it in what was once a chapel just south of the river in London. All of the takes were live takes and we just kept on recording until we were happy with the takes and songs. It was a very instinctive, pure and innocent as we had no master plan but just some songs that we had been playing live and then some songs that were half-written and came together there and then in the studio. We were certainly not tapered by any rules, it was pure experimentation and expression.

Our three EPs that preceded this album had all done really well so we were in great spirit. We rented a strange apartment a taxi ride away from the studio, somewhere in London where we would occasionally sleep as there was no residential side at the studio. The sessions got later and later until we became nocturnal. I remember the taxi driving us back to our apartment to sleep when the rest of London seemed to be going to work.

I felt like we were living on the edge of life, living and realizing our dreams in what was becoming a more and more surreal dreamy headspace. It worked great!

Alan McGee would visit us from time to time in the evenings and he, like us, just seemed really happy with what we were doing. In hindsight, it was a big challenge for us to go in and record that album with no producer but a great engineer (Mark Waterman), who we ended up driving into the ground in the end. But he and we all did a great job!

Alan Moulder was finally pulled in at the end once we had recorded everything to mix it. It ended up being a dark album but it has a very unique sound and an incredibly energetic quality about it. I had no idea then that it would end up being such a big and respected album. I’m very happy that it has become that.

JM: What was the good, the bad, and the ugly about the Shoegaze and Britpop music scenes?

MG: Like all ‘scenes,’ there was the good, bad and the ugly. The originators of both scenes were the better bands, and then lots of dire bands followed on in the dust of the originals. Shoegaze, I think, was definitely more substance over style. Britpop for me was more style over substance.

Shoegaze has proved to have been the much more experimental and influential in the long run, and has certainly stood the test of time much better than Britpop.

Maybe Britpop will come round again, but I never felt any of those bands were breaking any new ground so I doubt there will be any second coming. I’m always suspicious when people start waving the flags and declaring the second Brit invasion of the U.S. It didn’t happen.

Some of those bands did well in the U.K. I thought early Oasis and Supergrass were great, but there wasn’t much else that did much for me during the Britpop years.

JM: Where are you responding from?

MP: My Ox-4-Sound studio in Oxford … the city of dreaming spires … and musicians!

Click here for the full interview with Mark Gardener.

— Jeff Moehlis is a Noozhawk contributing writer and a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Upcoming show recommendations, advice from musicians, interviews and more are available on his web site, music-illuminati.com. The opinions expressed are his own.