Can a body of music be wise? Can it have wisdom? But of course it is only in its relation to us that it is real – only, that is, as it breaks like waves against us. Breaking – and with some music, breaking us, as though what we were was fragile, though we did not know it. As though by a secret frequency, it finds the crack along which we break.
That, I think, is the wisdom of Glasgow Monday, also known as The Cell. It knew me already. It had anticipated me, its listener, and knew I was coming. And it is possible that the whole of my life was but an approach to this album. Or that my life was only a dream of the album itself, as though only it was real, as though it was everything, like the planet Solaris.
Who am I, as I listen? I will say at once that to listen to this album, and from its opening, this question comes apart. The question itself gives way, and the ‘who?’ opens to enclose the world. A question becomes everything, and the question of everything.
It begins with piano, played slowly, steadily. It is Satie-like, or perhaps Bach-like. A slowed down Bach-suite. And a music of a steady momentum, almost unnoticeable at first, but that builds as the rays of the sun will do one day on those solar yachts whose spread sails will bear the pressure that will send them between planets. When astronauts become sailors, manning a rigging that is spread out a thousand miles to catch the pressure of the solar wind.
The piano on the album spreads its sails. Spreads them, but to catch what? A momentum. A slowly building pressure. That says: wait. That says: it will come, in time’s fullness. Only by its fullness, as it builds up, the steadiness of the playing, will it come. The music waits – but only for itself. The music builds and waits only for itself, catching up with itself and what it was. As though it had began before the beginning of time and will play until after the end, but that the end is also the beginning, and after this universe, there will be others.
Wisdom, then. The wisdom of time, all of time, that gathers in the playing. The first part of the suite is instrumental. And then the nine vocal pieces, in which the singer half-sings, half-speaks whisperingly, questionly, over the piano. A Sprechstimme that perturbs only lightly the surface of the music. That plies its surface, a sea yacht this time. Passing along what it is, this planet of music, 90 minutes of it.
‘What do I have?’, he will sing several times at the beginning of a movement. ‘What – do – I -have?’ sung slowly, questionly. A breathy singing. Singing that lets the music ask what it is. As though it was the planet Solaris, communicating through the past lives it conjures into flesh that knew itself in this way. As though the music was the sleeper from which the vocal awakes like a dream.
That sing-speaks of itself, wonderingly, breathily. That asks what it is, and for the first time, with its first words. ‘What do I have have?’ – each time the question asked anew, and for the first time. For the singer is first born – he was not born before. First, as William James says, and therefore young, and innocent, and the world – the whole suite of songs – is new to him.
And alongside the piano, the miracle of the percussion, played by Alexander Neilson. And the bowed upright bass, played by Richard Youngs. Neither name appears on the album cover of Glasgow Monday. Neither, because they both disappear into Jandek, as though Jandek were that dreaming sea, that Solaris which the music also is.
How could I have been prepared for this, the most essential of albums? And how could any of Jandek’s listeners, whom I only joined recently? A piano conventionally tuned. A playing measured and calm. A new style of singing. A whispering Sprechstimme: who could have known this was coming, as it was performed and recorded in Glasgow at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, on May 23rd 2005?
And what was I doing that day? Where was I? Writing a report and thinking about Roubaud, say the archives. Thinking – but did I know, then, that I was already being pulled towards a planet’s orbit? Strange fate. We listen with our lives, with the whole of our lives. How long did it take to listen to Glasgow Monday? 90 minutes, and the whole of my life. As the album called my life to it, called it and found its secret fracture.
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