50 albums to listen to! 50 to negotiate and periodise, tracking the changes from album to album! A task for a lifetime, and yet a task for now, too. What is the imperative that demands I listen? Last night, listening to A Kingdom He Likes, the answer was very clear: this is, for me, a visceral music, a music of the guts. How is it that the guitar, half plucked, half strummed seems to reach me in the abdomen?
As soon as a song opens, I know I am there – know that something has happened and the world shifted. Everything begins right here, I tell myself. This is necessary music, I tell myself. And the drama of the music, have I written about that? What words should I use? There are variations of intensity, sudden lulls and then they come again: those slurred, blurred vocals – there they come, like a rising wave, and then sinking down again, and there is a lull again, just detuned guitar.
I think it is the many albums released since the spoken word recordings around the turn of the millenium that are my favourite. His voice is deep now, having slipped an octave. This is the singer’s near-baritone period, with his guitar (or fretless bass) downtuned to bear his voice, to answer to it. The songs become longer, the recordings sharper, and in some odd way it is as though Jandek is only coming to itself – that the 30 odd albums previous were simply a way of returning to what was already there. As though it is only now this course of recordings was coming into its own.
But that is a way of saying simply that the idiom in which Jandek works – a fractured folk, a blues gone numb – has deepened into a new richness. A new, deeper voice, a downtuned guitar, and songs much longer, much more dramatic, voicing a phrase and then a pause with only a guitar – and then a phrase comes again …
I listen at the edge of myself. I am gathered up right at my edge. This is necessary music. Or it is music in which necessity lets itself be heard. A call, a demand into which the music is held, as with great strength. The holding of the song into what calls the song, but by what strength? From where did it come, this new, deepened strength? I marvel at it. I listen and can do nothing but listen.
The controlled howl of the vocal. The blurred wail. The voice rising and wailing and half-howling, blurring the sung phrase. And then the guitar, open stringed, picked and sometimes strummed. And the way one songs simply gives unto another – that where one ends, another, in the same tuning, begins. These are suite-albums, albums of a mood, and of the exploration of a mood. As if the music was trying to find something. As if it were trying to know where it was, and the sense of where it was.
Could you call it agonised, the singing? Not quite. It seems torn in some way. Torn across itself. It seems unravelled in some way – yet held together though it is scratched apart. How to write of such a voice, and such a vocalising? And of what carries the remains of blues and folk forms in the playing? Of the imperative that bears the music, and of the music’s necessity?
‘Oh I like calls at night/ It’s not serious enough/ I’m off for the day/ I shut out the lights.’ Short phrases in turn. A small break ‘I watch the day pass/ And in these moments, I intermittently escape/ To that space around my epicentre’. Inter-mittent-ly: the syllables strung across a void. Ep-i-cent-re: a word attenuated.
‘It don’t need to go far/ for me to see it here.’ ‘See’ breaking upwards to falsetto. Breaking the baritone and rising. And then, my favourite part: ‘In many ways, yes/ But in all ways, no.’ Yes – sung desperately. And no – resignedly, though not wisely. The sung version of Kafka’s ‘there is hope – but not for us.’
No hope for the singer. ‘No’ – wavering, but resigned. As though the singer had not quite learnt the lesson. As though he had to sing it to himself to tell himself again. As though he had to teach himself, to learn from his singing. And on it goes, the song, for 11 minutes. 11! And of necessary music. Of music that is held into necessity – but could it be otherwise?
As though in this period, after the spoken word albums, it was only now the Furies had caught up with Jandek. Or that it was only now he could turn to face the minotaur that was following him. No more escape. No attempt to escape. But no reckoning with the monster, either. ‘Take off your mask now/ Reveal yourself.’ ‘Ree-veeeaaal’ – a word stretched, almost pulled apart. ‘You beautiful thing’. ‘Beau-ti-fullll’ – an attenuated word, stretched almost too long for sense.
What is this song about? What do these words concern? But there’s no sense. Nothing overall. Only a line by line trudge. Phrases sung and then breaks. Phrases returning. A relentlessness, a forward movement. ‘Have you the strength …’ Str-eng-th drawled. ‘Go go go now’. A pause before ‘now, sung in a lower voice. Three ‘go’s coming quickly, and then, like an exhalation: now. And now resignedly, in the same voice as ‘no’ (my favourite of Jandek’s many voices) …
But what was the song about? The attempt to reach something? ‘Like a low place swamp traveller/ Who happens upon a kingdom he likes …’ And then another song begins, almost the same. The same tuning. The same picked strings, sometimes strummed, the song rising to a favourite moment: ‘Skank, you skant’ – a thrilling moment. A kind of release. Sung with a kind of woundedness. Declaimed, and always surprising, although I know it’s coming. And the next line, drawled ‘Leave’ …
‘I forgot now I’m free’: every word stretched. ‘I ain’t going back to no mystery’ drawled, and then the final line ‘These afternoons are real’, and the song ends. Then a tempo change, though in the same tuning. Faster, less depressed … but only the second song is depressed – the first song is something else, something more exploratory. A groping – but for what? The blind movement of a grub. Pim in the mud in How It Is. The unnameable in a jar. Singing to itself, without being able to find itself. Singing and playing to fill time, because there is always too much time.
Does the album as a whole explore a mood? Or is it, by contrast, an exploration of a palette of related moods, moods that shift slightly and change from song to song. It is an album suite – the songs bleed into one another. Another continues where one leaves off, but always with a change of mood, of emphasis. A palette of moods, and a palette of techniques, the album as what is made in one session or a few …
Not a mood, then, but a field in which certain moods are made possible. An idiom, that then makes it possible to make certain moods. And an idiom joined to the greater idiom of Jandek’s music as a whole.
But this album. How to fill time, when time is to be endured? How to endure time except by singing, by playing? The singing and playing is what endures somehow against time, lifting itself from it. Something seized from the endurance of time, and enduring in its stead. Given consistency, given form enough to stand: this what is marvellous. This is strength. How to have made something from suffered time? How to let suffering be smeared along time?
‘It’s oh so automatic’ -‘so’ sung high, ‘so’ rising like some wierd half-yodel. A mutant Jimmie Rodgers. No – not sung high, wailed high. Raised high by wailing. A cry against time, braced against it. Enduring against it as this album endures. Enduring to let song begin again after song. This, the last track seems voided by despair. It’s so short! But to have sung of despair so completely – so fleetingly. A song that out-despairs Smog’s ‘Hangman’s Blues’. A song that is lost in the mud. A song almost senseless like the strange dance the man does in Bela Tarr’s Damnation, in the rain.
Lars Iyer's Blog 