The frightened voice: I hear this phrase when I think about the late, recent run of studio albums by Jandek. This phrase, which seems to possess an important density for me, that seems to concentrate something important, tremendously so, for thinking about music and thinking about writing. The frightened voice – a voice fearful – a voice wailing out of some kind of fear: the thought I like is of a source external to the voice that draws it from itself. An external source, a point that calls the voice forward and makes it tremble, and calls the music forward also – calls them both.
But I should add the mood of the playing is steered by the voice – that the guitar, or the fretless bass still possesses a kind of ambiguity: it could lend itself to other kinds of vocalisations, other moods. And that it is the voice-mood that leads and determines it; that the playing, accompanied by the vocal, can now come forward as it accompanies fear, as it crashes forward with the frightened voice.
The voice, its singing, and what is sung, rises and falls with a music, in dialogue with a playing, draws it forward in its specificity: a frightened voice is joined by a music that accompanies being frightened. Accompanies, bearing it, as the sea bears a ship. Bearing it and letting it move forward, as the water that melts at its base bears a glacier, lubricating its passage.
And so with the music – it accompanies and lets roll forward a voice frightened, that seeks – strange task – to give substance to its fear. The music that is part of the fatality of the voice, of its necessity. That bears and gives fear to motion, letting a song – a dirge – surge forward. That it can move must be a kind of relief. That fear can be borne, that it can shape itself into something like a song – a dirge – must carry with it relief, and even joy.
Not to be rid of fear, but to step with it into a song. Not to assuage it, but to let the frightened voice do more than scream or cry in the instant. Fear gains a consistency. It opens a time for itself; gives itself to pulsed time, to a kind of rhythm, even as seems to belong only to a scream, a cry without context. The cry becomes horizontal. And it is no longer a cry, or, as cry it is drawn out into a string of lyrics, a singing, a song – a dirge. Now the cry that would have cried out into the night crawls forward as a song, like a reptile, blinking. It’s found a body, an inevitability. Now it can trace a life on earth. Fear is allowed to live.
But from where does it come, this fear? From what the singer, the player, would feel in his life? Perhaps. But then isn’t it also given by the music played, by the kind of voice the singer has, and by a training already – by the time of this great run of albums – 25 years old? Jandek, with these recordings, reaches a new intensity, a new focus. The albums explore a mood, deepening it as a river deepens into a gully. And until a great gorge stands around the song in its streaming. And it is in the concentrated form of a river that the song – a suite of songs, of dirges – surges forward in pure intensity, with absolute concentration.
These albums do not present a palette of moods, but a single mood, that deepens itself, that runs its groove into the earth. A mood determined above all by the voice. That is led by the consistency of the frightened voice, by its horizontal movement forward. This movement is what is permitted by its relationship to the music (even as it is also musical). There is a call and response. A sung phrase, and then a surge of music. Is this from blues? Is this call and response from the depths of blues?
The singing calls with silence beneath it. Then surges forward the playing – atonal, partly strummed, partly picked. On The Place, there’s even a harmonica. Call and response, from the voice to music – but does the voice respond to the music in turn? I think in the studio recordings – and it will be different with the live performances – it is the voice that leads. The frightened voice (but perhaps fear is only one of its moods) that lets the music wander. Lets it slip into the Jandekian idiom like the crocodile that slides into the water at the beginning of The Thin Red Line.
The frightened voice: this phrase seems important. As though the voice were called by something, that it was cowed in some important way. That it bowed forward like a serf before a master. But there is more than this. The voice is fearful, yes, and it has a fearful concentration: not for it the marshes and meanders where a river ceases its forward flow.
A fearful voice, and one that barely explores its fear, that does not, in the singing, pass through many other moods. A voice concentrated, absolutely focused – but isn’t there more than this? There’s dread. Absolute and suffocating dread. There’s a crushed anxiety, an Angst at the end of things. The voice is low, crocodile-like, sliding out into the idiom that bears it. And song comes after song, in a suite of songs. One, then another, without relief, without redemption – without the guitar or the bass (whichever Jandek is using) being retuned.
But isn’t there also the happiness that music is possible, that there’s been a stepping forward? A passage – a journeying, not that a destination is reached. Not that there’s any rising towards the end, a burst of light, as there is, say, on Glasgow Monday, The Cell. But that a movement was possible. That there was relief enough for movement to have occurred, even as it was almost totally crushed, totally buried.
Despair was not complete. The song is very low, sliding into its idiom – an idiom, a sliding which took 25 years to prepare. 25 years, until 2001, or 2002, and then … A strange crushed joy. Strange accomplishment, the movement forward. 25 years to reach this point, where everything begins AGAIN, as it does in the work of late Beckett. Where AGAIN the beginning is possible, and this is the joy of the work, the way it burns with a fierce and concentrated joy.
AGAIN and once more – AGAIN when so many times it seemed there was no stepping forward, no way to sing, to play. The AGAIN of the beginning, of the surging forward. Is this what it means to listen to these albums one after another – one, then another? Is it this AGAIN that seizes you, that carries you forward with absolute concentration?
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