(I Threw You Away is the album that inaugurates for me the most compelling series of studio albums by Jandek, following the acapella albums the appeared around the turn of the decade. It’s followed by a flurry of albums, of which The Humility of Pain, The Place, A Kingdom He Likes, Khartoum and Khartoum Variations are closest to it in style. Following are a few notes I jotted down as I listened to the album for the 5th time.)
What kind of music is this? From where does it come? Did I ask myself those questions when I first heard Jandek? But I didn’t need to situate it; it made its own sense. As though it had drawn all the rules, all the norms into itself, and become the Law. A strange black sun, completely black. That turned into itself like one of Van Gogh’s stars, a well of darkness instead of a well of light.
What state did this music inhabit? To what did it belong? As though it were made of some basic matter of the universe. As though it had been woven out of what was most real, and most true. Such was its conviction. Such was the absolute certainty of its making. A music that had known necessity. That was crushed, completely crushed. That wandered in strange corridors it had opened, far from the light, darkness falling into darkness.
How to paint with just one colour? As though he had bottomed out despair, and found some strange new state. Not that he had risen to write, somehow of his despair, like Kafka, who felt joy when he passed from the ‘I’ to the ‘he’. But that he sung from what was more basic than despair, lower.
This is a compressed music, a music pressed flat. A two dimensional music, that lives on one plane. Black painted on black. Spirals of black cut into black. Music devolved, music in devolution, falling back. A music more primitive than primitive.
The song of a great cry, wordless. A great wordless cry that bears the singing. That is the sound of being ripped from nothing. The cry of what was reluctant to be born, that dragged behind that nothingness from which it came. That was, in truth, only nothingness become dense in nothingness, nothingness that had found body. And that thrashed wanting to find its end, and cried.
What monotony bears the music! A single flattened mood, spun out. The spinning out of one mood, as it lets itself out and then pulls itself back. The guitar plucked neglectfully, almost randomly. Any note will do. Any non-note in this non-tuning, and all to the ghost of a blues form. The ghost of the blues, the blues turned black.
Blues for the desolate. Blues that is the wind around petrified bodies. Bodies of those who died in pain and in a state beyond pain, where pain bottoms out, falls. And fails to find itself. At a certain stage, pain is too great to endure. It is endured – but by whom? No one. No one bears this pain. The no one into which the singer has been dissolved. The no one who sings in the long moan of the vocal.
And misery beyond misery. Beyond what anyone might suffer. Suffering without subject. Suffering itself, wandering in itself. A ghost lost in the corridors. How gruelling it is! And how mesmerising, how right! How was this depth discovered? How the bottoming out to nothing?
Death within death. Dying writhing in dying: is there still life here? Is there still movement? Because the music still moves. There’s still a going forward, still a dirge that spreads forward in time. There’s even a momentum. A sense of the necessary. You can never turn off one of these songs. If it is on, it stays on. It must remain, and you must listen.
Still blues forms. ‘Let me tell you about my blues/ My blues have turned black/ Black, black, black, black, black.’ Almost to self-parody. Almost so you have to say, Is he for real? To find a context for this. To hold yourself from it. But the blues is on fire. Black flames, burning slowly.
A devolved music. A music melted, become sludge, become oil. Music in catatonia. Music locked-in. What could be more withdrawn than this? What more turned into itself, lost? What more lost than this? As though it were the outcome of some self-discipline. A long process, like Kaspar Hauser’s solitude. Year after year of pain. Year after year in pain, until there was nothing else for it but to make music from pain.
To cut into its streaming. To find a form and hold it just in place. To find a rhythm, a metre. To sing a line and then play, a call and response. But to give it form, the pain. To lay it flat and scratch it. To scratch out a blues, a minimal blues, that is barely a blues. To carve out the worn away blues, the blues turned black.
Black. Cindered trees. Ashes. That’s the landscape: ashes and black rivers of ash. And that’s the canvas: nothing but black. How to paint in just one colour? How to discover the most minimal of forms? There’s a pulse. A rhythm, not quite held together, but something like a rhythm. A movement forward. Not steady, and with clanging, ringing breaks, but a movement.
The song gathering itself up – for what? For release? Not for that. The momentum belongs to despair. Despair presses forward, absolute. Despair is hardening itself into a form. No release here. No catharsis. It will not end well. But to have given it a form, despair – isn’t that enough? To have given a structure to blackness in blackness?
‘Bluuuuues turned black’. And then ‘black, black, black, black, black’. Wailed – is that the word? Howled -not that: too intense. And it’s almost parodic. As though you had to laugh. To distance yourself. The song’s closed in itself. In itself, and not regarding us. He sings to himself. No: he gives voice to despair in despair, suffering in suffering. He unleashes it, he gives it form.
Suffering lives a life. Suffering given freedom. But only to return to itself, spilling back. A freedom-necessity to draw back to itself. How flat this music is! How low! Spread blackly across two dimensions. Never raising its head. Never raising itself onto its elbows. A crushed music. A music black and viscous, like oil. A music smeared, not played.
Like the oil that coats the shore and seabirds. Like the oil that sludges in from some great wreck in the ocean. Somewhere else, far away, a life has been wrecked. And this is music spilled from the wreck, surging in like oil. ‘I’m a zombie/ inside/ I’m – unknown’ and then the non-chorus, the non-refrain: the word black three times. And then. ‘I’m rotting/ stinking/ flesh.’
And the voice rising into a howl: ‘baby, you can see it it’. And then a grotesque drawl, ‘but I knooow it’s reeeaal’. Like Blonde on Blonde’s vocals stretched. A drawl pulling the words apart. Rising into a howl sometimes. And then the music, in response. Plucking and strumming, occasional fretting. Atonal. But that makes sense, its own sense. That shines out like a black star, like black stigmata.
And when the song ends, another one begins in the same tuning. Another surge, another oil coating wave. This time the vocal lower in the mix. A little further lost. A little further out. What terrible resignation is this? What resignation beyond resignation, beyond Oedipus with his eyes torn out? Beyond Oedipus led by Antigone, looking for a place to die?
A resignation resigned to itself. That cannot die. This song even more desolate than the first. That has a little less momentum, and less plain horror. But a song further along in the process. That has been taken a little further. ‘I won’t hurt nobody/ not even myself’. Vocals down in the mix, almost lost.
What dreadful state is this? What desolation? Despair further lost in despair. And lost from loss, wandering without forgetting. Somehow the guitar keeps it together. Somehow, played strongly, it rolls the song forward.
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