Category: Jandek

Kafka’s hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art – crowds come to watch him in his age, standing guard to make sure he doesn’t cheat. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to live performances, there’s the question of who is going to comprise the group, joining Sterling Smith (or, as he is known to concert bookers, the Representative from Corwood, that being his record label, which releases Jandek recordings) – or whether, indeed, anyone will join him at all; the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of the performance, with a runthrough of the set with participating musicians, all of whom are given a considerable say in the direction of the music) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the studio albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on, even as there is also a large element of improvisation in the performances. But in another sense, there seems to be no choice at all: follow the lyrics – especially those on the thematically linked albums that have appeared since the turn of the millennium, which trace, among other things, the ups and downs of a love affair, and the song-suites that have comprised some recent live performances – and it is clear, I think, that they have at their heart, a man in extremity, a man who performs because he falls short of the ordinary happiness most of us take for granted. He searches, for the most part in vain, for something to eat, but finds nothing. Nothing, that is, except perhaps performance itself, and the hope that I think is implicit to finding and addressing an audience.

Performing live, Smith’s face (the Representative’s) is almost always blank. It’s not a mask, but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project anything at all, but only because there’s nothing to there; because, with rare lapses, it remains disarmingly still, subtracted from expression. Yet, for all that, he is an intensely physical player. We can watch him shuffle and dip as he plays his guitar – we can watch his careful enunciation of his lyrics as he leans into the microphone, stretching his words, moaning them, or letting them rise into a despondent wail, but the face, half hidden by a fedora, is without expression and his thin, ageless body is always hidden in black. We can expect no stage banter – no ‘thank you’ for applause; when his guitar string breaks onstage during his performance at Newcastle, he waits, head down and silent for three long minutes until another guitar is brought to him from backstage. Indeed, he never even glances out into the audience or acknowledges its presence. He might as well, notes the observer of a solo piano and vocal performance in Hasselt, Belgium, be playing in an empty bar.

And yet, for all that, he will sometimes reference the live situation in his lyrics. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’, he sings in London at the beginning of a solo guitar/vocal gig. And he sings, ‘I wore a scarf in Denmark/ just like I said I would’, at a performance in Aarhus, Denmark, and refers to ‘the ticket that exploded’ at a gig that was part of a festival celebrating the work of William Burroughs in Amsterdam. It works another way too – as Barry Esson, Jandek’s erstwhile promoter and MC, announced at a gig rescheduled in Brooklyn after Hurricane Katrina prevented a performance, ‘the emotion behind this event is in tribute to New Orleans’. Lyrics are written to reflect the location and the occasion of the gig, even if, at the same time, as was clear to audiences at Camber Sands and Bristol in his UK dates in late 2005, he would flip almost randomly the pages of the book he brought with him on tour (resting, at the first of these gigs, on an improvised keyboard stand and a kitchen tray) to pick out phrases to sing.

There are moments when the stage persona, for a moment, breaks – when, for example, someone calls out between songs in Chicago, in 2006, ‘Where have you been man?’, eliciting a rare, quickly suppressed smile from the Representative, or, on another occasion, he asks into his microphone, ‘is this thing on?’ But almost all accounts of seeing Jandek live emphasise the ghostly intangibility of the performer (he’s called a ‘cowboy ghost’ according to a review of the Aarhus gig), and the way the Representative seems to drift on and off the stage (even, on one occasion, emerging with his band from a trap door in the floor). The distance from his audience that Smith carefully maintains is not part of the cultivation of mystique; I think it is an attempt to honour, rather, the music itself – to preserve it in its distance and its mystery.

Even Jandek’s disparagers honour this distance, intentionally or otherwise. For all his horror at the music, Irwin Chusid‘s first response to Jandek’s debut Ready for the House, passed to him by a radio station colleague in 1980, was to wonder at the fact that someone had gone to the effort of releasing it at all. On an interview included as an extra on the Jandek on Corwood DVD, he remembers being stunned by the ‘amusicality’ of the album, by its ‘sheer emptiness’; ‘I’d never heard anything that was so naked’ – but what really mystifies him is the effort its maker had gone to to record material, get it pressed and then distributed. Why bother at all? ‘It could be worst record ever released[….] It could also be the greatest record ever released. I can’t figure it out …’, wrote Chusid to the artist in 1980. He decides, of course, in favour of the former – which fails, for him, to fall into the category of ‘so bad, it’s good’ that he celebrates in his rag-bag of a book Songs in the Key of X. It is really only the myth of Jandek – recycled, clichéd accounts of an instrumentally incompetent recluse concerned for unfathomable reasons to move some of the albums he has had pressed – that concerns him.

The lure of such a myth is undeniable. For many years, all that was known of the man behind Jandek was the record sleeves, many of which (as we can now be sure) depict Smith himself, the Representative, at various ages in a variety of situations, sometimes making use of image-altering software. For Richard Unterberger, the album cover photographs show ‘all the attention to framing and focus of the do-it-yourself stalls at Woolworth’s’ – but their artlessness is their merit, being inseparable from the recordings they sleeve. There is nothing affected about them, nothing ironical or distancing – they simply are, and uncannily so. The blank, defiant face of Six and Six matches perfectly this hard, anaesthetised recording – but if the smiling man in a cardigan in front of a country barn seems the very contrary of the despairing intoner of Worthless Recluse (an acapella recording notable for the particular extremity it reaches on some of the pieces), this doesn’t matter. Is it a holiday snap? A record of a visit to a relative in the countryside? Its incongruity seems exactly the point: an ordinary man created these songs – a man with a past like anyone else. What are we to make of Smith apparently becoming a Sufi on the covers of Raining Down Diamonds and Khartoum? Is it an oblique religious or political commentary, following 9/11 (the albums were released in 2005, but were perhaps recorded earlier …) … the sign, perhaps, that all religions are one, and that Smith is encouraging us to reach a hand to the Islamic world in fidelity and friendship? Perhaps the cover photographs mean nothing at all; perhaps they mean everything. ‘Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable’, writes Agamben, ‘they are the moment, to be precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained’.

More recently, the sleeves have not always pictured Smith – they are what appear to be holiday snaps from Cork, the Dingle penninsula in Ireland and Chester, in Northwest England, and, most recently, a series of rural scenes. What are to read into all this? Everything – since the space is blank and will admit of an infinite variety of transferences – and nothing, since it is blank and remains so. Perhaps, as Smith said to Katy Vine about his music and his relation to Jandek, ‘there’s nothing to get’; perhaps this ‘nothing’ is the correlate of the man who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek: it is Smith himself, or rather it is a hungry absence in the space of Smith, who can find nothing he wants to eat.

The outsider artist, as Chusid and Unterberger use this term, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting, but merely gets on with it; it issues from him with perfect ingenuousness. He simply does it – and it is what makes him what he is; the outsider works by instinct, perhaps in a manner more direct and naive than others, and can be admired (or mocked) for this reason. Like the man who builds a palace from tin cans in his backyard, his work would be the monument to a magnificent eccentricity; the wonder is that it exists at all. It can be admired (he does everything on his own terms), or reviled (no one else would release his music) – what matters is that dogged directness that is so naive, so simplistic, so untrained it’s significant as a phenomenon.

Perhaps this rather patronising category does capture something important about Jandek’s oeuvre – its tenacity, its seeming perversity (quote) bespeak a musical vision that can seem a simple incompetence. Yet at its best, on albums like I Threw You Away from the recent run of studio albums, or the early Chair Beside a Window, or a difficult album like Put My Dream On This Planet, this music can be said to belong to the outside only in the sense that it maintains an extremity almost unparalleled within the singer/songwriter idiom. This is what commentators like Chusid even as they disparage the music: holding itself at its distance and its reserve, it is entirely apart.

Heidegger writes that the origin of the work of art is to be considered apart from both artist and artwork. It is a spring – an Ursprung – that wells up in what he calls the working of the work of art, the way it struggles into existence. The moment of inspiration is blind in some vital sense; it belongs outside the artist. Indeed, in the philosophy of art, it was always thus – Plato fears the poet for precisely this reason: he or she may be divinely inspired, but inspiration is a form of possession or madness (see the Apology, the Ion and the Meno). In the Phaedrus, we find a more nuanced account of the dangers of lyric poetry as it glorifies the deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. ‘[I]f any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill (techne) alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brough to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found’. Skill, technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poet. But when inspiration is absent? The poet is a mere imitator, concerned with mimesis alone.

In the case of Jandek, technique – the received account of technique – is precisely what is wagered in the experience of inspiration. Why do musicians suppose he cannot play or sing? Because they are in thrall to a music of imitation, of tonality, of conventional song structures and playing styles. One has to listen to Jandek with another ear – or rather, listening to the music co-creates the ear of the one who listens. Here is something new; a new kind of playing, a new kind of singing, even as it borrows from established forms, even as Smith remains a kind of singer-songwriter: it is an inspired art insofar as overruns mere technical proficiency. But to listen with this new ear – to be exposed to the dangerous extremity of divine madness – isn’t this precisely the danger? Plato would have expelled all the poets from his ideal city, except for those lyric poets whose work had been appropriately purified, bearing only on the relationship between gods and human beings, performed in a standardised rhythm and mode. More admirable than those who dismiss Jandek for incompetence – for a perceived lack of instrumental and vocal prowess, or (in a more recent turn) for the apparent shortcomings in his improvisational competency – are those who are afraid for themselves in the face of such music – who meets its hunger with an unassuaged hunger of their own.

On The Ruins of Adventure (as I write, the most recent studio album) – lumbering, staggering along, this is a dazed music, a music concussed – the fretless bass accompanies aimlessly a part-sung, part-spoken vocalising marked by despondency and abyssal despair. ‘It’s toooooo bleak’ – the ‘to’ howled and stretched. ‘Embrace the greeey of reality …’ The song does not fall from the Muses, but is a thickening of the earth – a fetid swamp, or the earth moving, swarming with mosquitoes, in solifluction. Without melody or regular rhythm – without the pulse of a musical groove, it is sludgy and inert – yet it moves nonetheless; it surges forward. But what moves? What lurches lifelessly from track to track?

Heidegger calls earth that materiality foregrounded in the work of art – in this case, lumpen bass picking and a vocalising thick with despair that wanders without settling on particular pitches. This is his name, too, for the reserve that looms around us in our relation to the world (the world become useless, things as they obtrude from the purposes by which we understand them). The Ursprung of the artwork, its origin, says Heidegger, shows how earth is in perpetual struggle with the ‘world’ of intelligibility and meaning. Explanations cannot exhaust the inexplicable: perhaps there is a way of speaking of Jandek’s art that keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained – that allows earth to resound in the torpor of his voice or the sludgy waddling of the bass. A way, then of speaking its inspired necessity as it remains outside mere technical proficiency and the imitation of existing forms.

It is Smith’s peculiar vocation to dramatise the struggle between a despair too overwhelming to permit of a beginning, of its doubling into song, and the strength, precisely to sing, to perform. Jandek remains in the neither-nor, the neutrality of this perpetually thwarted commencement. It is necessary to sing, to play – but it is just as necessary to interrupt them, to mark the performance with its own impossibility. ‘I made a mistake coming here today’ – to begin at all is a mistake; the mistake is the art, or what blossoms into art. But the flower fades straightaway; the song empties and becomes a husk. What else is performance but a sham?

The hunger artist fasts because he can find nothing to eat. Could Smith sing or play otherwise? Perhaps something changes with live performance, in which he seems to be able to take a greater distance with respect to this impossibility than previously. Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity, which sees the Representative playing keyboards with an organ setting, accompanied by, among others, Loren Connors, constructs a sombre sound-world that is of a piece with Miles Davis’s ‘He Loved Him Madly’, not only participates in despair, performing it, trudging through it, but muses explicitly on its source in the performer’s own life. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life …’

On Glasgow Monday, The Cell, Smith sings his way – wispily, breathily, in a speech-song entirely new in his work – to a kind of resolution; it seems enough to ask questions (‘What do I have?’), to let them resound. What matters is that this questioning is shared – that the audience, asked by Barry Esson to reserve their applause to the end of the song suite, shelters the inexplicable along with him. Does he find a kind of consolation thereby, a lightening of despair, when it is shared, addressed to others? I think here of the song ‘I Love You’ from Brooklyn Wednesday – does this song give despair (Smith’s, and that unleashed by Hurricane Katrina) a direction, thereby lifting it from itself, transmuting its substance? Perhaps this lightening was always present in Jandek’s music – perhaps it was there from the first, and this as why, to answer Chusid’s question, Smith went to the trouble of recording, pressing and trying to distribute 1000 copies of Ready for the House.

Listening to the small portion of the live performances that have been released by Corwood, and dreaming of releases to come, one might wonder whether the hunger artist has found something to eat. In both East and West, the ghost is often thought of as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost ‘hungry’ since it is still attached to the world. Has the Representative from Corwood, who looks, as so many have commented, exactly like a ghost, found something to attach him? But I think of another hunger artist – the starving novelist-to-be of Hamsun’s novel, who keeps a stone in his mouth to satiate his hunger. Driven to extremity, one day he bits down on that stone as though it were a piece of bread. And I wonder whether Jandek itself is Smith’s way to bite down on the stone he’s been turning for decades in his mouth, false succour. False, but also true, for how else to keep fidelity with the extremity in which he lives?

Kafka’s hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art – crowds come to watch him in his cage. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to the live performances, there is the question of who is going to comprise the group (or whether, indeed, it will number more than one), the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of performance, with a run through of the set with participating musicians, all of whom have a considerable input) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the ‘studio’ albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on – even as there is a large element of improvisation in the performances.

But in another sense, there is no choice when it comes to the performance (and particularly in the studio recordings): at their heart, they have a man in extremity, a man who performs, I think, to give this extremity to song. In live performances, the Representative’s face is blank – not a mask but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project nothing (what is feeling? what does he see of the audience? what is he thinking?) but also everything, for does not his blankness invite the wildest of speculation.

A blank face – but the gestures of a guitarist, a bassist, a pianist (whatever he is playing) are also present; we can watch the Representative turn to his fellow musicians, watching them; we can watch him shuffle and dip and crouch over his guitar. He is a physical player. But the face, half hidden by a fedora, is blank. Certainly we can watch the words come from his mouth – watch him lean into the microphone, drawling sometimes, stretching a word, but always wanting to be heard, always precise in his vocalising. A blank face – and no stage banter when a guitar string breaks, and he has to wait for three or four long minutes another guitar to be brought from behind stage. No ‘thank you very much’ for listeners who might have travelled halfway round the globe to see him.

What do the audience of Kafka’s hunger artist watch? A man in extremity. A man who starves. What a feat! What endurance! And Jandek’s audience? ‘I come to bring you a bit of depression …’ Watching the live band settling into their groove, interacting but following the lead of the Representative’s vocal, I wonder whether it is really extremity we see there, on the stage. In live performance, the lyrics change: they become more frank, more confessional; some (Manhattan Tuesday) permit of a simple, autobiographical interpretation. Is he a man in extremity or a controlled man, part of a controlled ensemble who somehow seeks to account for himself, to search for himself, and before an audience?

Often he will acknowledge that audience in his lyrics. ‘I don’t know why I’m here/ to sing in front of you’. But it is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of what they will see. Why is he here? But it should be admitted, too, that we find another lovely kind of extremity in the speech-song of Glasgow Monday, The Cell – a wholly new style of vocalising in Jandek’s oeuvre. A first – a breathy, tentative, suspended speech-song that seeks and searches over the piano – but for what? Some kind of resolution; a provisional answer to the questioning that is his speech-sung voice. And, too, that some performances revel in a muscular thrashing, in power, which has little to do with confession at all.

Perhaps at Jandek’s heart is not always a man who starves. But then, with the solo recordings that follow the acapella period around the turn of the millennium, that starving man is there and he is all there is. A starving man – and who starves because what is good for us (romance and work, ordinary sociability) is what he cannot find a way to want. He falls short of what we take for granted; he searches for what we, his listeners, presume ourselves to have. He is a man in exile, a man in suspense. Life, for him, is some kind of mistake, some aberration. And yet he sings. He starves.

I do not mean to imply that, listening to Jandek we are like the spectators outselves Kafka’s hunger artist’s cage; I don’t think we are the well-fed watchers for whom his starvation is an art we can admire, and for which can be exchanged the panther who takes his place when he eventually expires. I wonder whether we listen from a kind of starvation of our own – from that place in us where we are not in place – where the possibility of life, ordinary life, seems to wear itself away. For the hunger-artist, there is an audience of the hungry. How else could we bear what we heard? How could we want it?

Granted, there are those for whom the oeuvre of Jandek is a kind of stunt. Some, like Irwin Chusid, marvel at it – for all his derision (and Chusid is an articulate and funny man – he’s hilariously derisive) – there is his wonder that there were ever Jandek recordings at all. Why would anyone want to do that?, he asks, over and again. The fact of their existence perturbs him, and he seems to admire what he takes to be a mad tenacity. This is one of the images of Jandek circulated in the media – of an infinitely perverse man, a curiosity, an outsider, a kind of beast.

For their part, Corwood do not admit to being perturbed. Letters from Chusid are met with friendly toleration. I think the early days were so difficult that Chusid’s acknowledgement was already an encouragement sufficient to go on. We find a similar attitude in the filmakers of Jandek on Corwood who admit they were first lured to their subject by his reputation – the ‘myth’ of Jandek, and we a little disappointed, at first by the music. Doesn’t Katy Vine, the journalist who tracked down Sterling Smith in his Houston home admit the same?

For those listeners, there was of course also the record sleeves which, after the live performances, we can be sure depict Smith himself, photographed at various ages and in range of situations, often making use of photograph-altering software. Here, too, we find a kind of blankness – the blank face of Six and Six, which matches so perfectly this hard, affect-less recording (tracks that find their way into an affectless state at the heart of great depressive moods; the still eye of the storm), is defiantly – who? The smiling man in a cardigan in front of a barn is the opposite of the singer/intoner of Worthless Recluse … what speaks by way of the failure of this correlation?

Interpretation breaks down. It runs aground on the record sleeves, which will eventually stop picturing Smith at all. Smith becomes a sufi on two of them. He is outside Mansion House in London, on deserted streets, on another. Each time, with respect to the recordings themselves, there is something missing. Who isn’t tempted to read and reread the covers in search for a clue (what is he carrying on the sleeve of Blue Corpse?)? Something missing – and that it is who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek; it is Smith himself; it is the absence in the space of Smith, who cannot find a way to live.

We should admit the recordings are varied; there is a ludic Jandek – a playful, hilarious one (think, for example, of ‘Mother’s Day Card’, where two voices sing the message on the inside of such a card); a spooky one (the multiple voices of ‘Om’); a meditative one (‘I Sit Alone and Think About You’). for a long time, I think, there were no recordings at all – the acapella recordings seem to come after a break; the voice is deeper.

This becomes especially noticeable on the studio recordings that follow the great I Threw You Away – for my money, the greatest in Jandek’s mighty oeuvre. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum, Raining Down Diamonds … what is being pursued from album to album? My answer, very simple: starvation. The inability to eat, to find a thing to eat. And more intensely than ever; more focusedly than ever.

These recordings, I think, close themselves from Chusid and other, similar listeners – those who are looking for the stunt-Jandek, to confirm or disconfirm the Jandek-myth. How, when you had heard them – really heard them – from your own starvation, could you go out to look for the man who made them. They are forbidding. They push us back, I fancy, as they push Smith back too – doesn’t he wonder at them? Isn’t he amazed, too at what he has made? How not to feel a kind of holy seriousness around these recordings, which hold themselves, with respect to our listening, at their own distance?

I am always moved to read of the quiet reverentness that, for the most part greets Jandek performances (though it is always fun to read of those who call out, welcome to … X, and for Smith himself to – briefly – smile). We know seriousness. We know a kind of sacred – a distance – that surrounds the recordings. I’m sure that Smith feels it too. Sure, that is, that they also push him back from what he has done. What must it be to live at that remove from himself? To honour the recordings that made themselves from singing and playing?

I think this is part of what it means to be a hunger-artist who reaches the hunger-listeners who open their ears inside us. I think it demands a paring away, a blankness. The studio recordings have reached moods more terrifying than anything I have heard. Moods of a desolation so absolute – of a despair so refined that … they escape what I can say of them. How to greet them except by silence? There are few artists whose work I will simply put on and listen to. Few whose work has a drama sufficient to carry that listening, when a hungry man steps forward to listen in my place.

Jandek: hunger artist. Perhaps the distance of the recordings – their rarefaction, their daring – is the double of that which the artist feels towards the world, towards the ordinary possibility of living. He sings in extremity – is it not reasonable to suppose that he lives, too, in extremity? How can he bear what he bears? But he sings, plays and records. He issues LPs. And now, of course, he plays live, too. I think there must be great joy in this. Why not? Hasn’t the hunger artist found something to eat?

The live performances seem different to what has gone before. There’s less distance around them. And, in the performances, less extremity. Is this what has permitted a kind of autobiographical turn in their lyrics? Is it because the presence of other musicians make Jandek something other than a machine that quarries despair? I admit I listen to the live recordings (with the exception of The Cell) with different ears. Or rather, that my ears are not starving; I do not listen from my own extremity. I enjoy the grooves; I laugh sometimes at the bathos of the lyrics (‘Real Wild’); I like the fierce interplay and the surprise of what new collaborators allow. But I listen differently, and from another kind of distance.

December 2007, and it’s a full year since the last studio recording – one of the longest breaks over 30 years of Jandek LPs. I want to hear him starve again. And I want to listen again from where I am starving.

Links to articles on Jandek‘s performances.

What does it mean to speak of the posthumous voice, of a posthumous singing? Not simply that the song is sung from the perspective of someone already dead – killed, perhaps, as on the song on which Nick Cave duetted with Kylie Minogue. Posthumousness would not have anything to do with the supposed narrative position of the singer, or with the ordinary conception of the narrator. Nor is it concerned with a singer’s recordings released in the wake of his or her death – as with the recent compilation of live tracks and demos from Karen Dalton, for example. Rather, the experience I want to indicate bears upon a quality of the voice itself. And it is of Jandek that I am thinking in exploring the idea of the posthumous voice.

Jandek is ostensibly the name of a group that formed (under a different name) in 1978, but most Jandek recordings – and there are nearly 60 albums in print – are the work of one individual alone; it seems very clear that he is the same person who runs Corwood Industries, the label upon which all Jandek recordings are released, from Houston, Texas. Sterling Richard Smith, born in 1943, who also registers Jandek songs for copyright with the Library of Congress, is present on all Jandek albums, as a vocalist (though sometimes other people sing) and as an instrumental player – on guitar, piano, harmonica, fretless bass. The run of albums that most interests me are the solo recordings Jandek’s put out since the turn of the millennium, starting with I Threw You Away, and taking us all the way up to The Ruins of Adventure, released last year.

Listen to these albums and it is clear (this is obvious) it is not a tonal music. Nor is it (and this may be jarring) a music in tune. The instrumental work draws on a whole range of sonorities – by turns intense, combative, resolute, distracted, subdued, but always physical – through the plucking of strings and the stopping of frets (thought Jandek’s is not a conventional fretting) – with considerable dynamic range. The guitar does not simply take its cue from the voice, following it, subordinating itself to it, since the vocalising itself echoes and resonates with the guitar work, both in call and response. But it is the voice, nevertheless, that seems to lead the songs (and they remain very much that – songs), even as, as with the instrumental work, the emphasis is on the materiality of the sound – its texture, its grain – where pitch and rhythm are no longer the primary focus.

Hovering uncertainly between speaking and singing, the voice remains unmelodic, with wayward, part-improvised lyrics which are usually clearly audible despite slurred, irregular phrasing. The singing, so difficult to bear for many listeners, never settles into a particular pitch, remaining agonisedly in motion; Jandek presents us with a voice in extremity, and an endless quarrying of pain and related states, in which infinite gradations of suffering are allowed to differentiate themselves. The music of the albums with which I am concerned here remain in the singer-songwriter tradition, even as song prolong themselves into half-hour soundscapes.

We may want to hear these albums autobiographically – as the audio journals of a man depressed, in extremity. The legitimacy of such a hearing is undeniable, being evidenced in an unambiguously autobiographical turn in lyrics in recent live performances. But a confession, sung or written, need not tell us much about the conditions of what permits song or writing: the materiality of a voice (of playing), what it can do (and what it can’t). Perhaps we might even say, as has been noted by so many musicians, that the faculty of music making, the facility of inspiration remains somewhat prior to them, at the origin, the Ursprung of the work of art, as Heidegger might say.

This means a biographical hearing of Jandek recordings would need to do more than follow their apparently confessional turn. There is the fact that they are sung, and, sung, accompanied; of course, with singing, more than other deployments of the voice, it is never a question of merely reporting a sentiment, but of performing it; which is why writers – philosophers in particular – have envied and aspired to the condition of music. Thus the preface to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, written many years after its publication: ‘this book should have sung, not spoken’ – as though it were possible to discover a heightened form of expression, as when, later in his oeuvre, Nietzsche allows Zarathustra to move from speech to song and even to dance.

In the case of Jandek, however, there is something unusual about the attenuation to which the voice (the music) is subject. There is a sense of an artist exploring an expressive potential, certainly, but if this is a virtuosity, it is one mired or floored. Nietzsche holds out for a music that would let joy and mourning coincide, for loss and fullness to be present all at once in that site of dissonance in which pain and contradiction expose themselves in their full rawness, but Jandek’s music is lost in the sludge like Beckett’s characters in How It Is – in a space with barely three dimensions, and which, even as it does not prevent movement, constrains it, confining it to a single plane.

The voice, here, exhibits a virtuosity of a peculiarly limited kind, just as if a painter had decided to work solely in tones of very dark grey, or of black or black, or in the blues that has turned black to remember the title of one Jandek song. But this is a peculiar virtuosity: that of a twitching or spasming – of a creature by the roadside that is not quite dead. As though it were the sludge itself that sang, that had formed itself into a voice and sang of its own condition. Is this what I hear in the wavering of the voice and the instrumental work as it refuses to settle into a single pitch? Is it despair that seems to sing of itself?

There is, I think, a drama to the music – a dramaturgy that depends upon the slippage between the ability to perform, to sing, to play, and an inability – an inability to be able, that is to do anything at all. Some would discover this inability in Jandek’s unconventional use of the guitar and the other instruments he plays (or cannot play – or will not play according to the rules; or plays – according to other rules). There is also his vocalising – by turns wailing, despondent, conquered, frightened, defiant, tutelary as it remains non- or a-melodic, improperly phrased.

But I find this inability somewhere else: in Jandek’s music in its attenuation, its remaining of the brink of extinction, in the ‘and more again’ as it gathers itself up, in the one more gasp of an attempt for breath – each time, in its relentlessness and its wearing away, in its pauses and re-achievements, it is the capacity to sing, to play, that are placed at issue, and that become the drama, such as it is, of the performance.

In a sense, despair (to let the many dark states that are Jandek’s concern settle on one word) becomes a line that can be followed; it permits of something like an avenue of freedom – of freedom, the ability to move in despair, not despite it. Despair is animated and given life. At the same time, despair, the inability to do anything, the inability to be able, cuts across that line, breaking it as crevasses break across a moving glacier. The song remains, it has a certain momentum, but it is cracked – the line that can be followed, lived, is jagged and broken. The ability to be, to sing, to play, has to be regained, but when it is so, it is lost again almost at once. And finds itself again. And is lost again …

It is a remaking that happens as struggle, as creation in extremity that has, as its stakes, the possibility of its own endeavour. There is a fatal dependency of the performer upon the impossibility of what he sets out to accomplish – upon an unfreedom or incapacity as it is brought into contact at each point to the music. Let me concentrate this idea into an oxymoron that is my way of expressing the limits of those accounts of Jandek as the work of an incompetent instrumentalist: the success of the music depends in some sense upon its failure – of the extremity that maintains, in tension its conditions of possibility and impossibility.

What do I mean by this? There is a wonderful passage in Kafka’s journals where he speaks of the ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that, even in the midst of despair, permits the writer to write of this despair, ringing changes upon it. What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. This does not alter my basic situation, or offer therapy or cure, but allows me nevertheless to take distance from my suffering, without, however, simply objectifying it, or placing it to one side.

The drama of Jandek’s music is given in a freeing up of fate, a kind of mercy – not as it lifts itself from despair altogether, but as it momentarily allows despair to sing of itself. Mercy lies at the root of the surprise of the address, of being able to address. This carries the music; it bears it – there has been a retreat of suffering in suffering sufficient to sing of it – but suffering is there nonetheless. This does not imply a detachedness or an objectification of pain; there is still a bearing of suffering, a way in which suffering is enacted. I am tempted to put it emphatically, without knowing what this formulation might mean: at issue is not simply a performance of suffering, but of suffering as performance.

We are thrown into existence, says Heidegger; the fact of human existence is aways pre-given such that we are obliged to find ourselves in a particular situation, understanding (in Heidegger’s sense) and taking a stand upon what exists in our vicinity. We do not throw ourselves into existence, we are thrown; and we cannot get back behind or thrownness. This is why the adolescent’s wail, ‘I didn’t ask to be born’ is not ridiculous. Not only that, but we are obligated to do something about our condition; we exist in time, and the future opens before us. Our existence is a project [Entwurf]; we remain in the throw of thrownness [Geworfenheit]. The project is what means we are thrown into the future; we have to do something about our condition, even if it is only to accept it. To chose to do nothing is itself a choice (a refusal to choose to choose). But are we always capable of making such a choice? Can a merciful surplus of strength lift us from that despair in which incapacity voids our ability to choose, to live, to act, from the start?

Writing in a prisoner of war camp, the young Levinas suggests thrownness should be understood as a kind of abandonment or dereliction; that it has the sense of a desertion such that our relationship to the fact of our thrownness returns to overwhelm us, disrupting the opening of the project, of that projection that throws us into the future. For Heidegger, famously, it is by bringing ourselves into the right kind of relationship to our death that we might retrieve a sense of the particularity of our own existence, bracketing out the pressures made on us by others. Death, in Heidegger’s cumbersome phrase, spells the possibility of the impossibility of continuing to exist at all. Where death is, I am not, says Epicetus; but I can nevertheless bring myself into relation with the fact of my mortality such that I can seize upon my life-project as what it is.

Authentic existence, for Heidegger, is lived out of a sense of the urgency and finitude of that project; thrown into the world, I must now make sense of it not as an intellectual task, but by the very way that I live. For Levinas, however, death is not simply an event at the end of one life. It vouchsafes itself in any degree of suffering; it casts its shadow over all pain. It may seem that Levinas is thinking of something very different to the fact that we might bring ourselves into relationship with the fact we will one day die. It may seem that he is providing something like a phenomenology of suffering, drawing impressionistically on a metaphorical sense of death, whereas Heidegger is providing us with a phenomenology of mortality, with an account of what it means for us each to be mortal. I think Levinas would respond, in a manner I cannot explore fully here, that what he is really doing is showing us how death has always been thought as a metaphor, and especially so by Heidegger, and that suffering, likewise, has been metaphorised and sublimated in that tradition of which Heidegger is a part.

A tradition which passes through philosophical reflection on tragedy. In Greek tragedy, so the story goes, the tragic hero is thrown against necessity; he is abandoned to what he cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom breaks against necessity; the hero is dashed to pieces, but for a moment, he brought himself into a splendid freedom. He laments, but to do so means he still had the strength to lament; he has found a refuge sufficient to grant him the power to protest. He is possessed of a will and of a power to resist.

I would like to say – and I cannot substantiate this here, – that authenticity, for Heidegger, has a tragic dimension. The authentic person has confronted the fact that he or she will die; this knowledge, ineluctable as it is, nevertheless permits a seizing hold of life, a carpe diem. For Levinas, by contrast, no such stance is possible;the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity, coming up against a limit, against which he or she will run up inexhaustibly. This, says Levinas, is the ‘tragedy of tragedy’.

But what does he mean? Hamlet, says Levinas is exemplary. Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elsinor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantoms of resoluteness, phantoms of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore. 

In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

‘To be or not to be’: who speaks? what speaks? Perhaps Levinas would say Hamlet gives voice to an irretrievable dereliction and abandonment. I think it is because Levinas thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that he can invoke what he calls the ‘tragedy of tragedy’. Hamlet cannot assume his thrownness; freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

For T. S. Eliot, the figure of Hamlet is fascinating for us moderns because his behaviour is without ‘objective correlate’. For Levinas, such a correlate (although it is not, strictly speaking, a term of a relation) is given in existence itself, in the ‘irremovability of a past that cannot be erased’. Being itself is as though cursed; necessity makes its claim upon us such that we cannot escape into the future. Pain recalls us to our finitude only as it gives the limit at the end of our life unto a kind of infinity or limitlessness. A limit that becomes limitless – but that, by turns, that becomes a limit once again, narrowing itself down such that life, finite life, becomes possible.

Pain is inexorable, but a kind of freedom opens within pain sufficient to live, to prosper, perhaps, to begin and realise plans. Pain retreats in pain – existence is permitted to leap forward; the project opens, and thrownness gives unto the throwing of life into the future. Pain is inexorable. Yet Hamlet vacillates. To be or not to be. There open spaces of possibility; even the possibility of impossibility, the enabling, authenticating relation to death can open. But this opening (to be) is provisional, and it wavers in physical pain with its opposite – not to be is not to experience the possible as the possible. The impossibility of possibility – with Levinas’s reversal of Heidegger’s phrase, there is marked the erosion of the project because of the return of the past. Life becomes fatal, fate-bound and is mired in necessity.

Casually, much too quickly, I would like to say that Levinas’s remarks bear witness to the close of a whole philosophy of tragedy (of the role of the exemplarity of tragedy in several strains of post-Kantian philosophical thought). And this not because we are overwhelmed by necessity, but because we cannot hold out the chance of that harmony of necessity and freedom that would allow us to clear a space in which joy and mourning, loss and fullness might struggle against the other before us in a beautiful dissonance. No longer a space, a site, but a line – a more uncertain and precarious oscillation, a neither/nor to invert Kierkegaard’s title, in which the possibility of impossibility reverses itself into the impossibility of possibility, and vice versa.

The drama of Jandek’s music is given in terms of this oscillation, this neither-nor. What does it mean to characterise the voice in Jandek’s recordings as posthumous? The songs are sung as if the singer were already dead, as if death had already reached him – as if nothing were possible, not even singing. They are sung from suffering, out of it, and of a suffering deep enough to erode, to wear away, the very ability to be able. They are sung out of an unfreedom, of an experience of fate, of necessity, that simultaneously spells the impossibility of being able to sing. And yet, by the same turn, they are sung and therefore borne by the voice of a living body, of someone alive to sing; the singer is someone who had strength enough to sing, who depends upon an ability to be, a capacity that, as freedom, opens song to him as a possibility.

This is what even allows Jandek to sing of the impossible; the impossible is possible; incapacity – the inability to sing – binds itself to a living voice. But what makes this voice posthumous, as opposed to being merely resolute, stalwart, or tragic, is that it touches, in so doing, upon the impossibility of possibility. The posthumous voice is to be thought of as the slippage from the possibility of impossibility to the impossibility of possibility and vice versa, an alternation that is dramatised in the recordings of Jandek as they explore the infinite gradations of despair.

The evening is a staircase you have to ascend. No: it is like those tiered gardens you see in the East – whose steps are long and broad, but that take you upward nevertheless. And at the pinnacle – or, better, the plateau? At that point where it spreads out without cease and with no more steps? Then and only then can you give yourself to listening.

Ask yourself, am I ready for Jandek tonight? Ready – is that the word? A state of preparedness, a kind of calm concentration – why is it at concerts that I never feel I achieve it, never feel right for what is about to unfold? For a long time, I avoided them because I never felt ready to listen. And now? Up the stairway of the evening. Nine o’clock; the plateau. I’m ready to listen now. But to what?

In Northern India, raags are written for a time of day, a season. That’s the preparedness: the time, the season. You are brought to the point when a raag might be heard, and by no more than the earth’s elliptical orbit. Brought to it so that the raag might deepen it – might hollow out the season in the season; might discover time within time, unfolding it, opening out its flower.

And Jandek? In the recordings I regard as essential – most of the studio recordings from I Threw You Away onwards, which is to say, those made in the last 5 or 6 years – there is a kind of desolation that must reach you. As though everything were dimmed and reduced to itself. As though the world had contracted, hardened, and was falling in an inward collapse. The rays of the sun burn outwards; but what of an inward ray – what of a ray sent inward, a sun collapsing upon itself? What of darkness falling into darkness and all the way to that terrible void that would draw everything across its horizon?

How terribly concentrated the recordings are! How focused! Sometimes, in the course of a song, a relaxation, a breathing. These are sometimes short, panicked breaths – an animal in a trap; an animal by the side of the road and breathing quickly. Dying, but still breathing, and too fast. Or they can be long breaths, the patient without air, the patient who would gasp air into his lungs, but finds none; or that air is not air enough, that there is never air enough, that breathing cannot find what would sustain it. Long breaths, last ones.

Either way, the songs are sung around death, in its orbit. Around it, close to it, but never close enough for annihilation; there’s never an end. This is a dying-singing. A singing of pain, of absolute pain. That hollows itself from pain, in pain. That quarries pain, adventures in it. Pain learns of itself. Pain learns and sings of itself.

How is it possible to be still alive? How to be alive in pain, still alive? This is the surprise with which Jandek begins on the essential recordings. And what of the less essential ones? Why is Brooklyn Wednesday a little further from me? Why, though I’ve played it 20 times through, all 4 CDs does it remain over there, away from me?

Because when I listen to Jandek – when I’m able to listen, ready for it, I want only the despair, and the variations on despair. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Only the infinite gradations of pain in pain, the infinitely subtle quest for suffering in suffering, as pain turns in pain, as it awakens and falls to sleep in pain and lives it, as pain is lived and is given life, a body. As pain gives itself a singer to sing of itself. As pain sings of itself, a half-crushed animal by the side of the road.

Am I ready for Jandek, and tonight? Ready to follow the course of an album? Khartoum. The Humility of Pain. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds. I’ve climbed the stairway of the evening. Climbed and at the plateau, nine o’clock, nine bells. To what should I listen?

What’s the relation between Khartoum and Khartoum Variations? The first is acoustic, the second electric – but the second is slower, too, spanning the songs out, swelling them, and I imagine that is as though a balloon had been blown up in each song, pushing the words apart from one another and stretching them – or that Jandek had discovered the song in the song, that secret more expansive song that is turned yet farther away from the world, that sings to itself and of itself pressing into its own darkness.

Why that image, of an inside that becomes an outside? Why an inside that collapses into itself, swirling lyrics and music around it as around a plughole? Because what Jandek reaches is never an interiority – never the closed space that would enclose a personality, a person. This is not a personal music, but belongs to no one. Or rather, it belongs to no one in someone, or that no one he shares with the others with whom he plays and sometimes and those of us who listen.

No one – and this is why, I imagine, the song becomes a cry, why words break into wails, and why instrumental passages stretch out between the phrases – why the Variations seem to swell the original Khartoum, making the songs vaster, as a sail is full of wind, letting them be carried by a wind from the outside that, becoming word, become music, does not let itself disappear into each, but remains wind, as it blows with the words and with the playing.

No interiority – or rather, that inner space a sail spread to catch a solar pressure, and I am thinking now of the yachts that may one day sail out between the stars. Solar pressure, a solar wind, but it is a black sun that burns at the heart of the music, and from a black sun that there comes the wind.

Why, gloomy, do I want to hear a gloomy music? Because it is more than that, more than gloomy. Because as I listen, and new ears are hollowed out in mine, I hear more than gloom. I hear that evacuation, that hollowing that is the vast space from which the songs seem to come. I hear the hollow space that has cored our Jandek’s heart, making it not a space inside but one that presses outside, that is turned inside out and runs up against the darkness.

Who is he? And who am I that listens? Gloom finds a new direction. Gloom no longer gloom; a door opens. The door: the whole sky, and unto what does it give? I would like to be listening now. Would like new ears to grow within mine like the satellite dishes that scoop up rays from space. Khartoum, Khartoum Variations – from the one to the other is a movement of hollowing, of spacing out. From the one to the other a yacht on the sea to a solar one, a real sun to the black one that burns in the place of Jandek’s heart.

The outsider artist, on one account, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting. A kind of doggedness is his, that’s true – he gets the stuff ‘out there’ – but its source is also hidden from him. To go on, and that’s all. A blind need to continue. Relentlessness.

Certainly this image fits Jandek; there is a sense an idiom continues to discover itself in him – an idiom – but is this the word? is it not a question of what burns at the edges of folk, of the blues, of improvisation, of rock? – with respect to which he is always unwitting, making a music that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails those peculiar capacities with which he was gifted: that voice, that way of playing, but also, moreover, that temperament, that depression, that set of lyrical concerns – all of that. Succeeds – when the lyrics, singing, playing, fit the mood his singing, his playing cannot help but suggest. Fails when they do not – on the love albums (When I Took That Train), for example, where the hope in the lyrics seem at odds with what we hear in the tone of the singing, the playing. Where it is still despair that attunes everything.

But it is naive to separate capacity from performance, as if the two were not joined on the songs and the albums: as if the potentials that would be his are not only transformed but made with each step in his extraordinary oeuvre. That he creates, he makes, as he also creates himself – creates, not from nothing, but from that peculiar destiny he made for himself as one album followed another. Creates from that set of possibilities with which he was gifted and that he also gives himself.

What belongs to him is relentlessness, the desire to make, that is also a desire to remake himself, to partition his life – separating the musician (Jandek – he and whoever collaborates with him, the songs copyrighted at the Library of Congress), the owner and manager of the company who releases his albums (Corwood Industries) and the white collar worker, busy in the world.

To partition his life, and by so doing, to keep that place of transformation and remaking open, writing his lyrics and recording his work, buying new instruments, collaborating with others on live performances. Keeping it open, and this is his relentlessness, it is this around which his other lives are a husk.

Who does he become when he becomes Jandek? Not himself; not the involate one kept apart from the world; it is not that simple. Another and someone else. The one who changes, and to whom transformation arrives. A kind of sacrifice, perpetually burning. An avatar …

Is he relentless? Certainly. What is its source? No matter. What matters is to continue, regardless of talent, of opportunity, all that … To continue, and this is the source, and the reason why these apparently despairing albums are not made in despair. Handed over to Corwood Industries, sold and distributed, they are made available to others; they communicate, and to do so is already hope, the source of hope. This is what cannot help but bear the music.

Is he unwitting? But only as he makes his own idiom, which means he cannot know what he does, and only does it. Only as he opens his own idiom by going forward – but what does this mean? A movement that makes sense only when you look back to see where he’s been.

Album after album leading back like the crumbs Hansel and Gretel left in the forest. And back to – where? The source is mysterious. Simply a will to begin, to make. Everything follows from that. A kind of relentlessness. A need to partition, to keep one part of life apart from another. And to live out of that separation, to live from it. As if it were also necessary to be reborn as an avatar. To let yourself be born thus as into another life. His life as Jandek, as another. His life as an avatar in another world, where he develops his own legitimate strangeness (Char).

To work unwittingly. Without knowing where it’s going. Steve of This Space has written many times around the problem of genre. Literature, if I understand him, belongs outside all genres, even its own. Literature remains outside, being displaced with regard to itself, and this is what marks a literary writing. Literature outside, in lieu of what it is, and experiencing that lack in every sentence.

Literature without model, as the experience of the loss of models. Modernism as this loss, when creativity begins in the wearing out of genres, as idioms become impossible and you fall beneath them. And this fall, with relentlessness, becomes a beginning, and a literary beginning. And literature begins in the fall, in the loss of all models, all genres. In the fall that makes talent irrelevant, ability by the by. What matters is exhaustion, the experience of failure. That is also, unwittingly or not, an experience of the whole of art.

How to start again? How to make a beginning? From a death to what has been. Until what remains are fragments. That point – where? Nowhere, until the necessity to begin rises up. The source, relentlessness. That magnetises those fragments like iron filings. That lets them point the way ahead, a pointing that is itself a moving ahead.

How to begin, to find a beginning? To fall. And know only the desire to move forward. This holds for the artist, but perhaps, too, for the listener. That you have to have exhausted something to listen to Jandek. Or that you have to have experienced his exhaustion, alongside his imperative to go forward. An exhausted going on, but a going on.

Isn’t that what you will need to hear? Isn’t that what qualifies and elects you as a listener? Isn’t that what marks you out? And then every time you listen, it is also a beginning.

It’s Sunday, and the first sunny day for weeks in our failed summer. Sunny and bright – blue skies, and my Visitor is out, and it is time for my listening. Time, which had been waiting in me all the while. Gathering up, that readiness for listening. To the brink of me, and bringing me to that brink. Until listening is a way of creation, of making. Until I make as Jandek sings and plays on Raining Down Diamonds, and then Khartoum. 

Jandek has an eye on the whole; the whole has an eye on Jandek. An eye? An ear. It is not that Smith first has a mood then sees everything through its lens – everything, the whole, the outside as he will sometimes present it, while he is inside, in his house – but that the mood has him, that he arises from it, that, as Jandek (sometimes a group, but it’s usually just him, just Smith), he coalesces out of something much more diffuse.

Coalesced, pulled together in response to the music, to the prospect of making. Pulled together from out of the future, temporalised, and given a past, a present in view of what he’ll make. And that’s how he becomes Jandek and not Smith: how he passes through a mood and passes into it, and then – by what surplus of strength? – is remade by way of what is to come: to make music, to sing, to play.

And Jandek’s music is first of all that – the miracle of coalescence, of coming together. Of capacity, of being able to be able. As it arises from the confused muddle of a mood. Certainly the singing, the playing of Six and Six is abstracted, blank; it barely seems to belong to anyone. The singer become thing, become condition. The singer returned to that bubbling mire from which all things come.

Monotonous, apathetic – an absence of mood rather than a mood. Sung from that no-place where feeling should be. That place beyond pleasure, beyond pain. And a singing stark, hermetic. That has closed itself away. A voice that has locked itself in. Voice of the house. Singing and playing in the house, inside. In the cell, in the corner. Turned away from the world, and turned to – what?

Catatonic. A voice minus itself, lacking itself. All feeling, all mood. The absence where a mood should be. How did he reach that state, Smith? How did he find it? The second Jandek album, from 1981. Only the second – but by what process was he able to sing, to play – of nothing? What to reach that apathy, that apathein that is the absence of feeling? That is a place to begin, and from which everything begins.

Somehow, a breaking away from the muddle of mood. Some kind of separation has occured. Some reduction. When I listen, I’m sure he reached that state through long training. Through some other process. And I think of the novels Smith said he burnt – 7 of them, not rejected from publishers, but reclaimed by him, Smith, because Random House took too long.

He took them away from the city (‘our experience living in lower Manhattan was … necessary’, he writes to Chusid, using the Corwood ‘we’), burned and buried them. Gave them a proper burial. ‘[W]e took the printed matter to the countryside for an unfettered, proper cremation. Stirred into ashes into the ground[….] The countryside dirt was hungry.’ And buried what else?

Write enough, I’ve always thought, and you come to understand how it breaks from any form of personal expression. A fantasy, really – that of becoming imperceptible by writing and that it would happen to anyone, and that that would be the blogosphere. And I’ve thought that to fail at one thing say writing – finishing a book – would break anyone from the desire to succeed according the arbitrary rules of others. Until it is neither a question of success or failure – or that failure, a kind of falling, would be the way to find ‘your legitimate strangeness’ (Char).

But what strangeness is this? How intense Six and Six is. How fiercely bright, like phosphorous. And proceeds according to itself, by its own light. That discovers its path as it goes along. Light in light. So bright you can see nothing by it except brightness. As though it were a peculiar kind of night. A night without a source of light. But now light is everywhere, it comes from everywhere, thick, cloud-like. It is like passing through a dazzling cloud. That’s bright, but where you can see nothing but brightness.

How to focus on the lyrics? How to listen to them when it is the performance itself that dazzles. That guitar, detuned, tuned away from tuning. And the voice, loud in the mix, very present. And so present its hard to follow what is sung. Only that there is singing. Only the absoluteness of singing, loud in the mix, very present. Sometimes whispery. Singing in short phrases. Scarcely any drama. And the guitar, tuned to some wierd private tuning, strummed and picked.

The whole has an eye on Jandek. And if Smith sings, performs – if he does so as Jandek – then it is from that gap in all moods, that eye in all storms. An eye – an ear, rather. That hears … what will allow Jandek to be gathered to itself. But what is heard? What draws him forward, Smith, Smith-as-Jandek?

When one song ends, another begins from the same place, and in the same non-tuning. Begins again, intense, without absolute focus. Paced roughly the same, no melodies. But flat, a music of the plain. Consistent, with the same tempo, no choruses, no refrains. Just its continuance, white in white. White light, like a migraine. A pallette of high notes (non-notes); voice and guitar, both high. A fierce guitar break. But still on, going on. Monotonous. God, what intensity. Who’s doing this? Whose strangeness is this?

Jandek has an eye on the whole. The singer, the player (I am thinking of the solo albums) has his eye on everything – the whole. It is marked in the lyrics, and particularly on those on the albums that follow the acapella ones, around the turn of the decade; it’s very clear: God becomes a word he has to use (‘Because it’s all about God/ It’s all about God …’), and ‘you’, the addressee names more than a lover, and so too with love.

These are songs about everything, about the All. That address themselves to the All, which is sometimes addressed through the ‘you’, and sometimes through the word God, which becomes necessary as a way of naming the All. And in the same period, a new candour about his own depression: it becomes clear: the All gives itself through this same depression. That the songs are about the whole of existing as it is given first of all through depression.

It is a mood that matters, a mood that discloses – a mood that forces him up against the All. As though only now could he name and face what he had aways faced. As if now the condition of everything had become clear. That everything, that All through the lens of a mood. Or attuned by it. And the music in that mode which explores a mood, where the words name one and the same. Where it is a question of exploring what is given by that mode as possibility.

This given, I think, is also the life of the work, Jandek’s recordings. It’s what gives them momentum, even as the songs seems lethargic and anaesthesised. The sense of a quest, of a ‘must go on’, as in late Beckett. Of a limited canvas, black to be painted on black, and yet because of these limits: everything. Because of them, because of the concentration upon them, and the exploration, along its edge, of all that this mood allows: a sense of the whole, that everything is here, given. Or that it is the horizon of the given that you are brought up against, there from where it comes.

I think you could trace it as a lyrical theme: the necessity of going inside, of staying there. And of experiencing this confinement as a cell, as a prison. And yet, after a bit ‘In the cell, I have – possibilities’: it is there from the cell everything is to be seen, known. Everything, even if it is only dark and cannot be known. And from there, from the room, that making begins that doubles up what gives in its darkness, in non-knowing. It begins there.

Early to late, the theme of sitting helplessly, unable to do anything else. ‘I don’t know what to do except/ Sit in a chair/ All else is too difficult/ Maybe walk around/ Once in a while/ But quick, back to that chair …’ An incapacity, a retreat. But isn’t it, too, that place from which something can begin? And the image of being in, enclosed from the world: ‘My house is dead/ And so am I/ And I’m still falling …’ Retreat, incapacity, but ‘I just command the boat inside the house’; and the house is the boat.

Sometimes the dream of finding the key to a kind of paradise, of unlocking it. A way out of the cell (‘the key is out there …’), a way of finding the place (‘Unlock that place/ And see what’s there/ How can I do what I need to do/ In that place with those freed-up things. Laughing and joking and having fun’).

But then the sense that confinement is the chance, and the key must not be found. (‘Everything was making sense/ Locked up in my little room’). And in another song, ‘I don’t need a window/ To see what’s outside …’ He is mourning someone. Some loss. ‘And the thoughts that I have/ Memories of you/ I pray to God before I stare at the air’. And now that loss is possibility. It reveals, and by way of becoming the topic of a song. And there’s the chance of going on. The chance of beginning over.

Why so many albums when, in Chusid’s memorable formulation, each falls unnoticed in the forest? Why again, and over again? Because of that chance, that beginning. The mood becomes propitious, loss rich, depression suffused with hope. And how is that possible, that hope? Perhaps simply because the mood is doubled up in song. Because it lets itself be sung, it pulls back to grant strength enough for song, for recording, release and distribution.

Singing happens. The song is out there, away. And that from the first, from as soon as it’s sung, since it will be recorded, will be placed on an album alongside other songs. ‘In the cell, there are – possibilities.’

Unique to Jandek I think is the fidelity of this chance, these possibilities to the mood itself. That the music, the lyrics, bring us close to that enfeebling moods that blossoms to allow chance. How can anything begin? How can it be made to happen? But it happens, it begins, and the singing, the playing remains with the joy that that there is something, rather than nothing. That making was possible, and again.

But a joy that is pressed back straightaway, that is brought down, drawled. No sense of a lift, of lyric flight. Hope and possibility brought close to their opposites. A music played and sung along the edge, flattened. That keeps itself low. (Beckett to Van Velde: ‘I’m not low enough’). And isn’t that what is meant by ‘the humility of pain’? That pain must bring low that same hopeful flight. That the chance to make must answer to the impossibility of making, to pain, to weariness. And that God is given only because of that pain, that weariness.

That is pain’s humility. That is its lesson. A lesson endured on the later, solo albums. Endured – suffered. Even as it falls back a little. Even as it gives a chance. No lyric flight here. No lasting rapture. Everything brought back to the same. Black painted on black. Near nihilism. Nearly nothing left, black on black … What life there is to wail only that there is life. And that wail, that wretched protest is also the whole of life, what life can be.

Sometimes it seems pathetic. ‘You should get away from me/ I’ll just bring you down/ I’m in my corner crying/ Like a lonely dog’. And then, in the same song, ‘I don’t care about philosophy/ Even if it’s right/ I end up back here’. In the corner again, in the cell. By way of a reduction that no longer belongs to philosophy. In the chair, I stare. Or, I don’t know how to anything but sit in a chair. Humility again, but one that is also a way of seeing, of living, of not merely enduring pain, but letting it sing.

And this is the doubling up. This is the mutation the mood allows. And on the later albums, there is little but this – the mood, its mutation. As if there were only a single mood to Jandek, only one. That continues from album to album. That gives the chance of singing and then withdraws. Until nothing remains but the songs.

Pain sings of itself. Pain knows itself and sings of itself. And by way of Jandek. By way of what is sung and played. And by that same singing, that playing, there is also the humility of pain, pain remembering pain and not rising above it. Pain staying its own course – but more than that. Pain doubled up, made into a song, singing of itself and staying its own course as it refuses to rise, refuses lyric flight.

To sing from pain’s humility means a fidelity to pain. A way of staying with it, of running in its groove. This why, performing, there will be no address to the audience, no talking. Because this is not a performance, or just that. This is pain, pain in song. It is pain’s humility that demands nothing else. A guitar string breaks; the instrument is passed backstage. The band waits. The Representative looks down. Minutes pass, nothing is said; the guitar, restrung, comes back. And in those minutes, silence. The Rep looks down. In fidelity to pain. In pain’s humility.

And this is what he sings to an Austin audience. ‘I don’t know why I’m in front of you/ I’m six feet under the radar screen …’ Six foot under, and there. Dead and also there, a dead man singing, and singing from death. This is Jandek’s black on black.

‘The Humility of Pain’: a song addressed to – whom? To himself, the singer, the narrator? First impression: the voice desolated. More than alone, more than solitary. Utterly cast out, utterly removed. Subtracted from anything but itself. And even from that, from itself. Cast out from itself and having to sing to itself. And for itself, for its own sake. To prove it was there – itself. To prove itself there, that it could be there and had the strength.

Yes, that’s the need for this address. The need for the singer, the narrator, to sing to himself. It is to join himself to himself, to reach across the breach. The voice grows defiant, even amidst its desolation. Grows somehow surer of itself, gathering itself up. In this address, this call to awakening, though the one who is called is only himself, possesser of this voice; singer, narrator.

And this more general sense that all these Jandek songs are addresses – but to whom? To us, the listeners? Well, we cannot be ignored. These are songs released, whole albums. But this reaching to the public is also an attempt to return to the private for the singer, the narrator. That great arc that he must travel to return to himself. And now I imagine this arc is the one described by Jandek, for Smith. That the voyage out – writing songs and recording them, getting them pressed and distributing the recordings – is an attempt to come home.

To return – but to what? To himself? To that gap in himself that made it necessary to sing, to play. To that absence of self through which he gave birth to the other that sings and plays in his place. Rosenzweig’s God absents himself from himself to allow the world and human beings to appear. History is the drama of the becoming-God of what is separated from God; of the redemption of the world.

And the time of Jandek releases, for what does that prepare? The whole oeuvre: toward what does it look? The becoming Smith of Jandek? Smith knowing Smith by way of Jandek? Rather Smith becoming nothing, and that lack he also is discovering its strength. Until it is that which sings, and that which Smith becomes in singing, in playing.

Being turning in its sleep. Being contorted; the grimace of nothingness – its protest against being drawn from itself and into life. Men seek immortality by their works, says Plato; it is why the writer engenders a book, the hero deeds. In truth, this is a deathly immortality – a way of living on undead.

Deeds make the hero just as writing makes a writer. But writing exists all too much; it exceeds the writer, as deeds do not exceed the hero. And the same, too, with singing. What you have discovered is too strong for you, and in truth, it is as though it discovered you. And thus your oeuvre lives its own life, runs its own course, like a god who has been reborn as an avatar and forgotten its divinity.

Then the creation of Jandek is by way of absenting, a making space. But Jandek will not become Smith; the oeuvre will not glorify its maker. Rather, it will deepen that absence, increase it. Until the gap between Jandek and Smith is wider than ever. Until absence and presence struggle against one another, light and darkness, like Mani’s Gnosticism.

It is Jandek who reaches us in song, not Smith. Undead Jandek, never alive. And who sings from being brought into existence, into life, from beyond it. Death sings; death lives a human life. Or rather, what has never lived is singing; the remainder, the desolated part that lives on in our works without us.

What questions do we ask into an oeuvre? What is allowed to echo there? Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, carrying torches, they discovered great ochre coloured beasts on the walls in the flickering light: this was Lascaux where, thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find there what they wanted, asking their question into the cave’s echo and receiving their echoing question which they took for an answer.

And so with the writer in her criticism: is it not some clue to herself that she seeks when she writes about a body of work? As though the authors upon whom she writes were other versions of her, ahead of her. As though they had advanced further on a journey she was only beginning.

So can a writer find their courage in that pantheon of writers that stands all about them. Courage by their example, by the signatures they left just ahead of you, as the adventures in Journey to the Centre of the Earth followed the marks of a previous explorer.

Courage is important, and also the sense of being accompanied. The critic can also call from a dead body of words something like a ghost of their author – the name Bataille, say, but as it refers to more than the writer who lived and died. Then criticism is also a kind of seance; it lets that shadow flicker on the cave walls that is a ghost of the writer – a way of communing with the dead as they are buried in words, and not under earth.

What kind of life did the author lead? Where did they live? Who loved them? These are questions the ghost cannot answer. But the critic’s question, the first, is what drew her to the oeuvre in the darkness. That led her downwards into that echo chamber where questions return in the guise of answers.

Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader’s torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.

So Blanchot, who wrote to a director who proposed a film version of Thomas that his desires did not matter with respect to this project; he voices a doubt in his letter – part of his general suspicion of the visible – but then says: treat me as though I were dead. A posthumous existence he’d already claimed for himself in the author’s note at the end of The Infinite Conversation.

Dead, and away from the work. Dead, and retreating into darkness, to let the work be. To let it shine by the reader’s torch and not according to light of his own pronouncements. Discretion, then; withdrawal – impressive to maintain, in the face of the media, a kind of negative celebrity, a void in place of a man. There is the work in the darkness that belongs to it. And the man about whom for a long time we knew nothing.

And as with words, so music. And as with Blanchot, with Jandek, too: for his retreat in the face of his work is as absolute. What discipline does it take to perform live, and yet to maintain his discretion, not to put on a show, to address the audience, and to insist on there being an exit that leads out of the venue by a secret route, where the audience cannot find him?

And what effort to resist replying in depth to the queries that he is sent, limiting himself to a few cryptic, fortune-cookie words written in his familiar hand on a Corwood catalogue? The better, though, to allow the work to speak. To draw listeners to it by their own light – by their listening. And let them bring to it their own questions, which they hear, in the echoing darkness as answers.

Yes, this is admirable. But it does not hold quite all the way. For has there not been, in recent years, a new candour in the lyrics – a directness, a non-obliqueness, that provides the listener with a clue to the whole oeuvre, to a real sense of what it was always about? Depression, of course. For his whole life, says the singer on Manhattan Tuesday. And doesn’t he promise his audience in Newcastle to bring them a little of that – depression?

With this frankness, something new happens; a light flashes out, and the whole cave becomes visible – everything, the whole oeuvre, and at once. And we see that the man who recorded and released his work for many years did so from depression, and out of depression. That was the mood that attuned everything. Depression was the secret.

And yet the point, obvious enough, but worth repeating, that his depression was never complete enough that it did not lend itself as a topic for lyrics. That it did not close over its head so he could not rise gasping to sing of it. Then it was never complete, never absolute, it allowed respite, and that respite was the work, and the condition for that work.

Depression doubled up – depression joyful enough to sing of itself: this is relief, respite – and isn’t that borne also by the work. Isn’t that its hope, that it was possible, that the grey clouds parted, the black sun gave way to the brightness of the real one? Wasn’t that the miracle, the returning miracle of the faith implicit in the work, in the recording of music and its release?

An obvious point; and besides, it is to be remembered that depression wasn’t always his theme, and it was never simple. The light that spreads from Manhattan Tuesday, from the lyrics in recent years is only a flash; everything is seen and at once, to be sure, but this is a fake, an eidolon; it brings one Jandek forward only to push another aside, and the oeuvre is more than what is illuminated now.

‘There’s nothing to get’, said Sterling Smith in response to a question of what the music was about. Nothing: and that is the darkness in which an oeuvre gathers us to itself, and speaks to us in a secret autobiography – not Smith’s, this time, but ours, who listen and seek to find ourselves in listening. But to lose ourselves too, this is true – to become, to get away from ourselves. To move in a new direction.

But isn’t that what is also told in the story of a life? That if we seek to become what are, that becoming also means an escape, and even a kind of death – a dying to what we were, just as the Tarot dealer reassures us that death – the skeleton with a scythe – only means change. And that life will have to fall to what it does not know in order to find not itself – fixed, determinate – but what it might be.

Does this mean we might identify with the music, discovering it as an account of our moods, our melancholy? Or is it – fake alternative – also difference that alters them, our moods and our temperament, that attunes them differently, letting them resonate with what they do not quite know?

But all of this is too simple, as if it wasn’t the play of these alternatives that fascinates – the eternal fort–da of the search for meaning and its defeat. For isn’t it the very ordinariness of the man on the record sleeves that is the source of mystery? The ordinary – a young man in a check shirt, smiling at someone – as it is framed and presented to us as the record sleeve of a music that sets the blues adrift?

And isn’t it what survives of these blues forms that makes this music offensive to those (Chusid) familiar with, say, free jazz and the contemporary art music avant-garde? It is the way Jandek is close to blues forms and far, the way the Representative is presented as a man just like us but who is also withdrawn from us, who does not acknowledge his audience.

Close and far. Living and dying. Or a kind of dying – endless change come close, meaning sliding away. It is not just that Jandek is an enigma, and Smith, but that we are likewise enigmas, and it is this that echoes back when we ask our questions into the dark.

Let me ask my question: Why Blanchot, whom I read for the first time in 1993, and now Jandek, heard for the first time only recently (a matter of months)? Why this pair, heard and listened to before I knew the legend that surrounds either of their names?

Sometimes I don’t feel worthy of listening, of being able to listen. That I fall below listening in some way, and cannot measure up to it. As though listening were a task, a knd of discipline. And yet when I put on The Ruins of Adventure by Jandek, it is also as though the music gives me that discipline, that it commands me in some way. To pay attention. To sit still at the edge of myself, ears pricked up like a dog.

Commands me – and this is its law. But a strange, giving law that also opens within me the ears to hear and the capacity to listen. ‘I can hear now’ – a version of what the boy says at the beginning of Tarkovsky’s Mirror: ‘I can speak now.’ I can hear, and this can forced into itself, deepening. The ‘can’ hollowed out and welcoming into my chest the music that made a place for itself in me. That made a listening place.

Listening disciplined – that, but more. Listening given the capacity to listen, or have that capacity deepened. As the music becomes in some way essential. As if forces listening to be deeper than itself, but not to find itself. To lose listening in listening. To have no knowledge of its locus, of the place from which one listens.

To say this is a visceral music is a I think to say exactly that. Visceral: a music of the guts and entrails. This album is a singer and a fretless bass guitar, that’s all. And the bass, without pulse, searching thickly along itself, with its own thick consistency, reaches me at the centre of my body, there where the soul is, where the soul, listening awakens.

Called into being by the thick brown mess of the bass. Called – the music having made a place in me to hear itself. To return to itself in me, and thereby almost ignoring me, turning me aside. Which is also what I want in music, that: to be turned somehow aside. To not know in some sense. To forget in some sense. And to be led along that forgetting, unable to pull together what opens before me and opens me.

And so with the bass, with the singing: the form is elusive. There’s not even a blues form here. A voice, subdued, nearly defeated, sings in phrases, without verse, without chorus, and the bass – follows, but does it – follow? And in brown waves it reaches me, the music, the singing. In dull brown waves reaching me like dull blows. I don’t know where it’s leading, where the song’s going. Don’t know how long it will be. There are no clues here.

Am I too dull to listen today? Am I not quite up to it? But then that dullness comes from the music, arrives from there. And beats me about the head with great muffled blows. Until I’m not sure who listens and what to. And I can’t assemble what’s being sung – tentatively, adventuringly. Can’t follow the runs up and down the guitar neck, for there are sudden runs of high notes, unexpected.

I feel dazed. No: this dazedness is the swamp that loses the ‘I’ in me. When I am more than the point of attention that can follow a song as it unfolds in time. My God where is this music going to? And how can it go on, this music? Someone club it to death. Someone finish clubbing it to death. It’s like some roadside animal you’ve half run over. Something broken spined that still looks up at you and lives.

Even like this, half dead, it’s living. Living, though it can hardly last from moment to moment. Nearly dead in that lag that dips between the moments. A dazed music. A music concussed. Beaten in a terrible injury that will claim your life only later. Beaten, and you’re told you should visit hospital, but it’s nothing you tell yourself, dazed, though the next morning they’ll find you dead. And meanwhile this dead non-blues. Meanwhile the blues concussed, echoes of the blows rained upon the head.

Ah, the song is so – long. How much longer? And so – hesitant. As if it did not have the strength to tie moment to moment. As though it were about to spill from itself and all moments like an oil spill. Time become a thick, dark swamp. Time pouring from itself, wounded. It is the lag that’s terrible. The sense of a – lag – that unjoins moment from moment. That decouples them like passenger carriages. That attenuates time, nearly wears it out. And the suspense of the music is given in its very capacity to survive, to hold itself together despite the attenuation.

The attenuated blues. The blues attenuated, spun out long past life and living. Blues of the dead, the undead. Blues of the half-killed dead, the not-enough-killed dead, blues of the not-yet-put-to-rest. Of the survivor who does not live, but in whom death lives. The survivor who lives dying in life, and lets dying bleed into life.

Do you remember that Alfred Bester novel, The Demolished Man? And what happened at the end, when the man was demolished? Bester doesn’t spell it out. He leaves us to guess. This album is the demolition. This is the album of a demolished man …

Lumbering. Staggering along. You have to turn it up, this album, to let the singing uncouple itself from the bass throb. It demands attention. Forces itself forward. Disgustingly. Drawlingly. As if asked to be stamped out. Ruin me, it says. A wordless crying now. A cry without energy, wandering. And the bass plodding beneath, without rhythm. It’s played higher, the thick notes reaching up. And then ends, the second song ends.

A pause, and the third song lurches forward. Thick and bubbly like the voice from below in the Burroughs routine, ‘The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk’. Thick, dark words from the bass. But plodding, unlike Burroughs’ arsehole. Half-conscious, dazed. And the other voice can sing too, it is not frosted over, mute. Sings – drawls. Reaches out of itself like some worm, worming about. Like the dream of the maggot’s birth in The Fly. Something disgusting has been born. Something wrong. Death in life. Death wandering dazedly into life. And singing-speaking. Drawling. As everything in me, the listener, says: this voice is wrong.

The fourth song. ‘I can focus all my thoughts like a lazer – beam’. The voice gathered to itself, stronger. Ruminating – and now you can follow what is sung. ‘I’ll have to be a mental – dynamo/ And weeave a – spell/ on myseelf’. It can be followed, this song. ‘I can join the circles and triangles …’

The fifth song. The fifth demolished song. This a disgusting music. That muses from disgust, a golem of disgust. Bataille’s base matter come to life. Thick bubbles rising brownly – bursting. Grey-brown geyser bubbles from an unknown source in the earth. From which everything in you says keep away, stand away. Rising disgustingly from some unknown source.

Something wrong has happened here. Some vile spell cast. Some curse. The bubbles rise like prophecy. ‘It’s toooooo bleak’ – ‘to’ howled. ‘The ruins of adventure/ smoking in a burnt out city …’ Macbeth‘s witches. ‘Embraace the greeey of reality …’ Something is wrong. Something alive that should not live. ‘Why should I live at all …’ Something in pain. ‘I feel so sick of days / minutes or hours/ time, times oppressive/ Go awaay time/ Leave me at once/ I don’t want – to know you/ I’ll take the sun/ I’ll take the blaaack night/ I’ll walk through per-cep-tion/ But it’s so hard to waiiiiiiiit/ I want to go nowwwww …’

Music of the waiting for the end. ‘I want to leave through the back door/ I want to disappeaar completely and never be found/ I want to cease to exist as far as I know …’ sung more firmly now. More resolvedly, slightly. ‘I could always go drinking/ and neeeeeeeever come back/ I could go travelling in search of nothing …’ As though the music, the singing – Jandek – had reached some level of self-awareness, some ability to speak of itself. The song of disgust, and disgust at disgust. The song that sings of putting an end to itself. But that sings and there is no end.

Wow, this is glorious. ‘John Plays Drums’ from Your Turn to Fall. Spastic drums. What’s happening to the kit? And the atonal guitar, picked and strummed. And the singer’s usual total resignation, voice rising a little against the drums. But this is glorious.

I am listening to Jandek on my new speakers, which I bought to listen to Jandek. The 50 CDs lined up on top of the gas fire, all of them. The room full of kitchen furniture, and the washing machine, and the boxes the speakers came in. And now the evening, because of my listening, is heading in a single direction.

Now it gathers me together, that listening, his voice. Listening to a singing from him more delicate than I’ve known. Delicate and more light, wandering the semitones this time, wavering more, and to the extent that what is sung is slightly blurred, so I cannot focus, quite.

Songs come and go – 16 of them on this album, Your Turn to Fall. Listen to it, the title: Your Turn to Fall, it’s very beautiful. Your Turn – not his any longer, and To Fall – to suffer what he has. To suffer – and until there’s no one there to suffer, until the singer’s worn himself away. Who sings? The singer is made of air. A absence instead of a man. Or that, in a man, a particular man, although his particularity doesn’t matter, in which absence is allowed to resound. In which absence sings there in his place.

Sings – breathes. Or blows – like a wind through leaves. Until the singing is just that: a sussuration, the wind in leaves. The rain at midnight. Falling from itself, of itself, like rain. No one sings, just as nothing rains. The singer is the dummy subject like the ‘it’ of ‘it rains’. What rains? But there’s no sense to that question. It rains. It just rains. And so with this singing, which is just itself. But an itself without itself – wandering. A space of the Same without identity. Of the Return without stability. That’s what it means to sing, and to fall. And now it’s your turn. Your Turn to Fall.

Listless, bored, it’s time for Jandek. Time because there’s nothing else, this evening, that will accord with the flatness of this mood. The sense that everything is over, all possibilities. Over – and whatever began? The music rises like low islands from the flatness. Places where the flatness doubled itself up, where a kind of thickening occurred. Or a kind of scabbing – a crust formed over a wound, letting it heal. The crust in place of the secret healing, rising like a low mound, a barrow. Some wierd burial place. In which what is buried?

This is a numb music. His voice is high, breathy. He lets himself sing monotonously, flatly. There’s hardly a wavering. A wispy, breathy voice, surprisingly high, since I know his later work much better. And a picked and strummed guitar playing the atonal ghost of a blues form. There’s a restraint to the singing. A detachment. A numbness, I think. Like someone heavily medicated. Who sings in medicated detachment from everything.

This is not an an anguished music. I am listening to Staring at the Cellophane for the first time. It is very fine. It begins as though it ended a long time ago. Begins where an album like Smog’s A Doctor Came at Dawn broke off. No – begins further on from that. From where everything becomes indifferent. From where all drama peters out. Where nothing begins, there’s just the plains spreading indifferently along.

Ah, I very much like the strumming. Very much, as it accords with – what – inside me? In my chest – it reaches me there. Or I reach out from there – my chest. Strumming and wordless noises – I like this very much, and I want it to last much longer, but now, already, it is gone. But a new song comes, with tuning not much different. And then another.

This a restrained album. A variety of tempos. Songs so far blues variants. But controlled, focused in structure. Without losing that essential indifference. That sense of a voice floating, a singing that crosses without alighting, breathily. A breathy vocal.

I would like to say, dumbly: I like this music. It’s very simple, almost too much so. It meets me in the chest, and very simply, viscerally. As though I’d be tuned to the music in advance. As though it played me, or across me. As though it had waited for me rather than I for it.

Sometimes I think I fell to find it. That you must fall, and fail. That failure is important, that the sense of breaking off is necessary. An experienced fragmentation. A breaking – as of the ice along the shore where Pelle the Conquerer runs. As if you have to be broken apart from others to know such breaking is always possible and there can be no connections that cannot also be broken. And that even where you are, a kind of breaking is happening.

Until you fall in your own site. Until what you is the hollow place of falling, and of failure. Only then, I tell myself, can this music come not as a balm but as an appropriately cool breeze. A breeze that is indifferent to you. That passes over you not in comfort but in total indifference. Like the truth. As though it were the breathy embodiment of truth.

This is the anaesthesised blues. The withdrawn blues, the catatonic blues, the blues that has worn away the blues. Until what is left? This – a ghost voice, a ghost playing, wandering far out from tonality. Far, but keeping – it is necessary – that structure, the ghost of a blues form.

A music that moves like a cloud or a breeze. A music that is of itself, inevitable. And sealed within itself. Cellophane wrapped. A plastic bag over its head. And suffocating – and singing. The songs are not conscious, or subconscious. Below that, prior to that. Having reached some great indifference. The blindness of Fate, of Destiny.

A singing that Knows, that has gone far ahead of us and seen everything. That knows what will come, that peoples will rise and fall, and the world pass through many aeons but in the end will freeze over and there will be nothing at all. A frozen rock falling through space.

And it sings from this far knowledge, from this detachment. Having seen everything, and with eyes that can only focus on the whole. Eyes for which the near is nothing, for which each of us is only one of a billion billion like us who will strive and struggle until the end. As though the end were already here. As though our deaths were written on our foreheads.

A singing that has ranged out very far ahead on a spirit-journey. Ranged out far and returned, a hollow prophet, a prophet of nothing who speaks of nothing. Numbed having seen everything. And just the blues left. Just the blues and a guitar tuned away from tuning.

Is he really singing about Napoleon? He is. Imagine blizzards in the vastness of Russia. Imagine a million soldiers lost, cut off from supply lines and the villages burnt away. To be lost thus, and without hope, far away from home, and in the vastness of Russia. Storms and ice-blizzards. And the cold wind that also bears this music.

As I listen I wonder whether this album is part of another run of greatness – whether the albums before and after it are as good, as vital. As though Jandek had found a way up to a plateau. Had learned to breathe a mountain air, very thin. And to sing there, being unable to draw air deep into his lungs. Singing from his throat, breathily, in the high snow.

In my imagination – not having heard the albums before and after – Jandek crosses a mountain range, and this the highest point. The way back, the way forward in glistening snow. And Jandek long since snowblind, long since lost. But losing his way across a landscape. Falling his way forward as though wounded and staggering home.

Short songs! Fifteen of them. And that murky black and white cover. That murky grey guitar propped up against a murky wall. And there a doorway. I bring the cover to me as if it can help me with the mystery. What is the music? How was it made? How did he sustain indifference to indifference – the fact he sold only 10 copies of his records in the first 10 years? Did he know how good the music was, how vital it was? Or was recording and releasing the music, getting the records pressed a way of falling, of failure, but of doubling them up, falling and failing, of letting a kind of scab form, encrusting itself?

Low islands emerging out of the murk. Rising and falling back there, grey on grey. Nothing that gets high, nothing that rises. Rising a little and falling back – no more. This is a modest music, a restrained music. It doesn’t ask to be noticed. What does it want? To wander, to be left to itself. But to be left to itself on a recorded album. To fall there, in an LP, in the site called Jandek.

And wouldn’t you like to fall, too? Isn’t that what you want? Not to rise, but to fall. To fail forward, across the snowy wastes. This is why it seems you were hollowed out to listen to Jandek in advance. That you life was fatefully led towards Jandek. By a hollowing, an anaesthesis. As though you insides were scraped out by an ice-cream scoop. Leaving only your chest in which the music might reverberate. There in your chest, now a chamber of echoes.

What is this music? From where did it come? From what abyss of total desolation? From what despair beyond despair?

There are ragas for different times of the day and for different seasons. Is Hemvati, one of my favourites, an evening raga? It is stately, measured. A music, I imagine to myself, of late middle age. A classical music, after the romanticism of youth.

I remember Hemvati as I listen to Jandek’s Glasgow Monday, The Cell, that is based raga-like, around a handful of notes. Only it is constant in its tempo; it has learned to organise itself around a single, regular pulse. That turns around this most minimal of measures, and lets itself be measured by it. A steady music – wise. A music that has gathered up the lessons of the day, of a lifetime. A music that pushes forward like a glacier from the slow pressure of that life, and of its lessons. And lets the singer ask, very simply, What do I have?, and this at the start of each of the nine main sections of the piece.

What do I have?: to ask, simply: who am I that is here? Who? – and this question speech-sung over a measured, august piano, moving slowly. Over a piano played gently, measuredly, and percussion – Alex Neilson standing, I’ve read for most of the set, introducing several instruments, bowing them, scraping them, shaking them. And Richard Young’s bowed bass, curving upwards out of the music and down again, bass parts like the backs of whales in water, or like a landscape of low hills. And an august beauty to that bowed bass. A measured beauty; a classical one.

The first part has no vocals. It attunes you, measures you; the music lays itself out, inevitable. The bed of music is laid out, slow, august. And you are attuned, measured, calmed. This was to be a meditative set, the audience at the gig in Glasgow were told. So they sat down, 200 of them, and clapped only at the end, after 80 minutes of music. 80 minutes, gathering itself forward. Pulling over itself the lessons of a whole life, like a sleeper a blanket. And asking, over and again, ‘What do I have?’, which is to say, ‘Who?’ – who am I that sings?, that’s how I translate it. Who am I that can sing and has the capacity to sing? Who is it that has been gifted with this power?

The lyrics are made of short phrases, spoken-sung. The piano continuing all the while. And the bowed bass is droning. And percussion glides in and out. Who am I that sings?, asks the singer. Who is it raised from the bed of music, as in some kind of reversed sea wreck? A voice – gratuitous, unasked for, and that asks: ‘who?’ And that question throughout. Who sings, then? The Representative from Corwood, according to the usual nomenclature. The Rep at his piano and with a sheaf of lyrics, and singing – and with what concentration! with what focus!

But so that singing sings of the surprise of singing, of being able to sing. Of this strange strength that rises above the music and above living. A peculiarly human affair. Lifted from immanence, from the life of animals that, says Bataille, pass like water in water. Lifted up, standing on two legs and staring up into the sky. As if the sky held the mysteries of our birth. As if it was there we’d find the measure, where measure is lacking.

But there is the pulse of the piano, dependable. The bowed electric bass and the percussion washes. A slow advance, a rolling forward. Something is dependable here. A music you can lean on. A music that carries you forward, inevitably. And I ask myself, by what strength? By what strength did this piece allow this bearing forward? What miracle of strength holds it out into the unknown, and because of its measure?

A classical music. Restrained. With no breaks, no virtuosity. That patiently goes forward. Patiently, and like a pond refreshed by rain. Waiting, patient. Patient all the length of time. It is a suite in several movements. It starts, and then rolls on, and ends, in 7 or 8 minute chunks. 10 times over, including the first instrumental passage. Including the opening attunement, the anacrusis (not a real one) before the beat, the taking in of breath. The gathering of breath from the pulse as it finds itself. And the steady movement around the pulse, the slow orbit.

And the speech-song that rises as out of the music and stays and falls back in. That rises in a phrase and slides back in. ‘I – can break – the barrier’: and the last word half whispered. ‘If it needs – brushing – up against’. Half breathily, wonderingly. ‘Nothing – delivered – except the barrier’ – sung-spoken phrases. That ride above the music, not far above. That must and wonder. And are addressed to whom? to us? to the singer? to no one in particular? Perhaps to the surprise of singing, and of being able to sing.

‘To the other side of life – where – I don’t think about anything.’ Of the singing allowed to be made of words. That brings words. And sings of itself, of its own singing. Of that strange break in life that allows life to sing of itself. That strange reflexivity, where life grows self-conscious, self-aware – and that regards itself, its own transparency. That is as open as the air, and as blank.

‘It’s so basic/ these things’: as though the singer was reminding himself or something. Of trying to find a wisdom, a way to live. That can only be found by singing. A movement of discovery, then, and of a way to live – a quest. A questioning that demands sliding into the music-pool. Of laying out the bed of music.

And the exploration can begin. Patience begins. And the singer, surprised at singing, surprised there is a voice, lays out that long prayer – but to what? a prayer to what? – breathily, spoken-sung, half whispered. A prayer to – the capacity to ask. The question, and the question’s gratuitousness. As it forms itself and rises like a bubble. As the lyric-phrases rise bubble-like and break on the music’s surface.

‘What do I have?’ – asked so many times. ‘An insight – from the past.’ One answer, as there are others. An assessment of life, a looking back. An inventory of sorts. ‘Some bastion – I guard.’ And the bass, bowed steadily. The bass, giving itself to fate, singing the single not of fate. And the percussion, busy – in various ways.

‘Some shade – granted – the beast is difficult’. Lyric phrases that bubble up and break, half-whispering. A speech song. A speech-song sung looking upwards. Like a broken backed creature. Like an animal with a snapped spine and who can only look up to the spread sky, the stars. And in whom that sky seems to know itself and whisper. That seems to sing of its surprise at singing, and at being able to sing. Yes, that is what the singer is: a broken animal. Broken-spined and singing upwards. As the music pulses. As the music – all of life – continues. And as singing rises, continuing.

But there’s no pain here. An animal, broken, that freezes to death. That falls into death as into sleep. That draws death over itself like a blanket. Now I will die. And that does not die, but sings. An animal death enters and that can sing. ‘What do I have?/ A ship without a crew/ dead leaves in the forest.’ And the piano searching. Searching the mode Jandek has given it. Searching the possibility given in a few notes. Searching-playing. And the lyric-phrases half breathless. Breathed – out. Rising up like bubbles, breaking all along the surface.

(Order Glasgow Monday from the UK or the USA.)

How to speak of creation, of artistic creation, if not to draw it back narcissistically to the life of an artist, or to what the artist would have wanted to express? How think of art as the opposite of narcissism – to know yourself as the pool’s surface that reflected your face? That your face on the pool’s back is a feature of the water and not your own. Or that what you are is only that pool as it contracts itself to live a human life. Or to know yourself as an avatar of a god – that your life is not your own, but a sheath in which another lives.

That your life is greater than your own because another lives in your place and will awaken from you, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. And your life will fall away like dross, being justified only by what it allowed. To serve and not to rule. To abase yourself so completely you are nothing at all. To be the vessel of something, to let it work through you, as though you were that part of a circuit that allowed a current to flow. Part of it, but on condition that you are no more than a part, a conductor of energy and nothing more, and that your justification lies in this.

Is that what it would mean to be divinely inspired? Is that the possession, the dispossession, that Plato fears? To be the husk where a god passes (divine madness, he calls it)? We are without gods now. What does it mean to think yourself a husk? What current passes through you? The work instead of the god. The work that works through you, in place of you. The equivalent of speaking in tongues. For a time, inspiration, and then? What you have made. What stands apart from you. But what does so is not of you. It is not something you planned to make. Its origin stands away from you, prior to you as an artist, and the work as an artwork. The origin set back.

Why, then, did it visit you? Why did it come to you? No sense in answering that. No reason you could give. And the work is nothing you made. Or what you were was reversed at that moment – that you were turned somehow inside out, that your eyes were rolled back into your skull.

When I listen to Jandek – the late albums, it is not introversion I hear. This is not an artist who looks inside, for there is no inside, the inside is a landscape, a place where nothingness echoes. The soul unfolded. The artist’s soul – given in the moment of creation and only then – is the explication of the soul, the way it is turned outside. The eyes rolling back into the head. Inspiration.

And what can you be thereafter except the shell of that experience, its husk? What can you be the cast off skin of a chrysalis? Except at every moment of creation. Except then when the nova explodes all over. Now and now when the embers burn again, glow red. And your life, your whole life catches fire.

I would like to say, however implausibly, that the despair on an album like The Place does not belong to the singer, the player. Or that this belonging is a way of speaking of the soul undone, of the eternal return that keeps it open, and open, and open at each transmuting instant. And that this, in the end, is the pulse of the work, the way it shatters itself open, the way it blooms like a jagged flower into the night.

And who is left, after? Who are the wound – strange flower – closes itself? Who after the torn soul heals over? The one who knows himself to be the avatar of a god, of the work. Who knows the origin burns outside of him. That he belongs to the black burning stars on the other side of heaven. Belongs to them, but by not belonging. That the source of the work flees him as it flees the listeners of Jandek.

And even to the extent that he has this in common with them – that there is a kind of community, a friendship, that binds him, Sterling Smith, to those who listen. And isn’t it in the name of friendship that Smith must turn his life from us? Isn’t that the pact, isn’t that the honesty of a soul that does not possess itself?

A kind of honesty, as if to say: I made nothing. Someone else made it. Someone else sang and played in my place. To say: do not confuse me with him, with them, god or gods. Do not take me for the origin. To say: my life is the shell, the chrysalis, and what matters is the work. What speaks is the work.

Let the work speak for itself, this is the commandment. Let it speak – this the sole law of the work. But what does it mean? That the songs must not be read autobiographically. That it is not a matter of the life of Sterling R. Smith. Or that that life is placed on the altar of Jandek, and sacrificed. Much as in the same way that a novelist will take something of their lives and give it to the work. Here is Nabokov, speaking of the same:

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it[….] Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.

Note, then, that what sounds like the despair of Sterling Smith is merely lent to the work. It’s what the work asks for, as it belongs to an idiom, as the music sounds depressing. It is the music, then, that calls to the life, and not the other way round. Or rather, the music is not the expression of a life, but what is called from it, in much the same way, perhaps, as in a double star system, one sun may draw from the fiery substance of the other.

One sun licks part the life of the other away, devouring it. And that black sun – the music – draws forth some part of the life of Sterling R. Smith and not the whole. That it calls into being part of what Smith is and can be, even as he is more (and less) than that. It is in this sense, then, that the soul is opened. In this sense, in his music, that it is only open, the bruise that sings. For it is wounded as the work opens; it is what is summoned to the surface by the work; it is what is made to speak.

A silly example. Discussing the song ‘Helicopter’ in an interview, Andy Partridge says

the whole thing probably came out of the guitar pattern sounding a bit like the blades of a chopper[….] It was probably, ‘Oh that’s a bit like the blades of a helicopter – there we go, that’s what the song’s about.’ Sometimes it would take no more than that. In fact, that’s a big thing for me – the onomatopoeic sound of the instrument you’re writing on.

The lyrics follow the music. The music summon the lyrics because of the onomatopoea. And likewise in the double star system of Sterling Smith and Jandek, it is Jandek that summons from Smith’s life what accords with the music. And since the music, for the most part (and I am thinking here of the recent run of albums) sounds depressed, or desolate, or terrified, these are the kinds of lyrics it summons.

The exceptions here, of course, are the two love albums, in particular, When I Took That Train, whose lyrics, recalling the thrill of infatuation and romance, jar horribly with the music. It is not even that the music voids what is sung of romance, of magic – this might be interesting, making a numb album, an album that voids romance in romance – but that it seems merely a tiresome exercise, a throwaway music, Sterling Smith responding lazily and inappropriately to what Jandek asks of him.

There is another temptation, to which Smith, I think, succumbs on several recent live recordings, including the recently released Manhattan Tuesday: to personalise the lyrics, to link them too strongly to the vicissitudes of his own life, as if it were the measure of what Jandek were capable. In truth, Smith’s depression, real or not, does not matter to Jandek. Or that what matters is what it becomes such that the black star can burn it away from the surface of its double, swallowing it, sacrificing it, so that songs can come.

I have always smiled at the idea of Corwood Industries. We have the artist, Jandek – this naming Sterling Smith and whoever he performs with, even if he performs with no one, and the record label, distributor and booking agent (for his recent gigs), Corwood Industries. That Sterling always allows to speak in the first person plural. Always ‘we’. I think the promoter Barry Esson is part of this ‘we’ – didn’t he announce himself recently as a representative from Corwood Industries?

Either way, Corwood, who is nothing other than Sterling Smith (who seems to have another company, Sterling Smith holdings, registered to the same address) releases albums by Jandek (Sterling Smith and associates), distributes the albums, books gigs and so on. This means Sterling Smith, in the guise of Corwood, is not obligated to speak of Jandek as though he were part of it. That he can speak of Jandek’s albums as units to be shifted, or discuss distribution problems with customers on the phone.

At the same time, of course, he is part of Jandek; and for the most part of his career, he is Jandek, pretty much. When you book a Jandek gig with Corwood, as I understand it, it is the Representative from Corwood, plus band, whom you book to play. All this is wonderful. It shows a kind of humour, it’s fun, but also displaces questions of the identity of the performer with respect to what is made. It is a way of bracketting troubling questions of agency and responsibility, and the whole insistence, in our media age, of accounting for artworks in terms of the life of the artist.

In a real sense, I think all this is a way Sterling Smith responds in friendship to us, listeners to Jandek. It is his way of answering to the music of Jandek in a manner that is honest and responsible. Reading interviews with musicians, I am always struck the religious motifs that surface when they describe their creativity. The most sensible of musicians wax religious, as if the only vocabulary they can use, the only one suitable even in our secular age, is that of God, of angels, of the divine.

I do not laugh at this. It is courageous in its way, for all that it refuses the idea that the human being might be the measure of the work. A religious vocabulary is almost necessary – it is pretty much all we have to go on – when displacing agency in this way. Thinkers like Heidegger and Blanchot have attempted to produce another vocabulary for the process in question, but their work is not well known to come into common currency.

In friendship – Smith watches over the music of Jandek, but he does not do so for himself. He is not the only listener. From the first, from Ready for the House onwards, he knows other people will listen. He knows he even owes it to them, to get them to listen. Thus, from the first, although he is uninterested in claiming responsibility for these albums, for standing in place of Jandek, giving interviews, allowing himself to be photographed, he wants units shifted. Wants to find ways of distributing them.

Whence the near comedy of Corwood sending out boxes of albums to anyone who expressed an interest. Give them out free, Smith says. Distribute them. Very few albums were sold. Indeed, a complete lack of interest in the 1000 copies of Ready for the House pressed up back in 1978 made Smith almost give up recording altogether. Fortunately, a couple of reviews came in. His records were played on college radio; he began to record again, and from that time 1981, there’s been at least one new album a year.

On the sole interview with Jandek, included as a special feature on the DVD, we hear Smith saying he has to release one or two albums a year, in order to keep Jandek afloat. That those one or two albums are sufficient for Jandek not to disappear completely as a known recording artist. And there is the sense that Smith owes something to Jandek, that there must be some strategy to keep the name in the eye of the public (what little public he had). That he was in debt in some way, that Jandek kept him, Smith, afloat, that it made sense of his life.

And I think that is the other side of the double star system I have described. It is not just that Jandek sucks life from Smith, drawing incidents that fit with the idiom of the music, requiring him to write appropriate lyrics, to sing, to drawl, but that Smith draws some comfort from the presence of Jandek, too. In one sense, he is responsible for Jandek – this music has been placed in his care. He must look after it, tend it, and make sure it is passed on.

This is the friendship Smith has not only for Jandek, but for Jandek’s potential audience. In another, Jandek watches over him. It orientates his life; it makes it greater than it is. Smith, by way of Jandek, is more than he can be, and this is marvellous. Who would not want something in their lives to live or die for? That, I suppose, is part of having children: your life gains a sense, a direction. It makes sense as something which can be substituted for others.

And isn’t this what is alive in left wing politics too – the sense that you have always usurped the place of others, that you have taken their place, the nameless sufferers, and that you must, in turn, substitute yourself for them? Each time, it is sacrifice, each time, sacrifice lets life make sense. But we should also remember that Stalin asked Russians to sacrifice their lives in view of what was to come, that every dictator has asked the same of his people, and that the figure of sacrifice should itself be sacrificed.

A double star system, then, where each is responsible for the other; where term watches over the other. Why, those present at Jandek gigs have asked, does the Representative from Corwood (the Rep, let’s call him) not acknowledge the audience? Why doesn’t he thank them? Why, when his guitar string breaks, and he passes his guitar backstage for a few minutes, not engage with the crowd, some of whom have travelled thousands of miles to see him?

Because Jandek has asked Smith not to get in the way of the work. That Smith must not interpose, that he must keep away, lest the particularities of his life prevent the music from looming in its magnificent impersonality. Smith is a machine part, a ‘modest recording device’ as the Surrealists said.

And why the cryptic fortune cookie notes in lieu of any real communication with interested fans? Why does he sign them Corwood, not Smith, or Jandek? Because of the same impersonality. Because he does not stand at the origin, and is not the source of Jandek. And because – more broadly – our time does not permit of a vocabulary sufficient to speak of what he, Smith, has experienced. The holy names are missing, as Heidegger says; the holy itself is missing. The holy, as this is one name for the origin of art. Just as origin is only one name for what it names and so is art.

Deleuze says somewhere that no government will ever be leftwing. That to be on the left is a way of perceiving the world, a kind of attitude, that allows you to begin not with yourself, but with the world. A narcissist assumes she is the measure of all things; she begins with herself and brings everything back there. It is the attitude, Deleuze suggests, of the right. But to begin with the world, with the becoming of the world. To begin what is far from you. To remember the origin as it stands outside …This is Deleuze’s left. It is what it means, for him, to be on the left.

The figure of sacrifice, of discipline, is returning in the discourse on the left. Perhaps Deleuze’s position will be regarded as a low point, of politics-as-ethics, of a kind of atomisation of the great political task that should lie before us. We need the party and the discipline of the party; need, that is, not only to escape and find a weapon on the way, but to charge forward as a collective, to work together in hope and discipline.

Perhaps, then, turning to Jandek, thinking of him, is the worse kind of foolishness – that it is itself a kind of narcissism, a petty attempt to retreat from the real arena of struggle. Perhaps it is part of an ethical turn that involves no more than an adjustment to capital, to a way of coping without addressing the conditions of our lives. We are stoics, then, those of us bound in friendship to this or that artist, who have retreated to the garden. And meanwhile Babylon, the empire, is all around us.

(The suite of songs called, on the CD, ‘Afternoon of Insensitivity’ (Manhattan Tuesday) is a sequel of sorts to ‘The Cell’ (Glasgow Monday); there have been other sequels since, recorded live like these albums, that are still unreleased. Considered in the context of Jandek’s many releases, ‘The Cell’ arrived from nowhere; conventional chops, a steady tempo, an august beauty obvious to any admirer of Bach. ‘Afternoon’ suffers by comparison not musically – it is an extraordinary brew – but lyrically, with the obtrusion of the lyrics. There’s too much directness, too many long words that do not scan; they do not explore a mood, but force it. Anyway, here are a few impressionistic notes I wrote to accompany my 10th listening of the album.)

You can hear it as it comes into being, the music. Crawling out of nothing like the first amphibian from water. Comes into being, condenses as from the air. A mist that is sometimes a fog, becoming suddenly dense. And then dispersing a little – white, blank forms drifting apart.

The bass, discovering a pattern, a pulse seems to tread. The guitar squawls without notes. Textures matter, not forms. The bass treads, the organ seems to follow it. Then the vocals slide in. Vocals, spoken-sung, a little above the simmering music. A speech-song above the pulsing tread.

A resigned singing. A singing that begins in a mood, out of a mood, not questioning it, but searching within it. A voice in the fog of a mood. Washes of guitar – no notes. And the drums and the bass locked together, forward-treading. And the vocals, a new style for Jandek. Drifting mist above the cauldron. ‘There’s just this empty time/ I must persevere throuuugh’.

A speech-song borne. That searches above the musical bed. Horizontally, moving from side to side like a snake. A singing in two dimensions, restrained, half-crushed. That does not rise to look around. That slinks forward with the music’s wash.

Are these songs? Slices of mood rather. Slices that seem to end almost aribtarily, that start up again, after applause, in the same way. That begin again as they began before, spinning out guitar squawls over the void. And the Korg synthesiser set to organ treading forward. And the percussion starting up, rolling forward. A pulse discovered. A pulse that holds the music steady. That gives the music its measure.

But it is all about the singing that, with this second track, glides into the music like a crocodile. And as usual with Jandek, singing is followed by a break from the lead instrument in a call and response. Words drawled, though clearly sung. And then a keyboard run. And behind this, the squawling pulse of the guitar.

The steady trudge of the drums. Forward somehow. But as though in orbit around a pulse. Forward, though turning around a pulse, measured by it. The music throbs, simmers. There is a tension – will it boil? Will it wander off the pulse and break into noise? But it is steady, so far. Steady two tracks in. Patient and measured. And the singing sliding along the surface of the water like a sea-snake.

Percussion bubbling. Bass pulsing, bursting from itself. And guitar squawls without notes. This a slab of music. A swamp, heavy and bubbling. A swamp of some poisonous brew, some foul mix of chemicals bubbling from the depths. Bubbling up and releasing its fumes.

A jungle scene. Life everywhere, but life gone wrong. Strange mutations. A foul, creeping menace. Steam from the water at midday. Tar swamps. Swamps of what disgusting substance? what brew? That seems to be gathering itself up now. Led by the organ as the organ rises in pitch. That seems to reach upwards a little. That has advanced onto some lower slope.

The tempo rising. The music intensifying. ‘React with indifference/ As bombaaaarded by the woooorld’. ‘God knows the uuuuuuuse’ -and that last word howled high and torn apart. And now the music simmering back down again, off the boil. Why did it boil then and simmer now? No why, no pattern. It is, it spins on, a bridge over nothing. Simply a slab of song, a swamp. That bubbles.

And now the guitar plays rising notes – lovely. Rising up like the neck of some diplodocus from the jungle. Before it is allowed to wash again. Before it washes over the trudging pulse. And again comes the singing. Comes again, without melody, an instrument like any other. ‘Crazy dumb thoughts/ Afternoon of in-sens-i-tivity’ – lyrics in couplets. Two couplets and then on, the plunge back, the sea snake vanished.

Steady as she goes. Steering in the marshes. Brushing aside the dangling fronds. How long is this song? How long can it be? ‘Why – am I – so – empty?’ The song carries its own Law. ‘Living long and living deep/ I did not see – relativity …’. ‘But I don’t mind/ I don’t mind.’ ‘There’s a kind of numbness/ that I know …’ And the organ stops. The music stops with it. Applause again, and now?

A few seconds gap. Suspense. Then the organ starting lower. The guitar. And the organ walks along. Just organ and guitar for now. The jungle again. The marshes again. Back to the foul and fetid scene. What is that wierd squeaking? The song of birds turned inside out. The pain of minerals. Nothing is alive here. Beyond life, or life gone strange, unrecognisable.

And now the singing. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life/ I was about 11 years old on a summer’s day/ I was aware of the nothingness/ I said to my mother, there’s nothing to do/ She said just go outside, you’ll find something/ So I went outside and – did things.’ Comedy, but no laughter.

This run of lines spoken. Intoned. ‘Now it seems/ There’s more to do inside than outside/ But still there’s nothing to dooo/ We simply manufacture circumstances that give the necessity to do something’ – the last line awkward, it does not scan. It obtrudes from the music, forcing its way forward. Too present, and so with the next lines. I want the music again. I want the organ to enclose the scene. And it comes.

He sings something about the mind. Escaping nothingness. ‘It doesn’t seem we humans are happy/ we’re just in situations that force us to act.’ This is a treatise, a reflection. That comes into clarity in the fetid swamp air. That rises into lucidity, a kind of swamp noon. As if to say: the mind itself is wrong. The mind is where it went wrong, strange life, strange mutation. That correlates with nothing. That looks out, but for what? That searches, but for what?

‘Just go outside/ the elements will teach you to respond.’ And all these lines sung more firmly than before. And now it ends, shorter than the second part. Applause. And on again. I think of Aldiss’s Hothouse, and the idea he has that the mind comes from without, outside, as from a parasite or an infection. A Burroughsian idea. Or of Kerans heading SOUTH in The Drowned World. There are keyboard washes now, for the first time. The pulse has fallen back.

‘Staring out the window/ No expression/ Must have seen things/ It’s – the highway …’ Sung-spoken a little higher. Intoned more breathily, and higher. There’s more lethargy in the music. The swamp in the afternoon. The organ playing a rising flourish of notes (was it the organ playing these rising sounds earlier? the guitar?). The diplodocus’s neck craning up. More wierd squeaks. More birds turned inside out. Obscene life. Life gone wrong.

‘Don’t want to hurt/ Don’t want anything/ It’s no use/ Just lay low …’. ‘They have hope, those – creators/ No creation here/ record of falling – erections/ the edifice of meeee.’ The lines coming quickly. Words staccato. Blankly sung-spoken. Climax: ‘I can’t let them have me/ God how worse can that be!’ Sung in horror. The singer wanting to keep – what? The non-creation. The crumble of edifices. Land slumping into swamp.

‘Depression is consoling/ At least it’s mine/ I can be a slave to depression/ But at least it’s mine/ The scary world of losing control/ is far worse/ No reason to be/ is something I know/ There’s no overpowering outside force/ To excuse myself/ Well, I don’t care.’ So literal. Too literal. Absolutely clear over the music, which I want to come back again. ‘I don’t want to care/ it seems alien/ oh sure, there’s beauty/ it’s quiiiet heeere …’ And on, in the same metre, pretty much. ‘Nothing’s interesting/ The only interesting thing is nothing/ That’s all I want/ I care – about nothing.’ And the song ends. Applause.

What stage have we reached? The third and fourth pieces, which straddle the double album were confessional. The lyrics do not wind and turn, but seem to have hardened themselves into a theme. A theme has coalesced. I feel uneasy. As though the lyrics were too dominant, too clear. That the sunlight burns the swamp vapours away. What am I looking for as I listen? The murk. The river of tar spread everywhere.

‘Is it just go outside/ and you’ll find something to do …?’ A continuity of concern links song to song. A reflection intoned. A musing. Do I need to set out its principles here? But I’m listening, not analysing. ‘I can’t die/ to the why/ that loooms/ in my consciousness’. I listen to the long ‘loooms’, and without understanding. I want to force the music back into obscurity. To let it lose itself, away from the lyrics. I can’t stand the over-explicitness of the lyrics. Their obtrusiveness. Their crude non-scanning. That makes the song serve them and not the other way around.

I’d prefer a feverish vocal. Lyrics that bubbled, that rose up of themselves from the music like parts of dreams. Fever-dream lyrics, the dreams of Colonel Kurtz, lost in the jungle. ‘Okay, so what now/ What does one who doesn’t care do?/ Does he step to force himself to deal with the result of those steps’. I’m being forced to think. Forced to lift myself as a listener back into the first person, to ponder the lyrics, to muse with the singer. But I want to listen – and without understanding (with no miiiind as Jandek might sing).

But now this song, the fifth, has worn away and the sixth, too, has passed. The last song begins with more urgency. The tempo’s up. The current’s quickening … There’s no guitar anymore. It fell away somehow. No squawls … And the music is wrapped around the voice, the lyrics. The steam has almost been burned away from the river. A clearing has been hacked into the jungle. The undergrowth’s been cut back …

(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. 

It sounds like Miles Davis in the early 70s. A spooked, wah-wahed guitar. The shifting fog of the organ setting on a Korg synthesiser, notes played (by the Representative himself) as if looking for something. Carefully, slowly, but looking nonetheless in the murk. The songs I’ve heard so far (the disc is playing right now) take a while to bubble and simmer before the vocals come in, which, when they do, are also spooked, emerging from the murk and wandering with it.

This is a mood piece, but the mood thick and heavy. The instruments roll together in a strange, simmering broth. ‘I can’t fight no longer/I don’t recognise the battle.’ Is there anything new lyrically? ‘It’s all so useless/ Why do it?’ Perhaps only the way it is sung – drawled, as always, lugubrious, as it is sometimes, but somehow feeling its way forward in the murk.

Manhattan Tuesday arrived this morning. I came down in the lift to go out for a quick lunch before work. And I saw it: a cardboard box, a foot deep, half a foot wide and tall, in the pigeon hole for my department. And thought: is that it? And then, going to it, saw the unmistakeable handwriting on the dispatch note. My name, my address, and then the signature: Sterling R. Smith. Excited, I stood in queue to get the lift back up to the office, so I could unseal it and open it up.

A few minutes passed. Frustration. And then the lift, and then the office, and then I opened it savagely, ripping the cardbox flaps. And there they were: all the CDs and DVDs in Corwood’s catalogue. All of them, shrink wrapped and in chronological order and packed with styrofoam and plastic in the to protect them. Is there a note?, I asked myself. I took the CDs out and stacked them on the floor. No note. I was disappointed. I’d written to Corwood to ask permission to quote lyrics and music. No note.

But then I saw it: a sheet of paper folded into four, and on one side, a note, granting me permission. And a signature: Corwood. I put the folded sheet into my pocket like a talisman. And I saw, unasked for, Manhattan Tuesday was also enclosed. A gift. The CDs themselves, 50 of them, were almost uniform in appearance.

The discs were blue. It’s Corwood blue, I thought to myself. The inlays a single sheet of paper, quite thin. The spines of the CDs were almost entirely regular, but not quite. And the layout on the back of the CDs were likewise not quite uniform. Imperfections, I thought. That’s not how Corwood want it.

And the covers themselves, with which I’m familiar from the Jandek site … here they were, in person. Anti-photographs, as they’ve been called, just as the music’s been called anti-music. How they seem to beg for a context, a story. I Threw You Away, with the photo from Cork (I visited the exact same spot not long ago). And the cottage on the cover of Glasgow Monday, The Cell.

There’s a great deal to be written about all of this, I thought. And there are 35 posts to go this summer, until I reach 50 (one for each of the albums). 50, and all of them notes for a long article, and perhaps a book to come. That’s what the summer’s for, I thought. This is my Jandek summer, I thought.

I was up very early this morning, as always. Up early, and to write about Jandek, but what to write? About the alleged lack of musical proficiency, I thought. The alleged amusicality. Write about that, I thought, and set everyone to rights. Write about what passes for proficiency and what is more proficient than mere proficiency. Didn’t W. say the Representative knew his way around the guitar?, write that. And find the choicest quotes from Irwin Chusid’s interview on the DVD and use that, I thought.

But it was very early, and I was tired. I thought, as I often do, I would like to begin a post with the phrase, I wandered from room to room. And thought, no: some discipline is required. Thought: writing needs to be flung in a particular direction. And this is summer is Jandek summer, I thought. The summer is all for Jandek, I thought.

As I type, Manhattan Tuesday plays on. Didn’t I read the lyrics the other day? I wondered whether they worked. And now I hear the part about depression. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life/ I remember once when I was about eleven years old/ On a summer day/ I was aware of the nothingness of life.’ And I think to myself: this is Jandek’s version of Blanchot’s primal scene (quote here, scroll down), where the child looks up at the sky and sees – nothing. ‘I said to my mother, there’s nothing to do/ She said, just go outside, you’ll find something to do/ So I went outside and did things/ Now it seems there is more to do inside than outside/ But still there’s nothing to do.’

It’s an early summer evening in my city. Heavy wind blew grit in my eyes. I came home to soothe them. Home, and drank from the bottle of wine already opened. And piled up the Jandek CDs I brought home, there beside the washing machine still stranded in my living room. And went in the other room and lay down to hear Manhattan Tuesday. And thought of the leak coming down the bathroom wall from the burst soil pipe and how it must have been leaking all along. And wondered why the plumber hadn’t come yet to fix it, why repairs always take so long.

It’s upstairs’ responsibility. Or the property management company who run it. And I thought, there’s no sense dwelling on it. No sense getting annoyed. And thought, there’s always something to be annoyed about, and if you want to be annoyed, your annoyance will range out and find something. And that perhaps I was in annoyed frame of mind, and that I should lie down and let it pass.

So I lay, and listened. And then I came here into the other room, with a desire to write. I thought, if only I could write, then something would happen, and I’d no longer feel annoyed. Thought: if I write something down, then I’ll have a little distance, for writing affords me that. To set it down for distance, to write of the day and somehow be rid of the day, even as I am in the midst of it. But pushing it away, just a little. And enough to – what? Enough to do what?

And thought, too, that this will be the summer of romance, that I’ll be Visited again. That the Visit begins about a month from now, and it will be our summer, a summer of romance, in which my Jandek summer will be secretly furled. My visitor does not care for Jandek, alas. Few people do. I think W. does. I burned him some CDs. And I sent a friend back to his distant country with a few burned CDs. And I spoke the name Jandek at a conference, to which I’d brought a few burned Jandek CDs to give away. Jandek summer, the summer of romance, both at once, one overlaying the other. One laying down upon the other.

Disc 2 now, of the 2 disc set of Manhattan Tuesday. There’s a new kind of singing on this album, I’ve said that. And a new speech-singing, a sprechstimme (nice word, because it lets the word Stimmung, mood, resound in it). The part about the child and the mother (Jandek’s primal scene) was spoken. And now this fourth song, the first on disc 2, is spoken. ‘I can be a slave to depression/ but at least it’s mine.’ Too confessional, I think. Too direct – it invites too simplistic an encounter. Invites biographical interpretation, and that the key to Jandek would lie in the biography of the Representative.

Pause. Drink some wine. Soothe your eyes. Listen again. The simmering, the bubbling. It’s Miles from the 70s all over again. It’s ‘He Loved Him Madly’ from Get Up With It all over again. A song 30 minutes long that I never want to end (and especially as it is followed by a song on that album in a very different mood).

But this song – Jandek’s – is only part of a suite. A suite – Afternoon of Insecurity – that makes up the whole of Manhattan Tuesday. A title I do not like, I admit. That bodes ill. Not another misstep, I wonder, like that of The Door Behind and When I Took That Train – the romance albums. Not another over-literal Jandek album, I think.

But there is the murk of the music, thankfully. There is the swirl of that organ, and that wah-wahed guitar drenched in effects so that it could almost be Miles’ trumpet. And the suite presses on. Bubbles, makes a kind of bed across which the singing – the speaking-singing – can glide.

‘There’s nothing to do/ Is it just go outside and you’ll find something to do …’ Stay inside instead. Inside, for the whole of your life, there where there’s nothing to do. Nothing – and you are inside with nothing. No one with nothing, keeping it company. The long wake with nothing that is the whole of your life, and inside.

And outside? The outside is too full of distractions. Outside distracts from the sense that there’s nothing to do. Always something to do outside, but in fact this merely conceals the fact that there’s nothing to do. The voice is high, strangely high. As though lifted from itself. High up – stretched strangely into the air. And speaking – but in a high voice. Speaking – this is a tract. Is it over-literal? Do the vocals emerge to clearly from the murk? I think they do …

‘I can’t die/ to the why that looooms …’: those rhymes he likes sometimes. Rhymes that divide a line into couplets. And the long ‘looooms’ and two half cries, ‘aieeee’. And still the organ, creeping on. And the rattle of the drums. And can I hear a plucked bass? The guitar is quiet, for now. The organ has gone church-like.

I think this is music to listen to from another room. To let the singing, the speech-singing fall back into the murk and be dissolved there. Too literal – this is a tract. ‘Ok – so what now/ So what does one who doesn’t care do?’

Write some more, I tell myself. You haven’t written enough, I tell myself. You need some distance, and from the day, the evening. It’s really blowing outside, but you are inside. Don’t let the wind blow you around in here. You’ve a bottle of wine opened. Drink. Offer yourself some wine. It’s good, dark wine. Good for being uncorked for a few days.

Didn’t W. drink from it the other day? Didn’t he want a glass of wine when we were back from the pub, and ask to see the opening of Satantango again, with the cows. I was falling asleep, I remember that. I said to him, I’m falling asleep, and he said, alright, I’ll finish this wine and go to bed. I was on my blowup bed on the floor, he on the bed in the bedroom, whose slats collapse when you lie on it too heavily.

Write some more, I tell myself. Write of trivial things. Remember Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s song from their suite about Andy Warhol: A Dream. ‘It was a very cool, clear Fall night’ … narrated by Cale. Was it from Warhol’s Diaries? It seems to speak like Warhol, like all of Warhol. I like people, says my Visitor. She likes to read about people. With A Dream, I feel close to Warhol. And close to Cale and Reed’s closeness to him, and their need to be close to him.

But A Dream – something about the way it’s recorded opens up space. Opens it up. And the voice, Cale’s, held against that openness. Speak-singing about nothing, about everything. Conjuring up the quiddity of a life. Its quiddity – its string of haecceties, one after another. And I feel close to Warhol. And I feel close to the closeness to Warhol shared by his two friends, who sing for him.

And then I remember how I thought once that to spend time with another – a human being, a cat – is to learn of that secret integrity they have. That secret stringing together that makes them consistently them. A style of being, uniform. And that is somehow good, that is full of goodness. And remembered how it came to me as a revelation, that thought. That you could discover a vast, diffuse goodness in that way.

And that that what’s old married couples might know of one another. And that that’s what it might mean to struggle through life with another. And I remember again the ordinary heroisms of that Winterbottom film, what was it called. Of a man unemployed who had to get the house clean for his wife coming home, and then it wasn’t clean and she was angry and he left the house and went out, and then, after a while – this was one of the story-arcs of the film – came home. Home, because that’s where she was. And hadn’t she learnt by his exit of what he also was, besides an irritant?  And that that was a part of their living together, and of a whole life together, that that’s what it might mean, to live together, and for a whole life.

And the CD is playing. Where are we now? A new track – is it the last? has an hour passed? an hour since I say down to write. An hour here as the night is turning, the sky getting greyer? The organ sound is more assertive. It sounds as though something will be resolved, something brought to an end. The song is no longer murky, but determined, sure. It’s rising and finding, to a plateau in the jungle. To a vantage point that will let us listeners see where we have travelled. And will give the artist, too, a sense of what has gone before.

Ah, the song is heating up. The organ plays in a thick single chord – crescendo. And then down again. A down swoop. And he’s singing. ‘It’s the saaame chair’. A favourite motif from Jandek: a chair. In a chair, I stare. I don’t know what to do but sit in a chair. Didn’t I say once to X., ‘she doesn’t even know how to sit in a chair.’ As an ultimate dismissal. To say: she doesn’t know that, not even that. To sit. Just to sit. To be resigned. Not to resign oneself – but to be resigned.

To have come to the end of something. To have been brought to the end. Until there’s just that: sitting, and for no purpose. Sitting, waiting – but for what. Waiting without object. Waiting that’s worn out waiting. Until sitting in a chair is enough. Enough – because it’s a beginning. Things can begin from here. It’s a kind of inside. And to sit in a chair is already something.

I’ve no more to write, and only a drop more wine. These early summer evenings last forever. Never a dimming. Never do the curtains need to be drawn. And I would like to draw them. Against – the day. The outside. The wind that moves the clouds quickly across the sky. I would like the control the source of light. To sit in a dark room with pools of light from lamps that I switch on. There’s too much light – it’s everywhere. Everywhere, and even now, in the evening. This evening, this mid May evening, early summer – or is it late spring – from which Jandek summer begins to open. This late spring one month from my Vistor’s Visit …

No electric guitar on this one. You can hear the bass play. ‘Fear was the other door’ … something is resolving itself. Is coaming to an end. I’m tired. I’d like to go next door and rest again, and close my eyes again. Tonight, what is to happen tonight? I must finish my wine and cycle out. Finish it and go out with my bike, into the still-bright night. Having opened this space in the day. Having had it opened, set behind me like the musical background in A Dream. Against which Cale speaks. Against which I would like to speak-sing.

Ah, beautiful, the rising plucked bass, with the rising organ notes. The clatter of drums. It’s coming to an end, it must be. I’m waiting – and it’s ended. Applause (but no cries, as after Glasgow Monday, The Cell – how I love those cries, those whoops). As I must end here, without applause (but I do not want applause).

[Welcome to visitors to the blog searching for Jandek via Google. You all seem to end up here. Other Jandek posts here. There’ll be at least 50 in total when I’m done.]

The voice frightened – is that what it is, in late Jandek, in the recent run of albums? A frightened voice, cowed somehow, fearful – but of what? Of raising its voice. And even of singing. A voice frightened of what it will become in song. Yes, I think there is that fear, but that is not all.

Fear – but isn’t there a kind of courage that gathers itself in the music, that allows itself to be gathered? That, beginning, lets the beginning be carried forward, as the song reaches that field of possibility in which it can stretch itself out. As it reaches its milieu and tests its possibility like the first flight of a bird. Only this is a bird that must plummet and only plummet.

That its freedom is lent at once to following of necessity. That freedom is indistinguishable from nonfreedom, as it comes to this necessity. As it comes into it, inherits it. As it rolls forward with it, and rolls from it, the source – freedom, necessity one and the same is what repeats itself in its going forward. Nonpulsed time in pulsed time, the amplification of the same unfolding in place. Until the song is only what carries repetition forward, the freedom-fate with which it began.

Fearful – no doubt. But there are many moods here. Many low, crushed moods. Many moods that are reached only by the downpress of the a great weight. Crushed, almost broken, but not quite broken. Still the chance of singing, and playing. Still the movement forward in the idiom and even of the idiom, for the idiom, too, is enlarged by the movement of the late albums. Is deepened and broadened as the singer sings in the crush.

Freedom-necessity. What does it mean today to write of fate? And why should fate lead this way to a music of near absolute despair? Is it because fate is always relative to an idiom – that to make an idiom (to make it by making, for one can never be constituted in advance), to deepen it, is to follow in some sense what that idiom permits (freedom) even as it seems to bore forward in a single channel, being completely constrained (fate, necessity)?

I’ll need to make a topography of idioms … to map and chart the landscape of music. Does Donny Hathaway follow the idiom of soul? Does James Carr? What do they each open within soul? What is driven forward? And what becomes of jazz with Sam Rivers? And what of Derek Bailey’s claim to have discovered, in free improv, the non-idiomatic, the non-idiom outside?

In each of these performers there is, perhaps, a way they break away from something. That there is a cut at a certain point, and something new becomes possible. A new concentration. A new directedness, where it is as though you would only have to follow yourself, to take a step forward, for it to be revealed.

Vague thoughts, poorly formulated. But that moment when this new freedom carries with it a necessity, that you must do nothing other than create, that song must follow song, that you arrive at the studio without songs knowing only that there must be recordings.

But why Jandek, then? Why Jandek, and for me? Is this a question about my taste? About my physiology? About my history as a listener? About my place within a culture of listening and within a culture as a whole? Why focus on the moods of fear and anxiety? Why these moods and not others?

What kind of autobiography would I need to write to answer this question? What kind of cultural analysis? What philosophical leap that would take me beyond culture and all the way to the conditions of culture? What account of amor fati that would drive taste into the body? What account of mood that would speak of the attunement of peoples and epochs? What poetics would I need that would inform the appeal to bear the idiom of the music on the page, in prose? What relation to language that would let language sing like Jandek? 

In some sense, I tell myself, you must have FALLEN to listen to Jandek. That these are songs that are broken away from success, and from the criteria of success. That he sings after a fall, that these are songs sung FALLEN, that their cry rides up from a FALLEN place. That he went to the end of something and beyond it, as you must go to the end. That the field of the possible was exhausted, that it was no more a question of the body’s strength nor of its weakness, but of what happens at the end of strength and that of weakness. FALLEN – as if it brought its own broken wisdom.

But might the music not show you the way that falling will happen? Does it not stretch out like the steepchaser the line along which the tower will fall? Then it is not that you must have FALLEN but that you listen along those cracks that will allow you to break. It’s not that Jandek unleashes an explosion inside, that somewhere inside you are demolished. Not, then, that you life must have already broken, but that there are faults along which you life will break. Faults, fractures that exploded open with your birth. That what you are is also broken, and it was ever thus.

To die, then, before you die. To fall before you are FALLEN. The song sings along the cracks. Reaches you there, where the ruin is beginning.

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?

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.

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.

Our reservations about the oeuvre of a favourite artist are telling, instructing us about who we take that artist to be, about what is essential to them. It is a bad habit, but I like, I must admit, reading the lyrics of Jandek’s songs as they are reproduced at Seth Tisue’s website, as they are not on the stark, almost bare album covers put out by Corwood Industries.

Excitedly anticipating the new album, a document of a suite of songs performed live at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, I cannot resist going through the lyrics in advance. And what do I find? For me, a disappointingly personal string of lyrics – lyrics which do not obscure what they are about; lyrics that demand to be read literally, as though they were a document of the experiences of the lyricist.

This is a disappointment, of course, which says a great deal about me and my relationship to Jandek’s music – which says everything about what I take Jandek to be and more, what I want Jandek to be, as though Jandek were only the blank screen upon which I would project my fantasies.

What I want are lyrics that are oblique, and ride the music obliquely – lyrics that speak directly of nothing, but send speaking, singing, on a vast impersonal detour – a detour as vast as that taken by the music itself from the idiom to which it belongs and does not belong. I want it that what is sung does not ask to be taken literally – that it is vague enough, open enough, to encompass all the readings that are brought to it. Not that they can be made to say everything and nothing, but that what is said – sung – is done so with the voice, with the music, so that it belongs with the mood of the vocalising and the music itself, lowering itself into as into a bath.

I want the lyrics to ride a mood, not to convey something extraneous to the mood (the lyrics of the love songs of When I Took That Train sit too strangely with the creeping sadness of the music, of the singing), nor to double up that mood, literalising it, as I suspect is happening with the first of the songs (which I have not yet heard) of Manhattan Tuesday (but certainly there is the same doubling up on Newcastle Sunday …) I want the mood to attune the lyrics – for the lyrics to fit the voice and the music, to be borne along by it without forcing itself into my attention.

True, my disappointment comes from my foolishness for reading the lyrics in advance of hearing the songs themselves. But what does this reveal about who I take Jandek to be? What do I want from Jandek, that sees me, too, exclude his early collaborative albums from my idea of Jandek?

An anecdote instead of a direct answer. As I looked at Jandek’s album covers, I thought at once of the second Palace album, that became known as Days in the Wake. The curtains behind the face in shadow on the cover, and the shadowy face itself seemed a homage to Jandek, as did the recording techniques on the album itself – straight to reel-to-reel (or was it a simple cassette recorder?) in Will Oldham’s kitchen. And I felt a disappointment: why was it necessary to make a homage? And why did Will Oldham turn from these early recording techniques, letting his albums become ever more lush?

Foolish thoughts, because I like those later albums, and their production. Foolish, but revealing, because it seems I want an artist who remains him- or herself, an artist strong enough to remake the idiom of which they are part, and to brace themselves against the world, against production techniques, say, and against appearing simply and easily as themselves on their record sleeves. Foolish, as I said.

And I thought at once of Smog’s Doctor Came at Dawn, and how that was essential album of Bill Callahan’s oeuvre, insofar as it stayed with a mood, lowering itself into it, remaining with it, attuning itself to it, lyrics following the grain of the music, and of Bill Callahan’s own baritone. That album, rather than the albums that came after – because I want an artist to pursue their own legitimate strangeness (Char), to follow the course of what only they can provide – in the case of a singer, that follows the grain of their voice, their vocalising.

This is why, for example, I admire the solo albums of Jason Molina, Let Me Go and The Magnolia Electric Co. – albums of a mood, that follow the course of a mood in a suite of songs. That follow the depths of that mood, letting themselves be carried by it (and this also so, magnificently, for the best songs of Smog’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love). As though there was a kind of necessity to that mood, a claim that claimed music, lyrics, everything.

Listening to Jandek, I thought: why did Bill Callahan give up on that mood on later albums? Why did he fall short of it, relying overly on Jim O’Rourke’s production on Red Apple Falls (compare this album with O’Rourke’s Bad Timing)? Again, a foolish thought, but a revealing one: what I wanted of an artist was the pursuit of a mood on album after album. The mood borne by a voice, by a singing, by a playing … and with lyrics that rose from that mood.

And what did I find with Jandek – my Jandek? The continuity of a mood (in my imagination) that ran the course of 50 albums, give or take. Or rather (for me) that discovered itself on Ready for the House and resurfaced at intervals as the real Jandek, the only one. A myth, a fantasy. Then I would want lyrics to be part of the song, and the song a part of a suite, the suite an album, and an album an oeuvre of albums, one after another.

One after another, and released without compromise – recorded on reel-to-reel and self-released, being dependent on no record company. And the artist getting out of the way of the music, letting it be (as Will Oldham and Bill Callahan both do, in their own way). Yes, that’s what I wanted and let myself find (in my imagination) with Jandek.

In my foolishness, I suppose that what I want to hear is an address – a kind of sincerity in music that has nothing to do with what a singer intends to say or hear. A sincerity that bears the music as it arises from a mood, from the simplicity of a mood. That lets itself be discovered in the singing, in the music by the audience but also by the artist, who thereafter must follow that mood, be faithful to it, as though it were a path of research. And this movement would bear both audience and artist; both would be orientated by the same endless task: to follow a mood to its end, to follow the grain of the wood.

The journalist who tracked down Seymour Smith, the chief performer in the ensemble Jandek (an ensemble of just one, for the most part) told him she didn’t get his music. ‘There’s nothing to get’, said Smith. Nothing to get – nothing to seize upon, nothing to cognise. There is only the claim of the music, of the mood of the music, in its simplicity, its demand. A demand you may feel, and that will bear you, entranced, from album to album, or that you will not.

‘There’s nothing to get’, and in my imagination, Jandek was a way Smith gave himself to the demand of a mood, which did not reflect easily and simply his everyday life, but revealed the claim of the music Jandek could not help but make. The demand of a mood as necessity, and a necessity that was never simply autobiographical, but reflected what his voice could do, and what his hands playing a guitar could do. A ‘could’ here, an ability, where freedom gives way to necessity, and it is not a question of choice, but of being chosen.

This was why, in my imagination, he could refuse to compromise, to release his albums through record labels, to give interviews: it was to assist the mood, to follow its grain even as he sought to release his recordings, to get them out there. To assist it by refusing to get in the way of the music, of providing his own interpretations of what there was to ‘get’. And in this sense, there was and is nothing to ‘get’, nothing to seize upon. Except a kind of attunement, a mood that will make a claim upon some and not others.

A mood, in my imagination, that was such that it depersonalised the singer, the musician, until he wandered according to a kind of fate. An impersonal fate; written before he was born. Written in his flesh and his flesh as written. If this was depression, then let it be so. If it was a constitutive melancholy, then let it again be so. But follow it, even as it tore you from yourself, as it widened your soul until you were more than a person.

A depression that no one suffers because there’s no one there to suffer: an impersonal body, and without an ‘I’. And an impersonal body that called out to other such bodies, to bodies attuned to melancholia, and not necessarily because they were depressive themselves. But bodies ready to be so attuned, and to follow the course of that attunement, as it rode itself from album to album. Oh beautiful thought!

Perhaps, here, I am not so wrong. Perhaps it is why the lyrics that speak explicitly of depression, which articulate that depression obtrude all too much – as though, now, the lyricist revealed the key to his oeuvre. A lifelong depression. A temperament of melancholy. Was this what there was to ‘get’? But no, I have not yet expressed my reserve about the lyrics on the new album (an album, I emphasise, I have not heard). Is it that the lyrics translate too unambiguously the language of the clinic into song? Is it that they speak too directly, too readily of what cannot be grasped in such language, and flees from it?

I want to think instead of a sincerity that bears Jandek’s music (my Jandek) – of that desire to communication, to make communication tangible, thick, that means these albums must be released (‘how can I shift some units?’, he asks his interviewer). Let sincerity be the name of what bears a mood, of what lets a mood dwell immanently in what is said. Let it name a kind of saying that laps forward in the said, which repeats itself, saying the same, the same, the same each time, but saying it newly, researching and pushing forward, giving life to a mood, and letting necessity speak. A saying, now, that is more than any individual could explain about the music, and that pushes Seymour Smith aside so that Jandek makes music and Jandek makes song.

A beautiful thought. And what else do I want? To say that this mood, for which depression and melancholy are never quite names, loops through all the sadness of the world, that quivers through all sadness as cosmic strings are said to pass through all matter. That it is not only Jandek that is faithful to this mood, or that Jandek’s faith answers to a faith others cannot help but have. All sadness, then, everyone’s sadness – that’s what loops through the music, that’s what joins it together like a cosmic string.

And now imagine all of music as just such a series of strings, passing through everything in joy and sadness, in every mood, and that this is the universe, these wandering strings, leaping up like flares on the surface of sun, great loops by which mood returns to itself as it sings of itself.

There are some artists in relation to whom our world changes. Or perhaps not the world so much as ourselves who stand at the centre of the world. Or perhaps not even ourselves, but something like our condition – the subjectivity of the subject rather than the subject itself, to put it another way. Something changes, then, about the world, and about who we are.

A scene in the film Diner has always haunted me: a young man insists his fiancee listen to his favourite records. As though they were a piece of him – as though if she loved him, she would have to love them, too. But perhaps it’s not the particular artist you like that is important – the particular album, say, or the particular genre, as the relationship of affinity, of liking.

There are some artists who change our world; but what matters is not the artist so much as that change itself – what we become by listening to them, or what we have already become. As I like to say to W., if I’d heard Jandek sooner, I’d be a different person. Or, if only I’d heard Jandek when I was nineteen; everything would have been different. It is what listening to Jandek would have enabled that is important here, rather than Jandek itself. In truth, the position of Jandek could be substituted by other people, other music lovers, by any number of other artists. The fact that it is Jandek is not particularly important. But is this the case, I wonder?

You might say Jandek was created for the kind of person I am – they make a morose music, an isolated music, a music that has taken some wierd turn into itself. A music across 50 LPs that can be collected and obsessed over – there’s a whole oeuvre to map and to periodise, a sublime task. Then there is the withdrawal of Jandek, or more exactly, Sterling Smith, who is the heart of the group (but it is scarcely a group; Smith plays alone for the most part) and the marvellous website that swirls around the black hole of his absence.

He’s been interviewed only twice – the first time, perhaps, unawares (a telephone conversation was taped), the second time, reluctantly (a journalist tracked him down); and we know when he plays live, he always asks for an exit that will not take him through the audience. Playing festivals, he refuses to stay in the same hotel as the other acts, and (in a gig in Belgium) refuses his fee: he wants to be beholden to no one, and perhaps a lifetime of dayjobs has granted him financial security enough to achieve this independence. Yes, it was as though he was invented to fascinate, and that this fascination threatens to overshadow the music itself.

Happily, I can say I heard the music before I knew the legend. And I think I can also say the latter did not surprise me: a kind of withdrawal already seemed to haunt the music, as if the performer had shut a door against us. Commentators on the Jandek discussion list have noted the way in which his performances seem to hold his audience at a distance; that his lyrics do not only invite identification, or at least that roleplay by which we put ourselves in the narrator’s place, but also push us away.

The music of Jandek remains remote. But I think I heard this withdrawal, too, in the way Jandek occupies an idiom. Like so many others, it is to Skip Spence I link Jandek – hearing a song for the first time, I thought it must be an outtake from Oar; that is, Jandek seems to occupy a lineage, a kind of tradition. To Skip Spence, and perhaps to other outsiders working in the blues/folk idiom … but there was a context for me that made sense of Jandek’s music, an idiom from which it seemed to arrive.

That first night, I went straight to the computer to see what was playing. I looked at iTunes: it was Jandek, but who was that, and how had I arrived at his music? No matter. Everything began that night, only two months ago. I listened, and then found the website …

Why wasn’t I surprised by Jandek’s withdrawal? Because the way he occupied his idiom was already that of an outsider. Here was an outsider’s music, and didn’t the outside also demand a distance from the recording industry? As though the outside might be experienced as a kind of demand, as implying a certain ethos, a way of not only of performing or releasing recordings, but also of living.

As Jandek, inhabiting the group Jandek, Sterling Smith would no longer be what he was. As Jandek, he experienced a demand that turned him aside from himself. Who was he, now? Who had he become? The one who was bound in a relation to the outside, no longer to any particular idiom, but to the outside of which each idiom was in some way a fold, an implication.

Difficult thought. But I suppose it is by playing with open strings, each tuned askew according to conventional tuning, plucked or strummed or left to rattle retaining only the barest structure of folk and blues in the sung lines that accompany the playing. A dissonant music – a music that has only a family resemblance to others in the same idiom. A wierd uncle, a child savant – this is a music that is turned to the edges of an idiom, that tests those edges, suspending them without transgressing them entirely. But does so not wilfully, in deliberate provocation, but by seeming to inhabit music, to live it, in a manner unprecedented.

Drawn to there where musicians and listeners are uncomfortable – but by what kind of necessity? One that makes sense to Jandek, and to those who listen to this unfamiliar music. I suppose dissonance is nothing unusual. I suppose we are well versed in the avant-garde. But here, what is strange about the music is so in relation to a particular idiom (or schema of idioms); it must be understood in contrast to its context, even though for some listeners (I am one of them), it makes perfect sense; it seems absolutely right, and that right away, from the first Jandek we hear.

There are those for whom Beckett’s writings are the end of something, and others for whom it is a beginning, not because one need imitate Beckett, but because something is permitted henceforward because of Beckett’s example. And I think this is what I mean when I tell my friends that it would all have been different had I heard Jandek earlier: that a kind of courage would have been given me – a kind of tenacity. The example of Jandek would have been everything; it would have watched over me as I went to the outside of some other idiom. (Is this a kind of friendship? Blanchot’s dedication: ‘to all my friends, known and unknown.’ Friends by virtue of his work …)

I wonder if you can think friendship as a relation without, in some way, thinking of its terms. Of a relation that somehow precedes or escapes its terms, and lets those terms escape with it, so that friendship – this relation – transforms everything. Foolish thought. But now consider a relation of amity that exists between you and a particular artist. A relation that exists only in view of their work, of what lets them be an artist. Not them as individuals, not the person who works all today so as to have money to finance his releases, pressing up his records – but as the artist they become once these records exist.

I imagine this as a kind of friendship – a relation that with one who changes as artist – who is an artist insofar as he changes, and is no longer, in this case, plain old Seymour Smith. A friendship that is, perhaps, a double of the one Smith feels for Jandek, to the extent, as he will insist very movingly in his interview with the journalist, that Jandek doesn’t need him. (Doesn’t Heidegger eventually say being does not need the human being …?) This is because Jandek is there where Smith changes; Jandek is only the alteration of Smith, and Smith relates to him in a manner analogous to that amity I will claim for myself.

Then both of us, Smith and I, show a friendship for Jandek. A dissymmetrical one – since Jandek is away from us, perhaps higher than us, and a unilateral one – Jandek does not show friendship for us. Even as he watches over us in some way. Even as his presence – the presence of his albums – already testifies to a great, benign force for which God would be one name (God without God).

Then this friendship, this amity, is a kind of shelter. It encloses us, and hides us. And perhaps it shows us, too, a way of inhabiting life in a different way, a new way. At the edge of ourselves, somehow. Changing somehow, just as Jandek – the totality of Jandek – changes with each album released (and the 50th album has just been released).

Kundera says he knew, from his childhood on, the exact sequences of works by his favourite musicians. He knew the continuity of their oeuvres, how they changed. I would like to have followed the course of the albums Jandek released. To have been there early on, twenty years ago, or twenty-five. To have known the continuity of those releases accompanied me in some way, that elsewhere, there was an exemplar. Elsewhere, but also close to me, as though Jandek was closer to me than I was.

But all this without identifying with Jandek. All this because of the refusal of the music of let me identify with it. It does not express in any simple way what I feel. And what does it tell me about my life? But it is what it does not tell me that is the clue. As though by withdrawing it also drew the future ahead of me. As though as it refused me, it opened a way. ‘Discover your legitimate strangeness’, says Char. Occupy life, I tell myself, as Jandek occupies an idiom. Or rather, let your life be in some way occupied as Jandek occupies the life of Sterling Smith.

Orson Scott Card has a story about a future humanity, where musicians are allowed to spend their lives performing undisturbed, and where listeners are allowed to come to the groves where the musicians play. Sterling Smith, I know, is a listener to Jandek. He comes to hear Jandek play just as I do. But how then to listen yourself (but it is not yourself) in the same way?

Then it is not that the place occupied by Jandek could have been taken by others, and that liking the music or disliking it is a matter of what we call taste. It is also that the relation to Jandek lets something else appear – something outside any particular idiom. Or rather, that draws the inside towards the outside, letting it be seen by its dark light. That wears the inside very thin, as though you could hear something else beyond it. And that calls out a demand that is ethical in some sense, that asks you to change your life, and to inhabit that change.

The old prejudice sees the most authentic form of performing in the singer/songwriter, singing along with an acoustic guitar. The troubadour who sings the truth to the powers that be, the songwriter who speaks hushed and intimate truths about her life, the unplugged performance that at last reveals the songs themselves, stripped of their ornamentation: each time, it is a matter of reaching the real, the bedrock, the deep river of song that has always borne us.

Is it this prejudice I inherit in wanting to discover a real Jandek in the solo acoustic recordings? Then it is a way of putting aside the collaborative recordings, and especially those where there is a lightness and humour. To say: Jandek is serious first of all, and seriousness is the real river that runs through his oeuvre, from one album to another, breaking itself up in collaborations only to return to itself again, like the river that braids and then returns to its channel.

Listening to Ready for the House, Living in a Moon so Blue and then, later, Twelth Apostle, Glad to Get Away, and then, later still, I Threw You Away, Khartoum … Each time the return to open string, one chord playing. Each time to the microtone and to a playing that brushes and plucks, sometimes strums or plays strings individually. And, as the albums proceed, a vocal that drawls, that pulls what is sung apart … Isn’t it here the real Jandek can be discovered? Isn’t it here that the singer and guitarist is able to deepen his idiom, to travel further into what it allows him. To proceed along the narrow road that lets his dissonant idiom sing of itself?

Ah, this is naivete! What simplicity! But I want to indulge my fantasy of a man in a room – a man alone in a room with a guitar, with a reel-to-reel tape recorder running. A man alone, and singing, and playing, not of his pain or his despair, but of the pain and despair of his idiom which chose him before he chose it. A singing and playing engaged by the river of song, by blues forms and folk forms, but becoming something else with his singing and his playing – just as blues forms and folk forms are transformed by Charles Mingus or Albert Ayler.

Dissonance. A sound untempered. An idiom sings and plays, and the singer sings and plays to accompany it. No, it is not of his pain that he sings – and sometimes I think the collaborative songs about depression betray the deep river of song for this reason – but of pain in general, of suffering as such. As though he’d discovered a musical idiom that sang of all suffering without sentimentality, without tears. As though an idiom had discovered itself in him that would sing of the suffering of suffering, the way it experiences itself without respite.

As though he passed through Dante’s inferno – through the limbo of pain that precedes bodies. A pain in which parts of bodies throb – a head that aches, a phantom limb – but that allows no body to be constituted. As though pain itself were a river that passed through us all, and came to itself, singing of itself, only in the music of Jandek. Pain is dissonance. But pain not enobled through dissonance, as for Nietzsche. No Wagner. No art music. Pain calm and singing of itself. Suffering suffering itself in song.

The idiom is simple; it does not ask to be enobled. Absent, here, the clash between freedom and necessity that opens up the tragic. Here, freedom has become necessity. Freedom – Sterling Smith, singer, player, experiences the necessity of Jandek. Of becoming Jandek as he sings and plays …

The discovery is there on Ready for the House. What had Sterling Smith undergone to have allowed him to sing and play with that simplicity? What had he experienced that he was brought into that idiom? I imagine he’d written a great many songs before that. I imagine he’d played and sung and recorded many times.

But with Ready For the House there was a new simplicity. An idiom reached itself, shining darkly from itself. A beginning had been found, that was also an end of a long process of experimentation. Experiment gave unto experience. The beginning had found itself; the idiom knew itself and asked to be the subject of the songs it permitted. And it asked for a life to be lived in accordance with itself. That’s what it asked of Seymour Smith, and the formation of Jandek (of the Units, first of all) was the way he responded.

I think he knew the music would never be popular. Gone the avant-garde naivete, fostered by the state sponsorship of Old European countries that atonality would fill the concert halls. True, he pressed up 1000 copies of the album, sending them out in big batches. True, too, that he was discouraged when there was no response to the records he mailed out – and that it took a few favourable reviews to keep him going.

Thereafter, he would get only 300 copies of each album pressed, and sell only a fraction of those. 10 years after he began recording, he’d still only sold 150 copies of the many records he had made. But what did it matter? He’d found a way to bypass the recording industry. He relied, pretty much, only on himself, though he also worked in collaboration. He would not deviate; he didn’t need to, working in the daytime enough to fund his activities. Music was at the heart of his life, but it was not all of his life. He was part of Jandek, yes, but he was also Seymour R. Smith who worked in the world and bought himself an apartment and then a house.

I know those for whom Beckett, and especially late Beckett, is the exhaustion of an idiom – the last remnants of a now old modernity, wearing itself out. And so Jandek’s records can often seem they are reaching an end – his music is music of exhaustion, not beginning. And yet it is by way of this same exhaustion that he allows his idiom to reach itself. It is from the end that the beginning comes – from the sense that everything is exhausted.

Jandek does sing of personal suffering, of what each of us might endure. But of a suffering instead that traverses us by pushing us aside, as though it didn’t need us. An impersonal suffering greater than the world … a cry that is the infinite attenuation of the infinitive ‘to be’. Being, now detached from any being, the given as it is given to no one. The universe as an open wound, with the wind blowing over.

Etymology shows the link between suffering and experience, between pathos and endurance, between undergoing and becoming. But this link is there in the music, before etymology. The music learns and it teaches, and through Jandek. The albums released in the last few years see the wail and the drawl carry the lyrics on its streaming. A wail and a drawl stretched as being is stretched, as the ‘to be’ attenuates itself into the infinite.

Song of the nothing-is-happening. Song of nothing-happens and nothing-can-happen. And yet that this marker of nothing is itself something. That it is itself the new, even as it lets suffering – the suffering of being, of being as suffering – sing of itself. This is why there is also a joy to the music of Jandek – that it is borne by the joy that is the surprise of its possibility, that to sing of nothing is itself not nothing, that there are forms that can be set against the streaming of fatality.

Torn forms, broken limbs and an aching head – the scattering of organs in pain. Scattered as the head of Orpheus was carried along the river when his body was torn apart by the Maenads. But a voice, with Jandek, that is not glorious or beautiful. Dissonance does not burst forth in a great art music, in a concert hall, nor even in the descendants of that art music, funded by the government subsidies of old Europe.

Here is a voice that keeps company with suffering, without glory. That never raises itself from the thickets of pain. A voice lost in the forest of itself, like a bird in one of Max Ernst’s pictures. Here is a music that strums without change, without variation, that refuses, pretty much, the dynamics of tension and release. A music of the end, that is also of the beginning. A music that has seen everything, known everything and worn out the world. Music of the fraying of the world, of the world’s great age. Music of before and after the world.

No melodies, then. Or the barest melodies. No riffs. Or only the ghosts of riffs. No variation, then. Or only the most meagre of variants. For myself, I heard it straightaway, when I came across the song The Humility of Pain by chance. Heard it and knew it straightaway, rising from the other room, from where I heard it. Is it Skip Spence?, I asked myself. What is it? I’ve never heard the like. And I came into this room and looked it up. Jandek – The Humility of Pain. But who sang? And what was this song? …

That was two months ago. And from then on, a river rolled through my days and nights. I worked and came home. Home, and then – holy hush – I listened to one album, and then another. Home and in the quiet, one album, another, experiencing the necessity that revealed itself when I heard The Humility of Pain. And thought: all the music I ever heard has led me to this. Thought: but this is not an ascent, but a descent. Down the winding staircase, I thought. Down like Dante into the depths of hell.

But down until I am the hearing ear in the streaming of limbs and parts and fragments. None of us is whole, I thought. Lizards’ tails without lizards, I thought. We are born then we die. Born and die in life, I thought, and at every moment, glinting upwards like light on water.

Can you trap yourself in an idiom? There’s an album of Jandek that doesn’t work (When I Took That Train) I think because it is a suite of love songs, of the anticipation of love sung drawlingly to the usual dissonance. The lyrics should follow the gain of the idiom, which means Jandek should only sing about despair and numbness. But then an idiom is not trap, but also a way – it is just that the way, in this case, is narrow.

When did he discover it, the idiom that is Sterling Smith’s and hence Jandek’s? It was there, pretty much, with Ready for the House, back in 1978. A whole idiom – an unconventionally tuned guitar, played with few chords or little fretwork pretty much one-handedly, and played for the emotion – strings brushed, plucked, strummed. And dissonantly, on acoustic guitar and sometimes electric, cheaply recorded on a reel-to-reel.

What kind of words go along with that kind of playing? Words that speak of detachment and numbness, to be sure. But there is humour, too – Modern Dances – and sometimes collaborations with other players (Blue Corpse, which is, for me, very overrated). I suppose I want to find an essential Jandek – a Jandek without many blues stylings, the Jandek, I think, which reveals itself in the most recent studio recordings. As though it took 30 years of working within an idiom to finally discover its secret.

And here the sense that it is the idiom that has guided the song-making and lyric writing, and even the idea of Jandek itself: in principle a group project, though typically comprising only Sterling Smith, that has withdrawn from the usual mechanisms of recording and publicity. An oeuvre – 50 albums – that do not compromise (with one exception, which only proves the rule) the idiom that opens with Ready for the House.

As if Sterling Smith knew rightaway that it was only following the idiom, becoming with it, that mattered. And knew from the first that he could not compromise by dealing with record labels or distribution networks: he would sell the records himself, at first in large batches, intended for record stores and radio stations, but then directly to his audience.

I think he says he took a day job partially because he could not live a life with this music, with music making. The idiom exacted a price: imagine: days alone in those rooms we sometimes see on his album covers. Days in the house with only music, and the prospect of music-making. It would be too much. And so he worked – first as a machinst, and then, later in a white collar job. And he prospered enough to buy himself a house in a good neighbourhood.

He’s in his 60s now, Sterling Smith, and releasing what I think is his best material. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum Variations, Glasgow Monday … do these albums, and the gigs he started playing in 2004 indicate he’s retired from work? To one correspondent, he announces in 2003 to get ready for surprises: but what in his life has changed so that he can be along now with music, with music-making?

Perhaps the gigs are a way of getting out and away from his house. A way to expose himself to the demand of music-making in a different way. To work communally, as he had done only sporadically before, and before an audience, which he had never done: a burden was shared. And likely those who play with him – whom I think have little relationship to him outside the gigs – know no burden.

Become what you are, says Nietzsche. But in the case of Seymour Smith, who is also (almost) Jandek: become what the idiom demands. Follow the idiom; become with it. And let it bear your life, too, like the meltwater beneath a glacier that smooths a way for them to reach the sea.

Did his colleagues know what he was making? Did they pay it much heed? Did he seek to keep his endeavour to himself like a secret? We know from those who have interviewed him how uncomfortable he is to be linked with Jandek. Jandek is not him, he says. He may not even be necessary to Jandek, he says. As though Jandek were the concern of an lunatic brother.

In truth, Jandek belongs to the idiom, and when Smith is Jandek, when he makes, when he creates, he is no longer Smith. The idiom demands nothing less. Just as Kafka steps into fiction as soon as he writes ‘he’ instead of ‘I’, Jandek is a step away from Sterling Smith and the others who play with the ‘Representative from Corwood’.

We shouldn’t think of Smith as a recluse, even if he told his early correspondents he had no friends. His reclusiveness is the face of Jandek – that is to say, it is no face at all. Jandek is no one, and Sterling Smith become no one. Who is it that writes and records in his place?

But it’s a narrow idiom, no doubt of that. Narrow, and unappealing to those who dislike dissonance, or the lyrics which trail along behind Jandek’s dissonance. Some have said Seymour Smith is a poet who accompanies himself with his playing, but really it is the other way round: there is the playing and then the lyrics, the poetry. His voice drawls on recent recordings. It pulls the words almost apart. It is the idiom that sings along with him.

But it is a narrow idiom. He is joined by another guitar player on Blue Corpse. The famous Nancy joins him on Modern Dances and other albums. And then of course the many excellent improvisors who have joined him on recent live excursions. But these remain, I think, within the idiom – although there are the humorous songs to think about …

Is it that the idiom learns of itself through Jandek? Is Jandek a way the idiom can discover itself and live a life? Sometimes I think there is a lesson in art, a way of learning not only by thinking about what is made, but about the making itself, and the way it belongs to a life. About the demand of making, as if it held the clue to a new ethics of self-formation, a way not of becoming what you are, but of what an idiom will allow you to be.

Then what matters is to discover an idiom from which you can live. An idiom – not your idiom, not that style which, all along, was yours, but that through which a call can resound, tuning you, attuning you, and letting you live according to its demand. Is this a way of loving fate, of amor fati, as Nietzsche would call it? Of loving what has been given to you to live? Or rather, of giving yourself, or letting yourself receive what henceforward let a kind of living awaken in yourself?

A life within your life. The indefinite article within the definite one. A demand from which you can live. And now I wonder, still more speculatively, whether Deleuze was right to speak of one form of becoming yielding into another, and that the ultimate was to become imperceptible, to become with everything, with the life that streams in all things.

(Tangent: I think at once of the bad faith Sinthome identifies in those who profess belief in a system and live otherwise. Like those for Kierkegaard who live outside the speculative palace they construct, magnificent as it is.

Bad faith: is this the name for this failure to live by your thought – to keep the consequences of your thinking far from you, away from you? But thinking must be of life, close to life – to that impersonal living that none of us quite inhabits, the call which demands our becoming imperceptible. Close – and perhaps that is also what writing affords – writing, now, with no aim or purpose. ‘Boring stuff about me’.

As if there were a way of discovering a life through that detour into your life. Write, then; respond to a demand. Live – or a let that living live that is without person. Write of your life and let it burn with the flames of an impersonal living.)

(Note to myself: ‘pulls the words almost apart’ – think of a verb that attenuates itself, that is stretched like a torture victim on the rack. Think of the ‘to be’ as it becomes pure pain … isn’t it that which lends its voice to Jandek?)

Not to write on an artist, an oeuvre, but to write with them. With – writing of the whole of their life, of album after album it is as though you’ve lived that whole life yourself, that you’ve undergone an experience with them. As though, somehow, you were a limb of their work, that it unfolds also in what you write.

So with Jandek – listening to each album in turn, attempting to write on them (but all the while only taking notes for the long essay I would one day like to write) I feel the same creative wave that has passed through him bouys my small writing, too – that the event of his music making unfurls here, too on the other side of the world.

50 albums (nearly), and I’m gradually learning about each one. This thought, in the long interval before I consider each album in turn, Why does Jandek not credit his collaborators on his albums? In the case of ‘Nancy’, ‘Richard’ and ‘Mike’, perhaps it is clear: the first and second were neighbours of his, he says somewhere. Does he know their real names?, he’s asked in a telephone interview. Long pause. He won’t say. Mike’s name we know because he’s asked by the singer to take a solo on one of the albums. And there are other collaborators in the period before which Jandek played live, none of them credited.

And then, playing with Richard Youngs and others? With musicians so sensitively and wonderfully attuned to what it is Jandek is about? He doesn’t credit them, either, and here’s the reason: because Jandek is not the name of a man but a group. Jandek is like a crown that hovers above anyone who plays with the Representative from Corwood. A crown, a fiery nimbus. Why, then, does the Representative, cornered as Sterling Smith by a journalist, claim Jandek does not need him?

Very enigmatic. Because Jandek comes into being only when he plays. Because Jandek is the name of the aurora borealis as it burns over his playing. We are Jandek: that’s what he says by not crediting his collaborators. We are all collaborators, and you are Jandek, too. And how would the Representative credit himself if he were to credit everyone on his record sleeves? It would be to cut Jandek into pieces. To betray Jandek by delineating its parts. The whole is always greater. Even when it is the Rep playing as Jandek, Jandek is still greater. I think in some way, Jandek is close to God. Or at least that Jandek is closer to God than the Rep.

50 albums (pretty much; the 50th’s coming out this month); I’m getting to know them, one by one. Listening to them, thinking about them. Nothing else matters to me, really. So much to write about! And the sense that by writing on Jandek, with him, I’ll break into a new country.

I am thinking about Jandek, and why I think about Jandek. Is he a recluse (‘worthless recluse”s one of his album titles)? Was he? Once, a long time ago, he’d phone his very few record buyers and talk to them at length. He had no friends, he told one. He sent 7 novels to publishers, but none of them was published, he told another. But that was a long time ago.

How old was he then? 30 years old? 35? The aesthetic world (if I can call it that) of Ready for the House was already whole; what effort it must have taken to release it on his own label, with his own funds, designing his cover, the layout of the sleeve …! But he released it; it was sent out into the world. And as if by a single stroke: a world appeared; Jandek’s (but he was not called Jandek, then).

How many copies did he sell? Only 2, he told someone by phonecall, later. He sent out dozens of albums to college radio stations, to record shops. What happened to them? But a copy was reviewed, and that review, Jandek said later, gave him enough strength to carry on. 3 years later, another album, and from then on, until now, one or two albums a year.

Two interviews – one a transcript of a phone conversation. You can hear it, all of it, on the Jandek at Corwood DVD. 50 minutes where Jandek talks seriously, often pausing to think. He’s serious, determined. He must speak carefully, he knows that. He’s an intensely private man, he says. Intensely private … when, 15 years later in the late 90s, Jandek is tracked down by a journalist, he is still private. Never, he tells her as they part, does he want to be contacted about Jandek again. And in conversation with her at a bar, he says Jandek has little to do with him; Jandek doesn’t need him. Mysterious and beautiful: Jandek doesn’t need him.

There’s nothing mysterious about the name Jandek, of course. He made it up on the spot, he says in the first interview. He was speaking to someone call Decker on the phone, and it was January. And that was it: Jandek. But what about Corwood Industries, the record label (and perhaps more than a record label) which keeps a P.O. Box in Houston from which you can order his albums directly, and to which correspondence should be addressed, where did he get that name from? I like it very much; and I also like that when he plays in public, as he has done, in a remarkable change, in the past three years, he does so as the Representative from Corwood Industries.

His fans sometimes call him the Rep. Not to his face, of course. He has the look of a man who doesn’t want to be spoken to, they say. The Rep, the Representative. He’s not Jandek, or perhaps Jandek is more than him. And Jandek doesn’t need him. Perhaps he needs Jandek, but Jandek – is in a relation of indifference to him (I’m extrapolating …)

Ready for the House – an already intact aesthetic, a world; dissonance; spectral traces of the blues; a voice, still high compared to later recordings, that sounds as though it knows everything, that it had already exhausted life. Jandek is dead; he’s already dead. That’s why Jandek doesn’t need him. That’s why he’s only the representative from Corwood. Jandek is dead.

How many albums? 40 or so, before his first performance in Glasgow, in 2004, which followed months of investigation. The performance was not publicised under his name. No one, not even the other musicians at the festivals, knew he was playing. He stayed at a different hotel to the others; he came and he went; he met his partners in improvisation only the afternoon before the performance. The same for his performance in Newcastle, a year later.

Jandek, or rather, the Representative from Corwood, dressed all in black, rail thin, with a black fedora, playing with his left hand bunched into a fist. Playing? Striking at the strings. It’s rhythm that’s important. When he sings, a gap of silence from the guitar. And then back to the guitar, played simply, insistently. Something matters here. There’s a journey to be taken. You can see a clip of him playing on Youtube. Once again, as with the first album, everything is intact, everything there; the performance is fully realised.

And his ambitions grow. The third gig, at Glasgow again, is a suite, a single song, or a song made up of parts. No clapping until the end, the audience are told. It came out as a live CD, his 45th album, and what a shock to hear him playing a conventionally tuned piano, slowly and calmly, like Bach. On his 45th album – revealed, suddenly: he plays piano. And sings in a new way, half speaking. I admit that this, for me, is the most moving of his albums, especially in its cumulative force. It’s 80 minutes or so long, and when it ends, great cheers from the crowd, and from me, too, inwardly. Great cheers, and a kind of release. This is divine music. This is the music of God. The Cell it was called, the suite of songs. It’s released as Glasgow Monday.

And what about all the albums in between? Ah, I don’t know them yet. Sometimes, coming home from work, I’ll put one on, and just sit on the sofa and listen. Something important is happening. Something demands attention. I find the later records the best. Khartoum, and its sister album, Khartoum Variations. The Humility of Pain – just for that title. I Threw You Away, with its cover photograph of a street in Cork which I’ve just visited. And Newcastle Sunday with a picture, very perversely, taken in Dover.

And then there are the sleeves themselves. Photographs of Jandek himself at various ages. Dressed as a Muslim. Standing tall in his cowboy boots. Or face on in a photograph booth. Or pictures of drum kits. Or curtains, so many curtains. Or of the outside of houses. Or castles. And if you look closely, you can tell the photos have been modified. Drainpipes removed from the picture of Dublin Castle.

Does he have a computer? Does he work online with digital photos? But I can’t imagine him with a computer. Can’t imagine that he surfs the net (he said he didn’t in his second interview). Can’t imagine him googling ‘Jandek.’ I think about him so often, and the vast sea of albums I’ll have to journey across. 50 albums soon. Soon, a total of 50 Jandek albums, with 50 strange covers.

He sings about God, Jandek. This doesn’t surprise me. All profound singers sing about God, or rivers. To sing about rivers, as Bill Callahan does on the opening track of his new album, is to sing about God. Remember the line from Eliot (I’ve half forgotten it), ‘I don’t know much about rivers/ but I think think this river is a strong brown God.’ Yes, Jandek is a religous man. Is the Rep? Jandek is, but what about the Rep? Does he believe? Does he need to sing of God? Or is it only Jandek who so sings?

I think it is Jandek on the record sleeves, not the Rep. Jandek dressed as a Muslim on the cover of Khartoum. Jandek is a man of God, but what about the Rep? There is a third name, alongside Jandek and the Representative From Corwood. Sterling Smith. That is his ‘real’ name. His workaday name. When is he Sterling and when the Rep? At different times. The Rep works for Jandek; he is Jandek’s emissary. Sterling, meanwhile, works as a machinist or, later as a white collar worker, journeys around the world in his free time, in order to fund Corwood. Someone has to. Someone has to make sure the albums come out. That’s Sterling’s job. Sterling makes the money, and the Rep rings the record plants and types out the catalogue of albums for sale.

And Jandek performs. It is Jandek who sings, Jandek who knows how to sing, how to play. Jandek who turns his back to the audience when he can. Jandek who stares up at the wall and plays guitar, his back to the audience. Because Jandek is concentrating. Jandek is pure passion. A flame instead of a man, licking upward, tall and thin. Before the gig, the Rep. After the gig, the Rep. On the plane home, just plain Seymour. Driving back to his house, just Sterling.

I think about Jandek often. That there are so many albums to which to listen. That his first recording came out in 1978, and seems the outcome of a lengthy process. Dozens of recordings. Experiments. Working out how to play, and how to record. Sending out a few demos and then, finally, deciding to record by himself, all alone, and release his work by himself, all alone, dependent on no one. And how good his records sound! How perfect they sound! Put anything next to them and they sound fake.

And I think about thinking about Jandek. Of the experience, for me, of which he is a proxy. How dull life is! How mundane! How stuffed full of inconsequentialities! With what nonsense it’s necessary to reckon! That’s what I think and perhaps it’s what Sterling Smith thinks. But Sterling says to the interviewer who tracked him down that he couldn’t make music all the time. It’d burn him up. It’d be unbearable. So he has to work, he says. He takes the blue pill, and not the red pill that would show you how things are, he says, remembering The Matrix.

I told myself I’d write 50 posts on Jandek, one for each album. But I don’t think I’m capable of that. I’m tired, too tired. Writing one post is enough. One – and writing it over and again, the post that starts with Jandek and remains with him, turning him over in my thoughts. Jandek. That name, in its simplicity. Jandek, and those 50 album covers, exactly alike in some ways, all the same in some ways, the same over again.

Sometimes I think there’s nothing I want to hear except for Jandek and nothing I want to think about except for Jandek. Everything else is pointless, non-essential. I listen to Comets on Fire and Espers and Boris and all that sort of thing. It’s good, all good, but not essential. I listen to Mark Kozelek, which is nearly essential, and Bill Callahan and Michael Head – all very good, close to essential, but not quite essential. But you have to be careful with the essential, not to come too close to it. You need distance. You need time and space set aside. Sit down on the sofa. Do nothing else. Listen to nothing. Just Jandek. Just that: Jandek.

Sometimes I think everything is pointless and only Jandek isn’t pointless. That there would be no point, and to anything, except for Jandek. That there’s Jandek and nothing else, nothing else at all, nothing else mattering. I think that’s how it must be for him, too – for Jandek, or rather the Rep, who is Jandek’s servant, and Sterling, who is Jandek’s shadow.

Jandek. Jandek, then. What can you do with yourself after you’ve heard Jandek? Shouldn’t your life change in some way? Shouldn’t everything begin again? That’s how it seems: as if nothing is important except the beginning. There’s even an album called The Beginning, with a 15 minute piano track called ‘The Beginning’.

Didn’t someone baffled by Jandek play it to an open minded composer friend? A friend who was very encouraging of the efforts of younger performers and composers? A friend familiar with serialist techniques and minimalist techniques and microtones and so on? He knew everything; he was open to everything. He liked the avant-garde and the avant-garde end of the avant-garde. And what did he says when he was played Jandek, and specifically ‘The Beginning’, all 15 minutes of it. It’s rubbish, he said, which is very beautiful.

Rubbish! Imagine! It’s rubbish, all of it! The whole thing! Really, musicians are the most reactionary! Really, there’s nothing worse than a musician! But still, everything should begin again when you hear Jandek. Your life should begin over. You should begin to live for something. Your days and nights should catch fire. Or is it only that you know what life should be? Isn’t it only that, and that that is enough?

I think that’s what the Rep knows, who works for Jandek. The Rep who disappears when Jandek comes on stage. When Jandek, back to his audience, smiles at the band. When Jandek does his strange hip movements, half dancing. When he leans close to read his lyrics from the stand. Jandek, who is very thin, thinner than the rep and thinner than Sterling. Jandek, thinner than anyone, rising up like a dark flame.

I should write about his voice. I should have written about it at the start, that’s how it should have begun: with his voice, very simply. Is it a keening voice? Not quite? A desperate one? Sometimes. An anguished one? Sometimes, too. A peaceful one? Oh yes, sometimes there’s great peace, it’s very beautiful. Peace descends. Jandek sings to God and God descends. It’s all about God. It’s all leading to God or coming from him, one or the other. There’s a great deal to be written about this God, Jandek’s God. That’s what I’ll have to write about, one day or another.

50 posts. That’s how many I should write. 50 devotional posts, and to Jandek. W. likes my obsessions, he says. He likes that I’m obsessed with Jandek. We sat in his living room and listened to The Humility of Pain, played very loud. ‘It’s like a Blanchot novel’ bellowed Will over the music. ‘I’m going to send him one’, I bellowed back.

Will Oldham, I have it on good authority, tried to read Blanchot, getting out something or other from a library in Kentucky. He wasn’t keen. ‘I’ll bet he started with Thomas’, I say to W., ‘it’s the wrong start.’

But W. was impressed with Jandek. ‘You’ve discovered something here,’ he said. And later, ‘I have to admit it, you’re onto something.’ So I burned W. some discs, reassuring him that the originals were already coming from Corwood, that I’d ordered them already, W. not wanting to condone piracy. Oh yes, I’ve ordered them, I said to W. 49 discs, at $220 which is a bargain, I said. I told W. I’d burn him some more. Please, he said.

I think something important is happening to me, I said to W., as a result of all this Jandek. Oh yes, I can see that, said W. I told W. how in Appelfeld moments there comes a moment when a protagonist will say something like, ‘after all, man is not an insect’ and then do something stubborn and foolhardy like going down to the village to get food when he should have been hiding out in the forest. They’re amazing moments, I tell W. That’s what I feel listening to Jandek, I tell W., that I’m not an insect. W. can see what I mean. It’s like Bela Tarr, he says. Oh yes, Bela Tarr and Jandek are pretty much one and the same in that respect, I say.

At three A.M., having drunk everything we can find, W. crawls next to me into the bed I’ve blown up on the living room floor. Oi!, fuck off!, I tell him. But it’s late and W.’s tender. Show me the Jandek documentary, he says. OK, I say, but I’ll have to show you the trailer first (it’s on Youtube). W.’s ready. We watch, but he goes into the other room to sleep before we get to the great part about the rocks. You’re missing the best bit, I shout to W. But W.’s tired. He needs to get to bed.

Sometimes I say, The Humility of Pain. Isn’t that a great title? Oh yes, W. agrees. Or I say, his 45th album, imagine, on his 45th album he begins to play piano in tune. W. is duly impressed. Or I say, ‘I don’t know what do except sit in a chair’: what great lyrics! W. is at one with me on that. Or I say, they’re coming, all 49 of them. 49 albums! W. finds this remarkable. He is generally appreciative of my obsessions. It’s one of your best features, he says.

Is W. an obsessive? Yes (but not as much as me). Is he a melancholic? Yes (but not to the same degree that I am). W. has decided I am melancholic because of a mood he saw pass over my face in the pub. It was then I knew you were a melancholic, he said. For his part, W. is also a melancholic. How can you not be, with the state of the world?, says W. Jandek’s clearly a melancholic, I tell W., but he has God. We’re not capable of God, says W.

My life is very simple now. Damp, and Jandek, just them. Damp on the one hand – omnipresent, amniotic, all around me, and then Jandek on the other. Most mornings, I rise very early to try to write. Early, and I switch the heroic fan heater on in the kitchen to be rid of the night’s damp, penetrating in from outside and then condensing on the walls that have been stripped bare for the final reckoning.

I thought it was simply the damp and I, and the fan heater. The heater on the side of righteousness, the negentropic device that in its small way stopped this part of the universe from crumbling. I think of those everymen in Philip K. Dick novels – the tyre regroovers, the makers of toys from old garbage. They’re like the little heater, and I’m Joe Chip with his can of Ubik.

But just as Linda Ronstadt became, in Dick’s tangled mythology in the 70s, the voice of God or something like it, Jandek arches over me, halo-like. Jandek and the voice of Jandek, and his guitar. Back home from work, and the fan heater goes on again, eating up electricity but necessary. The flat must not decay. Must not resolve like the bricks on the kitchen wall outside, into pinkish paste. And Jandek watches over my efforts and blesses them.

These are my Damp Years, but also my Jandek Years, I know that now. I dream of writing 50 posts to celebrate Jandek’s nearly 50 albums. I may clear some time in the summer for that. Imagine: 50 posts! and on Jandek! In a small way, I will have justified my life. In a small way, something worthwhile will have happened.

I talk about nothing but Jandek, and damp, and think of nothing but the damp -and Jandek. I like to wake up very early, and then work, and then home and a general vague soupy tiredness in the wet jungle heat of the flat. ‘Keep it warm’ said the surveyor. Warm – it is hot here. Tropical. And in my throat, the spores. Deep there, in the throat, changing my voice, changing me: black spores.

Inside, my body is all black. Turn it out to the light and it will be black still, and absorb light. Black – and with damp, the deepest damp. Damp like sin, absolute sin. The mark of Cain, but across every inside surface. I am a cursed man. A man hollowed out. In the crevices, the corners – damp. There were the moisture meets cold plaster – damp. And inside me, in the darkness, along the corridors of my lungs and in the black cavern of my heart, spreading: damp, only damp.

But there is Jandek. The Humility of Pain – what a title! – that’s the one. The track, The Humility of Pain, the first one I heard from Jandek For Dummies. And because of the title. Because it was called The Humility of Pain. That title was absolute. I thought: it is very simple, and I’m not sure what it means. The Humility of Pain, I thought: he’s learnt a great deal, Jandek. Learnt it and over and over until it became simple for him.

Simplicity: already, in the title. The first song of the album, and the whole album. The title sheltering the whole album. Sheltering it, a black umbrella. A sheltering simplicity. Everything is here, says the title. Everything I’ve learnt is here, complete. A whole life’s lessons, and everything burning away, dark. A simple smouldering pile of darkness with bits of bone sticking out. A body burnt and a few bits of bone: that’s the album.

Not that everything is burned away – not a kind of transmigration into the air, a sacrifice that leaves nothing to burn. No: still burning, what remains of a life. Life but as it smoulders, having burnt for thirty years.

And Jandek watches over me, but blindly. No one sees. The eye is smouldering, with the rest of the remains. And now it is as though the damp changes polarity. As though darkness has turned a corner in darkness, and night is lost within itself. A wandering along the edge of everyhing. A peat fire along the ridge. Black, unspectacular smoke. Black and burning, patient, not yet completely reduced. Still the remains, smouldering.

Even the first album smoulders like a fire almost out. When did Jandek ever burn? How young was he? He spoke of seven novels burnt. Seven novels put to fire when the publisher’s rejected them. He works as a machinist, he tells a musician in his first interview in 1985. He’s a white collar worker, we are told by the journalist who tracked him down in the 90s.

7 novels burnt, that was the start. All the fire was in them, and the fire burnt away. Fire died in fire. And then the first album, a vision already complete. In 1978, the first album, after 7 albums. But this time, Jandek (who had not yet taken that name) was going to do it his way. No publishers, no outsiders. He would pay for the manufacture of his own records. He lived simply; no friends – or at least that’s what he wrote to a fan in 1980. A simple life in the house pictured on his albums. Curtains drawn.

Jandek – but that’s not his own name, but a name assumed – in his house, sitting on a chair. Hours empty but for music. Days pass; months; Jandek has his mind on music. He will organise his life around it. Everything must be simplified – simple. Only music. Voice, guitar. Sometimes other instruments, collaborations, but always the return to voice, to guitar. From which everything begins. From which everything can begin.

In the house, by the chair and an unused drumkit, a Fender acoustic, a simple amp, a microphone, a four track. Jandek getting up and dressing for work and going out to work and then back to the house and to the room where everything might begin. There are other rooms, all simply furnished. Echoey rooms, and in one a desk with a fold out table and a notebook, and pens, and pencils.

Jot down notes. Ready, open on the table: the white page of the notebook, with pencils close by. Be ready to write. Be in this room to write, echoey, white-walled and the window, as anonymous as any other, with curtains drawn against the light. And other rooms, where food can be eaten. A dining table. A kitchen.

Jandek falls beneath his name. He is never quite his name, which never names him. He is the other one who is not-yet Jandek. It is Jandek that is important, not him. He is Sterling Smith (perhaps). And Jandek – is elsewhere, and all around him, and nowhere. He is the representative from Corwood Industries who arranges gigs for Jandek, and the pressing of his CDs. He’s not yet Jandek; he does not coincide with him. Not yet him, and the house is where he wonders as he waits for him.

The phone unplugged. No one’s to disturb him. And he won’t have a computer in the house. Keep it simple. Wander from room to room. Days pass, months – and gradually strength comes to him. Strength in jags and spurts and then long bouts of weakness. And then, more steadily, strength comes and for a few days, Jandek comes very close to him.

He sings. It is not his voice. He plays – but whose hands are these? The four track running. At night, Sterling Smith goes to bed excited but also calm. He knows he must preserve his strength, tend to it. Even his strength is weak, he is usually weakness itself. To bed early, and to rise early. And then, after coffee, to the room where the instruments are. And then to play and refind the mood. Play, tune his guitar and let himself be tuned and attuned.

Sometimes, for long periods, he records nothing. He plays instead – his new fretless bass, his old piano, in another room. Play, just play. He asks for little – just to play. One day gives unto another. Days breaking into one another with the steadiness of his labour. One day, another – and each day the river-path that lets the music come. A mood. The pressure of a mood, day after day. Gathering, coming to itself. Until it’s time again for the music room, for a recording.

He rarely looks at his notes. The lyrics work themselves inside him. Jandek’s voice asks for him. His hands. And when he sings, it is Jandek who is close to him. Closer to him than he is. Jandek suffers. Jandek is suffering. And he suffers Jandek. He suffers himself as Jandek.

In another room, piles of Corwood CDs. Piles of his own CDs, ready to be shipped out. Letters and orders from fans all over the world: he keeps them. They help him keep his strength, and build and ark around his strength. For it is his strength that must be nutured. Rest. Eat properly. Exercise. Strength, the strength to begin is all.

But his strength is weak. It comes to him, it passes. Strength comes in gales and squalls, but then departs. And he must watch over it quietly, and without hope. Must not press himself. No stress. Wait, until waiting no longer takes an object. Intransitive waiting. Impersonal attention.

At night, sometimes he wakes and goes across the landing to the bathroom. Alone at night, he’s unsure who he is. And knows he must aim his sleep at the morning. That sleep is his ship of death that is aimed at the morning. Keep your strength: he doesn’t need to tell himself, not anymore. He is his own ark, his protector, curtains drawn.

In the evening, he sometimes drives out to meet his colleagues. Sometimes, out to see a film. Escaping his solitude only to return to it. Solitude he releases only to know the sweetness of its return. For it returns as sweetly as the finest summer mist on your skin. Returns like warn night rain in summer, sweetly. The house waits; the house is waiting. And inside him, too, Jandek waits. And soon another album will join those in the long list of albums from Corwood Industries. Soon, another title alongside those in that long, typed column.

Sometimes, there are trips. Sometimes, Jandek drives out, away; sometimes a plane to Europe. The house waits for him. The absence pulses. The instruments stand there – the guitar, on its stand. The drum kit, rarely used, dusty. Away, Jandek dreams of the sound of his amp when it’s switched on. The hum before music. The hum that says: I’m ready.

In foreign cities, Jandek drinks coffee and pulls out his notebook and writes a few lines. Sometimes he takes photographs for his album covers. Without planning, without forethought, the chance of a shot will surprise him; he thinks: there it is. He barely thinks about it. Everything is automatic for him now. 30 years, 50 albums: he knows what is required. Or it knows in him, in his habits, in the ethos into which his life has settled.

Sometimes Jandek feels simple, very simple. Not a thought in his head, driving along with the radio on. That’s why he likes, sometimes, to drive, to travel. To clear his head; to drift. As though the amp of his life were turned on, ready. Sometimes he feels he’s falling, but along the road, out. Falling as he drives out in his car, across the earth. And sometimes he feels he’s thrown out like dice, bouncing out towards the horizon.

Who is he? What chance is his? He passes among other people. He closes his eyes, opens them. They are everywhere, thickly around him, and he is anonymous. Who is he? Anyone at all; everyone, all people. And perfectly separate from everyone. He feels light. He feels he lives on the surface of the world. The light flashes across car windscreens in the carpark. In a white shirt and jacket, he feels lightly alive in the world, first among men, and last.

But who is he? Whose chance is he? Did Jandek throw the dice? Did he?