Lars Iyer's Blog

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.