Lars Iyer's Blog

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.