Jandek
Ready for the House
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Jandek has never performed in public. He has never willingly given an interview, though a reporter from Texas Monthly tracked him down this summer: they chatted about allergies, gardening, and The Matrix, and he politely told her that he never wanted to be contacted in person about Jandek by anybody ever again. All his albums have a fuzzy photograph on the front cover–of a man, or part of a house, or some curtains, or some combination of these. The back covers have his name, the album title, the track titles and times, and Corwood’s address (P.O. Box 15375, Houston, Texas 77220), all typeset in the same nondescript lettering–except for One Foot in the North (1991), which uses a sort of Chinese-restaurant font. No one knows why.
And what do these records sound like? Like pure desolation. Jandek is not just solo but profoundly alone on most of his recordings, picking distractedly at a guitar tuned to no particular notes, moaning in no particular key about thinking and love and wandering around and staying in the same place and God. Beyond that, there’s just emptiness–each off-key ping floats out separately into black space. Sometimes Jandek sounds as if he’s swallowed the grimmest death-letter blues of the 20s and is pulling them back out of himself hair by hair. His songs have no choruses, no hooks, no melodies, no rhythms, no internal progression, nothing but the inexorable Chinese-water-torture plod of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
