Jandek - The Legend of the Texan Minstrel

Jandek is a problematic and mysterious artist, egocentric-egocentred in his own personal experience, with no clear biographical identity, who has nonetheless preserved the same musical identity and an original style in spirit across 25 years of activity. His body of work consists of over thirty albums self-produced and self-released, recently reissued (through the fictitious label Corwood Industries, just as the catalogue numbers starting from 0739 are fictitious), and today boasts a vast number of admirers and followers who, retracing his archaic footsteps, have developed the modes and elements of indie rock.

From folk singer-songwriting to post-rock and avant-garde aesthetics; from do-it-yourself to low-fi, there isn't a scene that doesn't owe a debt to Jandek. Genres to which he could never have belonged, then as now. Always beyond, elsewhere and set apart, unreachable, untraceable.

What follows is one possible approach, a look at the work of this essential outsider.

(life is made up of small solitudes) – Roland Barthes

It must be in the air in Texas – Seth Tisue

The man continues to live with the curtains drawn and the phone off the hook

(Irwin Chusid, “Jandek, The Great Disconnect”)

Jandek, to some Sterling R. Smith, lives near Houston, Texas, and has been releasing records since 1978 (initially under the name The Units). Nothing has ever been known for certain about him, not even his physical appearance. One can only assume he is an introverted visionary.

His music is a kind of atmospheric, catatonic folk-blues, made in a raw and informal way with just voice and guitar, plus the occasional extra instrument or effect. The covers of his records are mysterious, grainy photographs, sometimes in black and white, depicting details of a house or of the musician himself. The back covers carry the album title, song titles and durations, with no reference to any collaborators or to when the photos were taken.

Ready For The House (1978) is the eccentric debut, made with no compromise whatsoever, in absolute poverty of means and methods, pushing the underground concept in rock music to its very limits. Unnoticed upon release, the record was deemed unlistenable, grotesque, because it arranged (and dismantled) familiar elements in a thoroughly shocking way. Used as car-seat lining by the DJs Smith sent it to, it nonetheless became, almost by force, one of the points of no return for indie and underground rock culture.

The singer's voice retains a folk-blues instinct, but it sounds desolate and suspended as if in a trance. It recites uneasy, melancholy lyrics, often hermetic, with a dazed and monotonous calm. A litany crystallized in a restraint that allows for no mood swings, no self-indulgence, no emphasis.

The performer's inflection may recall Lou Reed or Bob Dylan, but it stays frozen, regardless of what's being said, in the same key. Never derailing, never exposing too much, never revealing or betraying some hidden secret.

As for the guitar, our man crams in the same two chords, with no dynamics, at times reiterating a single note, plucking the same string with only slight variations in tempo from one track to the next. The melody, like the structure of each piece, is concealed to the point where you can't tell where it begins or ends: it's more useful to view the work as a single whole.

A whole that builds into a transcendent, unsettling tension, one that hovers in disarray and stretches space and time beyond measure, giving rise to darkness and abysses of isolation. Impossible to exorcise.

These traits, disowned by everyone before him, this sense of limitation, this abyss of despair, run through this album as much as the ones that followed (from Later On to Chair Beside A Window, from Blue Corpse to I Threw You Away), ensnaring and intriguing anyone curious about folk-rock underground, to the point of creating a dependency that makes other kinds of listening seem inadequate by comparison. This dark universe demands real dedication to penetrate it, and leaves little room for anything else.

By the late Eighties, provocatively and with some foresight, Jandek was considered one of the most compelling musical personalities of that decade, despite his artistic and existential self-exile. Both positions – execrable work, genius artist – diametrically opposed to one another, reveal how uneasy critics and listeners of the time were when it came to pigeonholing an artist who nonetheless never seems to lack coherence.

In 1981 came Six And Six, the second chapter in the author's derelict, minimalist blues saga, the one where he first takes on the name Jandek.

It's an imposing cone of shadow, the darkness of an entire day. A vast potential that is arcane, sinister, chilling.

The traits that marked the debut remain intact, but the whole feels more accomplished and mature. Six And Six forms a diptych with Jandek's debut, whereas the third album, Later On, will show significant and irreversible progress, or at least some different elements.

Six and Six is perhaps Jandek's absolute masterpiece. Dark, catatonic, evocative. An invaluable work, and not just within Jandek's own discography, with which it seems to share almost no connection.

This album uncovered everything first. The gloomy intensity of "Point Judith", "I Knew You Would Leave", "Hilltop Serenade", "Delinquent Words" anticipated the obsessions and anguish of Spiderland by Slint, well ahead of its time.

The effects of shadow and isolation sharpen: there's an echo that amplifies voices and instruments, like a sense of haze that reverberates until it wraps around and seeps into the surrounding environment, muffling it.

Six And Six is thus made of free, mono-tone acoustic guitar chords, empty drapes of sound merged with the narrator's groping voice, a half-spoken delivery that's extremely still and impassive, almost atonal. From "Feathered Drums" to "Delinquent Words", it's a monolith of voice and acoustic guitar (plus the echoes), and you're left petrified. Any escape is impossible.

Improvisation, together with a sense of clarity and surgical precision.

A dense solitude sharpens the sense of disorientation, a cosmic, definitive distance. The measure of a spiritual and existential unease.

Jandek simply states things (and perhaps suffers) off to the side. His defining trait lies in this unshakeable detachment.

He shows he can adapt to this striking, spectral and unstable atmosphere. In the closing "Delinquent Words," a continuation of "Point Judith," he denies any liberation or redemption, prophesying well-known lines: “Dust enters into all being/ and man who came from dust/ to dust shall he return”.

On the cover, a photo of the author as a teenager. It will be the first in a series of unsettling images that keep this persona forever young, despite the passage of time.

Later On (1981) is Jandek's second work in a year, the one that once and for all dispels any notion that we're dealing with a hallucination, a mysterious mirage, or some odd, abandoned one-off project. From here on, the author would embark on one of the most consistent and rigorous careers ever, both in form and content.

It opens with "Your Condition," the track that reveals a new direction: strummed acoustic guitar, sketches of a muffled rhythm (plucked strings), a harsh, shrill harmonica, and a lopsided, mumbling, understated voice that grows in intensity, turning disturbed and sadistic.

So, a way of exposing himself. By pushing to the extreme the ambiguities of the mimetic vocals heard on the two previous records, he finally breaks away, changing style and "subjectively" conveying some emotion in the performance.

For the rest, there's the usual underlying organic unease of Jandek's solipsistic universe, always masterfully concealed by a self-control that keeps it free of any rhetorical impulse. "The Janitor" and "Oh Jenny" are among the songwriter's finest moments.

Moments of depression and sheer despondency ("What Did I Hear") will alternate with bursts of genuine vitality and dynamism ("Just Whisper, Jessica"), whether they rise up or simmer beneath the surface. In short, the air feels different here—not necessarily more mature, but more expressive and engaged.

The unsolvable enigma surrounding the dating of Jandek's entire body of work is one of the sources of ambiguity and dark fascination surrounding the artist. As is well known, there isn't a single album (or rather, "collection of tracks") that indicates when it was made. Hence the endless debates and speculation about when each record (or even each individual song!) was actually conceived; whether what comes later is truly more recent (or older) than what precedes it.

Every hypothesis is plausible, given the total lack of any points of reference.

During the three years from 1979 to '81 (dubbed the "lost years") separating the release of the debut Ready For The House from the massive wave of releases that followed, Jandek—who identified himself as Sterling R. Smith to radio producer Irwin Chusid at the time—not only admitted to having a backlog of embarrassing material but also claimed to have recorded enough for ten more albums. Music bearing the Jandek name may therefore have remained hidden for years before eventually surfacing.

Chair Beside A Window (or part of it) shows certain vocal and musical affinities with the debut, while at other times it's clearly closer to the third album, Later On: cutting harmonica, acoustic guitar and an impassioned voice, as on "You Think You Know How To Score," "Unconditional Authority," and "The Times."

Chair Beside A Window is renowned among the artist's devotees for featuring "Nancy Sings," which, together with the electric "No Break," forms an unsettling, intangible diptych, carried by female voices of arcane, magical allure.

According to another statement the author made to Chusid, the voices belong to two sisters from Ohio (Nancy and Pat) who were asked to contribute vocals and drums. The album's other electric track, "European Jewel," is a genuinely dissonant chaos in the style of Mars's "Monopoly," built from crashing electric guitar and drums, standing in stark contrast to the stillness of the rest of the record. A bass even makes an appearance. Jandek's performance, however, retains the inert tone of the album, stripping away all the ambiguities of the song's original version, which closed "Ready For The House."

In any case, Chair Beside A Window remains a tightly focused album, centered on abandonment. In some tracks a visceral depression dominates, elsewhere there's a kind of simulated detachment, as if to heal the wounds. The opener, "Down In A Mirror," is a restless, emotional composition—perhaps the most exceptional track on this collection. Acoustic guitar, reverb effects, and time kept by foot-tapping. Time stretches out to an extreme degree.

J.'s voice is tender, anguished and forlorn, pleading for the return (or forgiveness) of someone whose (vengeful?) spirit seems to linger within the house, tormenting him.

A similar sense of defection surfaces in "Mostly All From You" ("Rain on my head and it's/ mostly all from you") and "The Times" (“It took about a month or so/ for you to know what you are after…/ You’re livin’ free and livin’ high/ You’re like some angels in the sky…”). An attempt is made to escape despondency through the ecumenical message of love in "Love, Love". Yet again a sense of human fragility can be traced in the female performance of "Nancy Sings".

An unprecedented and never-repeated emotional quality, magical and dramatic; a sense of spiritual tenderness that seems to immediately console the very protagonist pictured on the cover. A detail, yes, from a larger photo, but rather than a group shot, it's yet another forlorn image of the poor boy Jandek, portrayed alone inside his own home.

Living In A Moon So Blue (1982) is about living on the moon, or thinking about it, dreaming of it from the ground like a castaway, across a series of sixteen short, loose and, as always, instinctive compositions.

Loose, scattered miniatures, found and played no doubt during the slow flow of the night, steeped in the unnatural, quiet nocturnal aura (the period is probably late spring) that envelops everything. Moon as mood, and a perennially blue feeling, meaning blues, melancholy.

The original lyrics (on Six And Six) read: "You're living in a moon so blue", perhaps addressed by the author to himself; one cannot escape the hypothesis of self-analysis.

Sadness that breeds insomnia. But it's a clear, luminous night, one that inspires and suggests quiet, bare, muted atmospheres, discreet and informal gestures.

The usual splendid, indefinable cover, blurred and monochrome, entirely complicit with the musical material, depicts in two dimensions an acoustic guitar in the foreground leaning against a wall. An acoustic guitar that's never cumbersome, but sits alongside the performer, alongside his lost, wondrous hallucinations delivered in a thread of voice, alongside the usual congealed interpretation, mysteriously frozen in an apparent calm.

Of Living in A Moon So Blue it has been said: "The songs have that swingin' bouncy tempo; Jandek is finger-plucking the strings so hard that the pitch of some notes bends up & down. Some of it is quite aggressive…" (Bradley Be).

This description also fits Staring At The Cellophane, which follows from the same year, though "follows" is barely the word: it's more of a double, identical in every respect.

Besides reprising the artwork from the cover image of Living In a Moon…, Staring shows the same hazy vegetation, the same solipsistic universe, serene and softened within itself, but more subdued and catatonic. Faint ectoplasms stir indistinctly without pain, in this ideal impressionistic collection made of string-shredding hallucinations and crumpled, lost vocalisms. A fragile and bruised soul, spontaneous and sincere…

There's a curious lyrical affinity between "Michael", the track that opens this album, and the song of the same name that closes "Down Colorful Hill" by the Red House Painters (1992): both lament "Michael, where are you now…?"

Your Turn To Fall (1983) completes the nocturnal trilogy alongside the already twin-like Living In A Moon So Blue and Staring At The Cellophane.

Three albums cut from the same cloth, whose tracks could be shuffled into any sequence without shifting the overall expression by much.

Instruments and voice carry a shy, mysterious quality, clinging to the walls, spilling out onto the carpet. A mimesis aimed at dissolving into the atmosphere, without any pull of its own.

The opening track "Liquids Flow To The Sea" seems, fittingly, to let everything go, releasing it away, elsewhere.

In this evocative trilogy of opacity, the vocal delivery is taut, sighing, dragged onward. A yowling anxiety for the infinite, with no burden of sadness or pathos. Other albums (Chair Beside A Window, Interstellar Discussion, Nine-Thirty) share some of these traits, but only partially. These three, on the other hand, are far more unified as a whole (with the sole partial exception of "John Plays Drums"); bound to this same mood, they pull each other along, scattering into a faded limbo, drifting weightlessly. Atmospheres and ambient tensions with no weight and no shape, no subject and no object.

Often the voice is a querulous moan that turns into an ambient effect (thanks to faint added echoes), and even more so the acoustic chatter takes center stage ("Elementary Talk", "No Time", "New String"). An intangible air, a sense of futility, a self-indulgent streak pervade the artist, disheartened and plaintive ("You Don't Have To Entertain Me", "Echo", "Dance Of Death", "They Knew My Game").

The lyrics of "I'll Come Back" go: "If you're ever sad and lonely/ I'll come back and be your only".

"If Your Fortune Fails You" recalls, in both title and voice, his most distant artistic beginnings.

If Your Turn To Fall doesn't quite rank as a mile marker in Jandek's discography, it remains a remarkable work nonetheless, with an intact and precious charm.

The forthcoming Rocks Crumble will wisely experiment with new idioms and lay down other foundations, warding off premature fossilization.

On Rocks Crumble, the striking, blurred black-and-white cover photo depicts a dense darkness within a house interior. Light pierces through a window, curtain drawn as usual, spectrally illuminating a drum kit and a door. Jandek's eighth album in six years is also his first entirely electric one. The artist had already plugged in on his debut album, specifically on the closing track, "European Jewel (Incomplete)". Perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing song in his entire discography.

The entrance of a livid, razor-sharp electric guitar riff; hoarse, sinister. And a voice slurring hostile, perverse, unsettling words, describing a tormented, terminal situation: “You sure are cool…/ A European jewel…/ I dig you most/ A letter came… It’s not the same… The ink was blue”. A Transylvania, echoes all around, a gloomy, oppressive, inhospitable mood: “There’s bugs in my brain/ I can’t feel any pain/ Just a shaking shake”.

And that interruption, a sheer drop into nothingness. On Rocks Crumble, Jandek carries out no fewer than three variations on that harrowing scenario: "European Jewel 613", "European Jewel II", "European Jewel 501". Consecutive, and therefore obsessive, exhausting.

The first is the most faithful to the original, but the performance is more hypocritical.

In the second, a chaotic drum part comes in, completely free to follow its own tempo or spin in place. At times it's pure racket.

The third version is the freest of all. The underlying riff is distant, as if drowned out by the roar of the bass drum. The voice is more drunken and anxious. Perhaps this repetition, working on the subconscious, can help one adapt to the spectral mood, a sort of homeopathic cure. Or, perhaps, it simply keeps tormenting you.

As for the album, Rocks Crumble is a work of many faces, a watershed between artistic past and future. A pivotal turning point, as well as an antechamber to the drifting spaceship of Interstellar Discussion.

Rocks Crumble opens with two reflective, nocturnal tracks modeled on the albums that preceded it. The restless "Faceless" and the languid, disconsolate "Birthday". The voice is composed and resigned. The latter is another reworking of the track titled "Nancy Sings" from Chair Beside A Window.

The album's novelty lies in its use of electric rather than acoustic sounds.

But there's also a shift in substance: for the first time the artist offers up a free-noise-rock blend that inaugurates a new artistic phase, one that would underpin several of his albums throughout the Eighties. Most notably Foreign Keys, from 1985.

The diptych of “Message To The Clerk” is a sulfurous blues-rock piece built from deranged, frenzied improvisation. A stormy atmosphere set up by electric guitar and drums with aseptic vocals: “Take a message to the clerk. Tell him not to work”. Jandek would revisit the track on On The Way in '88, steering it toward an ancestral electro-blues. “Branded On A Telephone” and “Breathtaker” are appendices to the previous session. “Lonesome Company” and “Same Road” stir the blues-rock theme more steadily, toning down (sterilizing, even) the orgiastic mood a little.

Interstellar Discussion states its intent right in the title: to feel as free as possible and to range across perceptions and senses beyond the conditioning of the music industry and existential confinement. Jandek draws together folk-blues, ethnic music, psychedelia and avant-garde until the cages of convention deviate and collapse.

This album is the artist's discussion with himself, a progressive consciousness unfolding through improvised sessions within his own mansion-prison.

An invaluable leap, one few would have expected from the author of Ready For The House. An egotistical, psychotic monologue, choral in appearance yet solipsistic and single-voiced at heart.

In the opening triptych, “Starless”, “Hey”, “Why Did I Change A Word In The Last Song”, voices and instruments reach a disturbing alchemy. An unusual vertigo creeps up, a claustrophobic tension, a mad and brilliantly erratic groping in the dark. The ill-fated cacophonous assemblages, the broken rhythms and out-of-tune riffs, the flung-out vocals and lyrics left perpetually suspended as if paralyzed, all come paired with a dramatic sense that mimics with great effectiveness the apocalypse and decomposition of psychedelic rock, while the artist's amateurish instinct lends it a preciously pioneering essence.

In “Call You The Sun”, reverb, jarring effects and enchanted chimes swirl all around. A dreamy harmonica brushes against the bass line, before a threadbare, exasperated voice arrives.

“I Ain't Got None” is a classic of the artist's idiom. It expresses, as well as it possibly could, just how far one can go in this direction: “Just because you’re lonely/ Just because your mother took your daughter from her only/ Think you come around here/ Asking for my son/ I just have to tell you/ I ain’t got none”.

Echoes of his own past, disturbed, morbid vocals, dark, hazy, stupefying and orgiastic percussion bounce with ancestral echoes in the distance and stretch on into infinity. The result is terrifying and infectious.

With “The Spirit”, the artist's isolationist instinct awakens, turning into catatonia; guitar and a desolate voice.

In “Rifle In The Closet” (“is just the name of the song”…), “Ha Ha”, “Customary”, “Kick”, demotivation reigns everywhere. Like a dreamlike passage, the same aura of dream and obsession that pervaded the album Living In a Moon So Blue.

Nine-Thirty (1985) returns to rudimentary, atonal and out-of-tune acoustic guitar after two largely electric LPs (Rocks Crumble and Interstellar Discussion).

Across the usual forty-odd minutes, a twisted, afflicted blues psalmody reigns. Formally it might look like a step backward, but it isn't a regression. It builds on the neurosis of his most recent work, a kind of maturity compared to his more youthful efforts. And there's a desperate, confiding romanticism in the storytelling, in the splendid “This Is A Death Dream”. All told, one of the best albums of the period, and one deserving of reappraisal.

Nine-Thirty resembles both Later On and Staring At The Cellophane. From the former it borrows the track “Oh Jenny”, as well as a similar homogeneity of tone; from the latter it takes on the moody ego, swinging between hysterical (“Wrong Time”) and conversational melancholy (“Left The Beach Last Sunday”).

An occlusive disillusionment, like an imploded apocalypse that flattens everything into a state of motionless stillness. Voice and instrument flatten out and lock into the same comatose state.

There's always something that slips away, that escapes. In this singer's nature lies the wisdom to reject every consoling melodic instinct that has involved all the precursors and epigones of the so-called "singer-songwriter" genre. Rather than reconcile, find a compromise, an agreement (in every sense one might intend!), Jandek insists on scattering things to the ground, on making them futile, occasional, and dispersing them to the four winds.

The cure proposed by the author (for himself first of all...) is to hold onto a rigor, a methodological constancy that is, first and foremost, an end in itself, and that preserves the integrity of being an artist, defeating every illusion, every frustration.

A collection perhaps lacking the resonance of other Jandek albums, Foreign Keys (1985) is nonetheless an album of fundamental apprenticeship, of trial and growth.

It contains tracks and refinements that will lead to Telegraph Melts and Modern Dances (whose embryos date back to Rocks Crumble), in which the particular musical research of the period will be expressed at its peak of tension and incisiveness.

Fatalism, sarcasm, an unpleasant air, a desire for self-annihilation: in the lyrics and delivery of "Spanish In Me", here in its first original version, and in another classic, "Lost Cause", a sweeping summa of the Jandekian philosophy that will give its title to a future album.

Foreign Keys marks the first continuous appearance of the "Jandek band", made up of voice, guitar, drums and an added female voice. It's hard, if not impossible, to work out "who plays what". The only certainty is that the instruments, guitar and percussion, each go their own way, intentionally, each improvised and heading in its own non-direction. They meet rarely and by chance. One might say they tend to avoid each other.

Raw, spartan, scorched folk-rock settings are staged, traversed by worn, mumbling, subdued vocalizations.

The role of overdubbing in Jandek's music has often been questioned. Whether it's occasional or frequent. The strong impression one gets is that of a choral performance recorded live. If so, it would indeed be three distinct elements; otherwise, the author alone would be responsible for all the sounds — voice, guitar and drums — with the occasional appearance of the female vocalist. At times the female voice replaces the singer. Her performance is more emotional, willful and resolute, for example in "Some Of Your Peace". The delivery can turn passionate and violent, for example in "Ballad Of Robert" and "River To Madrid".

“Jandek, Nature Boy. He crouches shirtless in a vegetable garden behind a house that’s mostly obscured by a profusion of tree foliage. He’s got one hand under his chin as if contemplating something profound, or perhaps just trying to figure out what to do about the bugs eating holes in his lettuce”. (Seth Tisue)

A charming opening that we thought was worth revisiting. There's some joking about the apparent nerdiness of the author's image on the cover of Telegraph Melts (1986); to us it rather suggests the less reassuring pose of a bird of prey, or a marble demon out of fantasy imagery. In the end, what prevails is speculation, the curiosity to probe Smith's mind, whose unsettling impenetrability interferes, disturbs, and overlaps, making it impossible to listen without unease.

One wonders whether these are studied artistic poses or cold, glacial rages actually lived through. Either way, one cannot help but acknowledge the great intuitions at play.

Musically, the record is memorable. Intense like few others, and impressive, without reservation. It's split into one suspended, impatient part, made up of martial percussion, harmonica and anxious vocalizations, and another crossed by a free, unstoppable whirlwind of senses and ritual deliriums.

Shakespearean, metaphysical and religious visions and awarenesses. The confined, rural setting has always produced symbolic meanings, mythic forms and imagined uprisings. Oppression born of anguish has given rise to attempts at social overthrow, but also to irrational obscurantism, folly, sabbaths and witchcraft. Here the natural is indistinguishable from the supernatural.

Telegraph Melts is thus Jandek's Macbeth: impious, omnipotent, sacrilegious. A pure magma, a solemn sacrificial act, a celebration of the blues that seems conceived and carried out in the underworld.

"Let us celebrate our love, …our magic". The walls of Jandek's house overheat, catch fire, come crashing down amid rumbling, smoke and steam, but he pays it no mind at all, celebrating the magic, exasperated, in the midst of it, in the dark.

"Ace Of Diamonds", "Star Up In The Sky", "You Painted Your Teeth", "The Fly", "House Up On The Hill" possess an unheard-of hostility and profane force. Male and female voices, deranged and distorted, moan tormented, convulsive, possessed, rant in a frenzy amid dark abysses, growing in power alongside battle-like percussion, echoes and clangs, industrial background noise, deflagrations swirling into a cyclone.

L’autore è intervenuto aggiungendosi overdub in alcuni brani, sovrincidendo vocalismi liberi, disturbati (“The Fly”, “House Up On The Hill”) o farseschi (“Mothers Day Card”) alle performance corali.

The hallucinated stare of baby Jandek on the cover is the perfect introduction to Follow Your Footsteps, his thirteenth work in eight years of activity. An enigmatic crossroads, a grandiose container of scattered shards, upturned walls, disorder, hesitation. Scorched earth all around, a depressed, murky, mute atmosphere, the aftershocks of the feverish, incendiary sessions of Telegraph Melts and Modern Dances. And more still.

Follow Your Footsteps is a hybrid place of second thoughts, substitutions and constant self-contradiction. Yet these backward glances reveal new, unexpected perspectives in favor of a “new course.” First and foremost, the decisive novelty for the albums and years to come is the (partial) involvement of another guitarist in the project, whose style is recognizable by being more strummy, more standard, more inclined toward melody and…more skilled.

The opening tracks are electric: hallucinated guitars and an uncontainable instrumental rawness bring to mind the Godz of their early albums. Improvisation is the watchword: “What Do You Want To Sing” portrays the bewilderment of Jandek's collaborators.

In “Honey” and “Jaws Of Murmur” (sung by the guitarist), a powerful, off-kilter, asynchronous bass drum pushed to the fore is hijacked down the pathways of a deviant mind.

Then comes the reversal: it bluntly replaces that with a humble, disillusioned mode that lets the album drift. A suppressed performance, an impalpable, bland if not altogether spent air, sharpens the edge, forms the heart of the album and reveals quite a few affinities with the forthcoming Blue Corpse.

“Didn't Ask Why,” “Preacher,” “For Today,” the melancholy melody of “Leave All You Have” and “I Know You Well” are in fact crucial tests in which the performer tries out a particular sense of defeat and collapse experienced with detachment and without regret; it will go on to form the concept of Blue Corpse.

Often the vocals, far from the microphone, are hard to make out, obscured by the instruments. Lost voices hover in an unguarded purgatory where it's hard to get one's bearings.

In the final tracks, the album has an electric last gasp with “Straight Thirty Seconds” first and then “Bring On Fatima.” The tense, muffled darkness of the atmosphere culminates in “Collection,” which effectively restores the mood of the album Living In A Moon So Blue. Bare acoustic guitar and echo effects all around, as though inside a sealed vault. A groping through the fog toward an ever-thicker darkness.

The incipit of “We're All Through” is chilling, just voice and guitar, “All together now…one two..” The only response: sinister ambient reverberations.

A raw work, as caustic as few others, Modern Dances (1987) feeds on shadows rather than light. Inhospitable, to put it briefly. Here the artist, together with his usual collaborators, tries to isolate and segregate, not without torment and laceration, his own demons and most recurring obsessions: “Painted My Teeth,” “Spanish In Me 003,” personal “Funny Games,” revisited with a sadistic, farcical, mocking air.

Threats crop up, knives, uncontainable shrieks, sloth, blasphemous acts, unspeakable instrumental degeneration, tribal din, satanic temptations.

Modern Dances is the twin album to Telegraph Melts, but decidedly less approachable, almost unbearable. A difficult album, then, but one with great energy and a fascination that reveals and strengthens itself with repeated listens. Improvisation, inconsistency, an informal and indigestible feel rule the roost.

It's Jandek's Mars-ian record: brain-damaged voices, entirely improvised tracks, long and interconnected, all cut from the same cloth that rejects any structure, harmonic principle or progression.

“Twelve Minutes Since February 32'nd,” “Hand For Harry Idle,” “Nothing is Better Than God,” “I Want to Know Why”; everything is an ulcer, a wild and inorganic mass, a primitive and ferocious symposium of villains, in lyrics, rhythms, voices. Towering over everything is the value of a chaos-performance that recovers an acrid, primordial sense of rock, regressing back into first principle within this ramshackle, devoted dwelling.

The closing is entrusted to a triptych of striking intimacy, almost as if to openly disavow and renounce everything that came before. A new baptism, one that re-explores the artist's origins: the reproach of “Simple As That,” the interior monologue of “Open E,” the sublime, unsettling hymn of “Carnival Queen.”

Blue Corpse (1988) is an awakening, a secular reconversion after the exasperated tones of his other work from the period. A return to the congenial acoustic expression (guitar, voice, harmonica) with which we first came to know this artist. At the same time, Blue Corpse proves to be an atypical, singular work within this vast body of output. A clarity and a wisdom never again attained.

An embryonic folk-blues impressionism that leaves its mark inside, an indelible mark. As a whole, this record comes across as a painful, spontaneous emanation, a frayed emulsion, in which the artist, tearing himself apart, takes on both his own guilt and that of others.

In the course of these confessions he seeks not only to atone and purify himself, but to dissolve, subtly.

The atmosphere of the session is improvised, playful, spontaneous. Another person is plausibly involved in the album, a "strummer" guitarist already heard on Follow Your Footsteps, whose contribution is decisive in shaping the record. He is the one singing the first three tracks on this album.

Blue Corpse continually explores and alters its musical spectrum in a wandering, patched-together, informal way, with ideas and revelations of real interest. Some familiarity can be felt with one of his recent efforts, the aforementioned Follow Your Footsteps, particularly regarding the acoustic middle section of that album. The sense of acute disorientation is the same. But where that record was dark and funereal, here light, hazy harmonies prevail, tinged with melancholy but also with a smirk, a sense of mockery. Blue Corpse is a personal revisiting that is at once self-aware and unconscious, making it hard to pin down any solid points of reference. A few distant echoes of Buckley, and the usual godfathers of the Delta blues. There's also a version of the traditional House of the Rising Sun.

The more his later work will bend to imposed blues conventions, the less this particular inspiration will show itself. The cover alone could be the subject of its own thesis: an accidental shot capturing "the man" mid-stride, catching in that motion the fatefulness of the moment. It anticipates slacker/lo-fi tastes and intentions (and carries on from... the previous Modern Dances).

As always, the artwork is stylistically in tune with the music on offer. A shared sensibility, the same raw, extreme, unflinchingly realist emotional essence. This figure remains, as ever, elusive and sincere.

You Walk Alone (1988) is one of the Jandek records we can listen to in company without embarrassment, meaning one of the more regular and musically cohesive ones. Even on the cover, the protagonist appears, for once, dressed up smartly (although, as usual, the photo was likely taken some time before... who knows when).

The familiar psycho-blues approach remains stripped-down and ungainly, yet also more consistent, given the deeply personal and compelling (dis)orientation of a lone explorer, a wayward countryman who steeps everything in a surreal, archaic atmosphere.

Starting with the album's title itself (drawn from a line in "Forgive Me", from his second album), You Walk Alone sifts through his past repertoire, presenting itself as a kind of live-take anthology. Eight tracks in all, almost all previously released, but rearranged to the point of being unrecognizable except for the lyrics; voice, electric guitar and drums in the usual ultra-amateurish style, not without a certain refinement.

The drumming is a ritualistic, orgiastic roll, perpetually off-beat, in the style of Maureen Tucker. Velvet Underground are evoked in the remarkable "Time And Space" and "Quinn Boys II". The guitarist is probably the same one from Blue Corpse (and he sings on "I Know The Times").

There's also room for diaphanous, dreamlike psychedelia in "The Cat That Walked From Shelbyville" and "When The Telephone Melts".

The performer is at times sly and droll, at times he rages and rants, consumed by his own excesses, but this is a different guise from the heretical sorcerer of Telegraph Melts: here the suffering is not metaphysical, but immanent.

The ritual has been completed, and now Jandek presents himself as a kind of homeless figure, a carefree vagabond saying whatever he finds lying in the street. You can almost picture him sprawled on the ground, at a street corner, surrounded by empty bottles, mumbling delirious scraps of sentences.

The whole work comes across as a single, long, unbroken, acid forty-minute session; the breaks between tracks are purely illusory.

With On The Way (1988), the exploration-expiation continues through the depths of an original, primordial blues, a placenta in which to get lost and lacerate oneself, unraveling existential unease and melancholy. The scene is shared between the usual string of dissonant, primitive sketches and a handful of emotionally searing tracks, more acutely personal and anguished.

There are tracks here that can be considered high points of Jandek's art. Take, for instance, the radical rhythm'n'blues of the deranged “Give It The Name”, which thrives on vocal and instrumental shrieks, or a polished-up “Message To The Clerk”, or again “Sadie”. Or the faint, ice-cold suffering that seeps through “I’ll Sit Alone And Think A Lot About You”, and the mournful, depressed ballad “I’m Ready”, where the guitar's persistent, cloying melodic theme props up the singer's plaintive voice. The other guitarist, by now a fixed and decisive presence, takes part in several tracks, even contributing vocals.

On side B, the blues becomes a metaphor. “The Only Way You Can Go”, amid ectoplasmic acoustic guitar and a melancholy air, seems to evoke the atmospheric neutrality of Blue Corpse.

Jandek's presence grows ever thinner, confined to a space of extreme discomfort, becoming faint, modest and discreet. Almost a self-erasure within the murky, veiled half-light of yet another memorable cover.

Between 1988 and 1990, Jandek released no fewer than four albums: You Walk Alone, On The Way, The Living End, Somebody In The Snow. Beyond confirming the artist's unstoppable prolificacy, these records turn out to be the most musically assimilable, and can be filed - albeit with some reluctance - under an archetypal blues-folk idiom.

These records show some hints of artistic normalization: if nothing else, the definition of Jandek's music can now win the agreement of more than one critic. A perhaps definitive renunciation of solipsistic preaching, of the manic-depressive excesses of the past? As we'll see, that won't be the case.

After two years and several albums, The Living End renews the partnership with the muse singer, Jandek's female counterpart.

There's been speculation about her identity, whether she's the usual Nancy or not. Her vocal timbre sounds very similar, though not identical, and her delivery is less overflowing and more restrained than usual, which may hint at a deliberate stylistic shift.

“Niagra Blues” and “Janitor’s Dead” develop the same sinuous, gripping blues theme, which grows thinner and more detached as it progresses, while the author's performance follows the opposite path. Within this shifting of forms, a watchful, steady tension is maintained.

“Slinky Parade” continues the crackling euphony-cacophony of the blues, adding an enticing, abrasive vocal effect. Then come the warnings of “License To Kill”, and “Talk That Talk”, with its free-form guitar. “Start The Band” recalls “Jaws Of Murmur”.

On the second side, the The Living End sessions stagnate or drift away, dissolving into the surroundings. “Crazy”, “Embrace The World Outside”, “Take Me Away With You” seem to drown and blur into one another, within this sweltering atmosphere.

Somebody In The Snow opens the artist's 1990s, carrying forward the folk-blues approach and largely reiterating the themes and musical structures of his late-Eighties work. These are the last embers, yet the synthesis grows ever more self-aware and weighty, while at the same time more distant, alien, and disoriented.

The female voice is a constant presence, an emotional lure running through much of the record. This perverse enchantress's contribution is essential in building a striking atmosphere within its own disturbing guise. The usual harsh, fragmentary instruments make up (so to speak) the picture.

“Tell Me Who You Are” opens in a dreamlike, dazed fashion, then continues with a disoriented, mysterious air. One of the wonders of the Jandek method.

Siren-like flatteries drift through “Come Through With A Smile”. “Pastimes” is an instrumental reworking of “I’ll Sit Alone” and “Think A Lot About You”.

Shocking as much as unexpected, the mixed-choir interlude in "Om" is a murky boreal tundra, a chilling mantra, a sharp interweaving of choral laments and sighs.

"Bring It In A Manger" drags along with subtle, persistent sadism a distant harmonica, vocal laments and tolling atmospheric verses.

Interessanti “Stick With Me” e l’armonica stradaiola in “You Sing A Song”.

One Foot In The North (1991) sounds like a Jandekian "Lost Tapes", a "possible" parallel anthology of tracks pulled from various artistic periods.

At times the ambient instrumental style points directly back to his artistic beginnings, particularly to the dark and morbid Six And Six (1981). Many of the compositions share the same occluded, inconclusive feel, as well as the same estranging echo effect painting bleak, segregated atmospheres.

Take the whole first side of the album as an example, among the most inspired and unsettling things the artist has done. The opening of "Yellow Pages" (itself yet another re-edit of "European Jewel") is extraordinary and bone-chilling, with electric guitar and voice: “You’ve got to help me dear/ Because there’s no release/ From this tangled beast/ You got to be my guide/ Right by my side”). "Yellow Pages" sets the album's main direction, later followed by "Angel", "Think About Your Lady", "Real Fine Movement", "Show The Man Your Picture" (and "Breast In A Moonbeam", which picks up its motif).

These tracks stage extraordinary scenes and climates of tension through lyrics, sounds and effects. The only substantial difference from ten years earlier lies in the instrumental choice, electric rather than acoustic.

Elsewhere there's a kinship with the recent, sinister, bone-chilling atmospheric appearances of Somebody In The Snow, with no witches involved this time, the only one to reckon with is the performer himself. A cold, desolate unease lingers, snaking and waiting between the walls of the record.

At times the solipsism gives way to shared blues fire, already explored on recent single-themed works like You Walk Alone. In particular, "Alehouse Blues" and "Upon The Grandeur" seem torn straight out of that album, beguiling digressions from the initial climate of anguish.

One Foot In The North sounds like a complementary, oblique work; an ideal artistic summa of everything "Mr. Corwood" has done so far.

Shadow and ghost, real or imagined, of this tenant who, stubborn yet amused, distorts or dissolves his own image and his own art, here a vampiric silhouette of itself.

Atypical, despite plainly betraying its usual origins, Lost Cause (1992) thrives on contrasts like no other, reactions aimed at pure effect.

The first side of the LP is the most stripped-down since Nine-Thirty. Just voice and guitar, a state of apathy and catalepsy, perhaps, in part, with another musician.

Muted tones, a torpid, dim atmosphere. The intent is to lull, drain and demotivate the listener in order to take hold of them by stealth, progressively upending the cadences on the second side, until it turns, strikingly, into pure, thunderous noise.

This interplay of opposites and antitheses may make Lost Cause one of Jandek's most unsettling works.

The album opens with the languid yet unsettling "Green And Yellow", which reiterates a similarly insinuating, querulous theme throughout its entire length. A pure sensory line, dim and slight.

"Babe I Love You" echoes the opening track, a withered, charming piece of folk-pop; a whispered melody reduced to a wafer-thin husk. The following tracks, "Cellar", "How Many Places", "Crack A Smile", feed on a similarly faint torpor.

"God Came Between Us" has a disturbing jolt in its finale, tempers flare after a chanted, recited invocation. "I Love You Now It's True" continues the plea in the same direction. The performer's tone turns possessed, a fitting antechamber for "The Electric End".

"The Electric End" could be read prophetically as the end of the electric: for a very long stretch (eleven years) the author will not plug in again. "The Electric End" takes up the entire second side, a ramshackle, exhausting electric (noise) session, nearly twenty minutes long and bordering on the unlistenable. A livid, searing act of revenge set against the invocations to the Lord that preceded it. A mockery and a sarcasm echoed extemporaneously by fitting possessed screams and tortured stringed instruments; a delirium we'd grant only to Yamatsuka Eye of Boredoms and a handful of other degenerate filth-mongers.

The occasional noises of passing cars (“Don’t need no automobile/ When you are what you are/ Then there ain’t no dream they could steal”) on some tracks of Twelfth Apostle (1993) are probably down to a recording made facing a street. For once they give the material some context, an exceptional outward opening. These odd, incidental disturbances add something extra to the collection, a set of folk sketches split between a dim, lazily dragging voice and adjoining instruments. Yet another compelling work from this artist, very different from the two preceding masterpieces, and closer in spirit to the forthcoming Graven Image and Glad To Get Away.

Twelfth Apostle has rightly been called the first album of Jandek's late period: nothing remains of the recent past (female voice, overtones, melodic sense, drums, electric instruments). The performance reverts to a private affair as in the early days, dry and modest, quiet and detached. The author plays and sings alone, at times almost lifeless; his only companion the atonal plucked acoustic guitar, occasionally tapping out the time with his foot. Harmonica and accordion will appear before long, though rarely. On certain tracks an eerie, piercing reverb-drone effect settles onto the strings of the instrument, spreading the sound waves spectrally across the walls.

The album is catatonic like the early works, but not as circular. What intrigues is its mesmerizing narrative cadence, free of the emotional ups and downs, the jagged, treacherous paths that will characterize his later artistic output. There's an acoustic style still "dense" where further down the line it will become lazier, sparser and drier.

It's hard to recall anything after listening, but while it's playing, in the midst of it, you're spellbound. From "Walking A Four By Four" onward it's all one compacted, pressed-together, homogeneous and organic flow. Time here is conceived as a homogeneous flow, always identical to itself. It thus abstracts itself from the human experiences contained within it.

You live the illusion of time slowing down, the time of listening, which the author tampers with by un-defining it, stretching its flow into infinite terms, inexplicably.

Two albums were prepared in 1994. Their artwork is nearly identical, since the photos were taken in the same location. The cover shot of the first, Graven Image, is blurrier, hidden, almost voyeuristic; on the second, Glad to Get Away, the view is instead more central and panoramic. The music of each seems to follow the same cues: Graven Image is the vaguer and more undefined of the two. Still, the differences between them aren't many.

Compared to Twelfth Apostle, here melodic sense, instrumental vitality and a certain song form are recovered.

More sketches than songs, as we said. Graven Image comes across with a wholesome impressionism and an ambivalent mood, hazy, impalpable and mournful, with a few echoes of Nine-Thirty and Blue Corpse.

A few unexpected instrumental choices lend this set some freshness and charm: accordion and harmonica on "A Real Number", "Phillip Was Mentioned", "Janky"; a slide guitar on the sprawling "Going Away My Darling".

The author's classic tropes are reaffirmed, as the excellent "Remain The Same" shows, while at times a closeness to Twelfth Apostle surfaces ("Chilocothe", "For You And I", "Closing").

"The telephone pole in the foreground is a visual stand-in for Jandek himself: silent, anonymous, unmoving, gray-brown": this remarkable observation by Seth Tisue about the cover of Graven Image can rightly stand as emblematic of the Texan's entire "late period".

On the instrumental side, the excellent Glad To Get Away (released in '95) is leaner and more essential, a folk-blues revival down to the bone. Undoubtedly one of the Texan artist's peaks. The voice rises to the fore, freer, more direct, more alert. The singer's mood is hard to pin down, but it comes across as fragile and guarded. The guitar isn't strummed carelessly, the sound is dry and parched, the performance spare and clean.

If this kind of rigor tends to exclude any instruments beyond voice and acoustic guitar (with the exception of a touch of harmonica on "Plenty" and "What"), it brings in a more extended, unsettling "delay" echo effect than usual on two tracks from the second side ("Van Ness Mission", "Anticipation").

White Box Requiem (1996) is the ultimate destination of a formal quest stretched to the utmost minimum, the culmination of a process of shedding every linguistic frill and residual overtone in order to reach a vague, undefined expressive freedom. Along with Glad To Get Away, it's perhaps the most accomplished work of Jandek's acoustic production of the Nineties.

An otherworldly lightness and calm reign over the whole album. Acoustic and largely instrumental, pared down and stripped to the bone, White Box... is a work of clear, limpid-sounding light, a tepid and opaque glow, barely defined and underscored by a faint echo (on a warming acoustic guitar) that suggests and expands reverberations and stagnant pools, dampness and fog, purely autumnal in character.

A pastoral climate and setting with an angelic feel, over which looms an "evening sun", to borrow the title of one of the album's most emblematic tracks.

"Walking In The Meadow" is the heart of the album: eight minutes of pure, lifeless improvisation. Drops of atmospheric chords, random fragments. There's even the occasional brief arpeggio; what he now seeks from music is spiritual support, an analgesic balm. The voice pairs remarkably well with the instrumental inflection: it's softer, calmer, sweetened by the outer warmth. A perplexed, hesitant mental limbo, yet the performer isn't distressed by his loss of cognition - he plays and sings while drifting within a neutral atmosphere.

The caustic, acrid and priestly tones of Modern Dances and The Living End are geological eras away.

I Woke Up (1997) is an atypical, transitional work that, in passing, reveals a period of doubt. It seems to rest on a fragile, minimal precariousness, between voice, acoustic guitar, harmonica and accordion, with "echo-drench" effects applied to the acoustic guitar. Here he relies on carefully measured interventions to leave a mark, creating a delayed effect. Vocal use, like the lyrics, is kept to a minimum, static. More than singing, he speaks.

Some have suggested the performance was handled by a different performer. Indeed, there are some noticeable differences in the neutral, "unproblematic" delivery and in the way the phrases trail off at the end, unlike before ("First Awake Moment", "Alone On That Mountain", "Just Die").

It's a predominantly instrumental record, where the author treads rustic, bare, pastoral paths. A kind of quiet, desolate, brooding concept, almost trance-like, which one could reasonably compare to 1984's Interstellar Discussion. It might be the prevalence of the harmonica, the reverb effects, the alienating themes, but that's precisely the impression one gets. Rather than evoking stars and galaxies, this album places itself beyond any metaphor, folding and twisting in on itself. These are the traits that give I Woke Up its languid, peculiar and arid appeal - the poetics of detachment, of removal, of abandonment and devaluation of reality, which make an eloquent appearance right from the cover art.

The recovery, the awakening from this transitional phase, may come with New Town (1998). New Town, a "new city" whether real or merely imagined, is by no means a place of absolution or amnesty, but yet another penitentiary for the soul.

Unexpectedly, the author lays himself bare, and after recent "eclipses" on covers (White Box Requiem) and instruments, he returns to display bleeding wounds.

So New Town stands as a place of suffering, a private, genuine matter steeped in pain - a place permeated by a bleak resignation with no hope of salvation in sight.

We return to tracks for voice and guitar alone, plus the usual occasional harmonica, whose wave-like patterns try to soften and sweeten things a little. The sound of the instrument and improvisation often prevail.

Jandek shows existential vulnerability and fragility more than ever ("New Town", "Steal Away Home", "The Real You"); the approach follows a steady, calm and quiet course. It brings to mind the despair of the second side of the old On the Way, offset by inviting bits of relief like the rhythm of "Time Will Come".

The wound seems to have partially cauterized; things "begin" again (once more).

The Beginning (1999) is in many ways a consequence of New Town, but not quite a direct descendant. There's a new impulse at work, a result generated (or recovered, rediscovered) from a different perception, one that pushes the artist to move further, beyond his own bleeding wounds.

On this album Jandek uses, for the first time, a digital echo effect that covers over ambient hiss ("Hiss Reductions"), muffling and smoothing out voice and sound.

This prototype, which some have likened to an "underwater, burbling sound," would be used by Jandek in the reissue of his catalogue (launched in 1999) to correct or replace environmental interference, though at times he overdoes it (see the opening tracks on The Rocks Crumble).

It's yet another effects-based device, much like the extra box included with other acoustic records released in the Nineties.

Listening to "It's February," "Moving Slow," "A Dozen Drops," and "Lonesome Bridge" fully reveals this sense of fading allure, of neutral atmosphere. "A Dozen Drops" is a listless wandering of voice and guitar, whose "Frankenstein" lyrics sabotage themselves by variously quoting the past (or is it the present? given the impossibility of pinning down when it was actually made): from "Nancy Sings" to "God Came Between Us".

The title track that closes the album is yet another small shock Jandek has in store for us: a mysterious, ghostly instrumental suite of around a quarter of an hour, for solo piano (plus the occasional beat of time). Completely wrapped in haze, out-of-tune, yet built on a harmonic principle that keeps resurfacing, rather than the unhinged free "electric end" excursions of before.

Between 2000 and 2001 Jandek released three albums for voice alone (Put My Dream On This Planet, This Narrow Road, Worthless Recluse), adopting a crooning style typical of early recordings, perhaps aligning himself with some primordial bluesman from the dawn of the century, voice with no instruments. The "blue notes" no longer come from a detuned guitar or a harmonica: they're to be found, above all, in the lyrics.

The artist in fact disguises his own voice behind some recording apparatus that dirties and distorts it to the point of depersonalizing it, making it unrecognizable.

Three thoroughly mysterious and unsettling works, albeit with a remote fascination of their own. Throughout the albums, short lines are recited (or intoned) in a state that's hard to pin down.

The operation and its reasons remain obscure and incomprehensible even to someone like Jandek, but on closer inspection it's just another methodological variation, however pushed to the most extreme radicalism. It's a search for the roots of folk and blues, their first causes, their essence.

After three uncompromising albums of pure effects and recited crooning, Jandek goes back to accompanying himself with guitar. But those three a cappella records haven't passed without leaving traces. Something has changed, perhaps irreversibly, in the way he communicates. How much, time alone will tell, once again.

I Threw You Away and the following The Humility Of Pain, both from the same year, 2002, are albums that closely resemble each other, starting with their covers, which depict street corners lined with rows of houses under a leaden sky. The origin of the shots has been identified thanks to extra details in the photographs: the location is Northern Europe, Ireland. The images (like the one on the later The Place as well) aren't recent. They're desolate, depressed, marginal shots, which pair well with the state of mind the artist displays.

Musically, on these two albums the acoustic guitar strings aren't plucked but dragged, as if to naturally reproduce effects, cascading clusters of reverb. As if wanting to load onto the strings the weight of an entire existence, and of the whole world.

In this sense, "Blues Turned Black," the long opening track of the first of the two, is a masterpiece of anguish, abstraction and chameleon-like shifting, a genuine rebirth. Here Jandek rereads, reshapes, and once again legitimizes his own career.

The album I Threw You Away has been compared to other records from the Eighties, particularly Six And Six and Blue Corpse. If the power of suggestion and entrapment is the same, together with The Humility Of Pain it forms a pair in its own right: albums exiled and alienated from any context.

The main novelty lies in the protagonist's approach. After the three previous records with no instruments and a voice distorted by effects, his delivery here is lowered (by an octave): the tone is deeper, more powerful, mournful, at times even hostile.

But whereas before one identified with the performer as a vehicle of expression, a mirror of anxieties and emotions, in this pair, rather than sharing "sympathy", we're left watching, dismayed and uneasy.

The performer is perpetually devastated. In a kind of free, histrionic and fragmented delirium, the author simulates a state of drunkenness, a whine ("Blues Turned Black", "Work Of Art", "Frozen Beauty"…).

Throughout the albums, the performer launches into dramatic wails that end in drawn-out high notes. He lets himself be guided by acoustic guitar and a few hazy effects. Rarely, and only on I Threw You Away, a caustic harmonica appears (on the title track, for instance). Monotony, bent and hollow soundscapes, even further removed from structure and harmony. A collapse beyond the collapse that constitutes the Jandek-esque work itself. An anguish, a suffering lived by its maker that we sense is necessary for the purification of his spirit. As Oedipus did in blinding himself.

These albums carry on the icy, artificial abstraction of their predecessors, expressing pure inner alienation, turned outward, poured into our ears, as it's been described, as "in your face-suffering". A reality that gropes blindly, a cul-de-sac for every will, intention, and stage.

The following album, The Place (2003), is a concept record about displacement, about disorientation as it happens. It spells out, in another setting, the imagery of the recent LPs.

This time the setting is England, Chester. Our man is thrown into an unrecognizable elsewhere, one he struggles to get his bearings in, whose dreamlike, gloomy features blur with reality. The spectral mannequins painted red (evoking a sense of cold that's somehow warmer), displayed in the cover image's shop window, seem to be the only threatening beings/apparitions in this bleak creation of the mind. The Place, a fateful site of loss, stateless, impossible to possess let alone master, yet still and always necessary.

The author keeps his emotional temperature in check, toning down every theatrical gesture, enunciating without smudges or drags, and recovers some of the appeal of his best work from past decades. The "periods" are laid out by our man as the echo of the sonic shapes fades, then another brief stretch of silence, and once again, a new detonation. The result is both fascinating and unsettling.

A vertigo of darkness is woven by the sound, electric this time. The swerves of electric guitar dig deeper, with rare, minimal added echo effects. Especially notable is the result of the duel between harmonica and guitar on the closing "The Stumble". Cascades of notes, circular guitar phrasings alternate with the usual anguished, anxious thoughts, now voiced with more ambiguity and hermeticism. Five tracks tightly bound by theme, similar even in their titles, equally devoid of melody and structure. Riffs that drip and plunge, taking turns accompanying the unfolding of the tale.

Just four months after the previous The Place, a new album arrives, The Gone Wait, for voice and bass. After the classical piano that guided the title track of The Beginning (1999), here then is another instrument for a new expressive solution (though not quite as bold), with which the author explores and modulates new sonic hypotheses, putting himself back on the line yet again.

Following the three inexplicable "a cappella" albums of 2000 and 2001, one can rightly speak of a coherence, of the continuity of a new path that, starting with the anguished I Threw You Away and The Humility of Pain from 2002, carries on in the same direction in 2003. Jandek renews his sense of showmanship with a performance of grave, altered tone (compared with other recent works), gradually draining the accents while retaining similarly chilling instrumental atmospheres. So once again, unease, hostility and disorientation dominate the scene from start to finish.

The Gone Wait has a twin cover to The Place, the previous album of which it is a coda, an appendix. It still aims for a kind of shock, with warm, bright colors contrasting against the iciness of the images and sounds (voice and instrument); the "Charon" bass marks out and stamps a narrative of tragic design, forever caught between paroxysm and swoon. I went to hell, I was a king and I found the right chance are the most significant tracks in this respect.

Together with I Threw You Away, this is the most intriguing record of the current period.

In this album too, Jandek turns to the sound of the bass to probe and investigate his own innards once again.

Although the bass still represents something new in this body of work, Shadow Of Leaves can be said to be essentially similar to the previous, cancerous The Gone Wait, itself already a close relative of the guitar-driven The Place.

So a possible trilogy, a paranoid trilogy, of amnesiac oblivion, a helpless refuge in a "dead zone".

Beyond the usual style-turned-signature, one has to acknowledge a certain inertia of content, an alarming, tormented and obsessive retreat in these years of the Texan's output.

Shadow Of Leaves consists of three tracks of constant improvisation, a nervous, smeared and distorted form, lively and penetrating. The opening title track runs close to half an hour. Jandek's narration is monotonous, measured and at times devoid of strength, mocking and desolate, poured into alarmed, uneasy tones. The thick, dark sound of the bass, an external "conscience" offshoot, marks the course with its characteristic cavernous "returns". Notes bounce like thickened shadow-figures. The themes are unsettling, murky, unestablished and unrecognizable. There's a constant reference to a you, a ghostly presence (a splitting of the self?), undefined and sexless, already massive on The Gone Wait.

The insinuating woodland cover once again shows the man. This time he's sporting a smile not without ambiguity. Leaning against a tree, with his usual haircut, in an elegant but ill-fitting black suit, as in Somebody In The Snow. He looks just a bit older. For the first time, signs of artifice have been noticed in a Jandek cover: someone (the man himself?) has intervened to "artificially" thicken the woodland vegetation (some elements appear to be duplicates of others!).

A new adaptation to the times, following the recent digital reissues of the catalogue…

The End of It All is released hot on the heels of Shadow Of Leaves: just a couple of months apart. First of all, the title. Once again, just the name of the song, "no special intention", Corwood itself specifies. As in The Place, voice and electric guitar; phased strings with a drone effect, an immense, unheimlich widening of the atmosphere. An exploration that is often broadly and evocatively instrumental-improvised, almost brushing against the unfinished hollows of White Box Requiem.

So a more perspectival form, less fixed in two dimensions and less suffocating.

The album is made up of four tracks, yet another dark, unsettling reconnaissance by our man. An uninhabitable space of the imaginary, the dark side (the gap) in which the performer has always survived, has always sustained himself. In which he desires and resists.

A diversion from the abyss, within the abyss; from the unspeakable, from the "stranger". Symbolic weight, an alien, hostile and anomalous reconsideration of empirical reality and its supposedly familiar meanings, filtered through an elusive or unknowable performance.

If at times he convinces himself of some relief and trust in man and existence, elsewhere Jandek shows once again his congenital weakness and reticence; a state of constraint and imprisonment, an anguished thrall to events.

"What a difference a day makes", as the Grever/Adams classic put it. Everything happened in one night, that of October 17, 2004, in Scotland, at the Instal04 festival held in Glasgow: Jandek's first live performance. Our man, introduced as "a Representative of Corwood Industries", sported a black suit and a black hat. He sang and played electric guitar for about an hour, together with Richard Youngs on bass and Alexander Neilson on drums.

The live performance split the fans, before winning them back over once they'd had a chance to hear the material: for those who weren't there, a high-quality bootleg recording circulated online within 24 hours, later included, in April 2005, on Corwood 0779 Glasgow Sunday. Yet another coup de théâtre from the Texan.

Besides showing absolute ease performing in front of an audience (before vanishing into the night, having left his fellow musicians a couple of satisfied remarks), the musician appeared, directly and for the first time, with a body and a face — the one most had suspected from the covers, obviously older now. One of the artist's unshakeable taboos was thus broken — who is he? who plays and who sings? — and it was finally possible to identify once and for all the man behind the Jandek project. Live, Mr. Corwood brought to mind a couple of cinematic images, that of the "Reverend" from "Night of the Hunter" and the raving prophet-anchorman of "Network" (1976, Sidney Lumet).

The performance, not without a couple of moments of interaction with the audience, reproduced in form and content the recent studio works. The whole, still phantom-like and dark, is decidedly alive and pulsing, immersed in a "live" atmosphere, reclaiming the spirit of the artist's electric albums, such as Telegraph Melts and The Living End.

A performance hard to forget.

From “Not Even Water” to “The Other Side”: eight unreleased tracks of moaning, howling electro-noise-blues; spectral, hermetic and restless lyrics, and the guitar fumbling-clangor that are the trademarks of this new phase.

“Jandek is the blues”, is Keiji Haino's understandable claim. Few artists today have always sounded this visceral.

The instrumental contributions from Youngs and Neilson (who in 2004 crafted the excellent etno-kraut-delic pieces “Ourselves” and “Beating Stars”, with distinctly Agitation Free-like live overtones) should be understood as entirely improvised. Together with the Texan, the two put together and polished dark, evocative jams with “post”-rock leanings, not unlike the studio album mentioned above.

It's a rather malleable magma, mind you, but one also instinctively close to New Zealand's Thela and to certain strands of Sonic Youth.

The liner notes of Glasgow Sunday make no reference to anyone, but that's nothing new. Smith himself doesn't identify with the Jandek project, preferring to call himself a “representative” instead.

The Door Behind, the thirty-eighth studio album, was released by Corwood just a few days after that live performance.

It's the third one of 2004, an extremely prolific year. If the musical well of the past may have eventually run dry, the same can't be said of the iconic one. On the cover, Jandek surprises once again with yet another unseen portrait from his youth.

While the form is entirely similar to previous records, and especially to the almost contemporaneous The End of it All, the content of this album may come as quite a surprise.

The thread running through it is, surprisingly, a love story — or rather the desire to embark on one and live it out. But between intention and action, the narrative reveals cracks and inner conflict.

The scene depicted is vivid and realistic: some images, for instance in “Gate Strikes One” and “The Slow Burn”, are more concrete than usual (the theme of “losing one's bearings”, and the constant reference to a shapeless, imaginary you).

Thoughts and doubts shake and torment the protagonist's soul, tearing at his emotions, plausibly revealing a condition of congenital fragility, pushed to the very limits of what can be borne.

Released in the last two weeks of 2004, A Kingdom He Likes is Jandek's fourth album in a single year (even the fifth, if you count the bootleg of the now-legendary appearance at Scotland's Instal04).

The artist's increasingly normalized image peeks through on the vivid cover: black hat, half-length shot, seated (as in Nine-Thirty) with bony hands folded, and a condescending air — the air of someone perfectly at ease on his own throne and… in his own realm.

The second one, When I Took That Train, surfaces in spring 2005, its cover picturing the protagonist in London, in a shot taken several years earlier, sporting a look à la Jon Voight in “Midnight Cowboy”.

Musically it's business as usual: the two albums are “definitely a pair” — voice and acoustic guitar, a domestic, solipsistic hermit's universe; a possible, ultimate wellspring of creation. Some differences do emerge in the lyrics: while the first revisits the relationship scenarios sketched out in “The Door Behind” (“You know I want to be alone/ And that's why I don't find you (…) I'll just be me here, da I gave my eternity”), the second one circles back and focuses on them once again.

After two years and five electric albums recorded in complete solitude, these two albums mark a partial return to his origins, with little to add beyond what's already been shown in his recent work.

Months on it still seems incredible, but Jandek has indeed emerged, however partially and well past his youth, from the artistic isolation that had sheltered him for twenty-six years, performing live first at Live Instal04 in Glasgow and then at two further British concerts held in May 2005 on consecutive days: at The Sage Gateshead festival in Newcastle on the Sunday, and at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, again in Glasgow, on the Monday, with the same lineup (Youngs and Neilsen). Jandek's new "phase" is thus unfolding as a mix of live dates and his usual studio work.

Part of the artist's mystery (who he is, who sings, etc.) has by now crumbled away, but since we've always cared almost exclusively about the content, we keep invoking and dissecting it without too much fuss.

Alongside this live activity, July 2005 saw the release of the artist's forty-second album, Raining Down Diamonds, for voice and bass.

If the artist's fame has grown exponentially, his work continues to show no compromise whatsoever with the marketplace - if anything, it grows even more "hermetic" (P. Condon).

This is yet another rigid, bare-bones blues record, raw, fascinating, accomplished, with deaf, stretched-out, shadowy slabs of bass plus the usual consubstantial spaces for a performance that's weaker and subtler than elsewhere, undone and despondent; an extreme horizontal dimension, a morgue for the soul.

A bleak, claustrophobic feeling, much like The Gone Wait put forth, but with a difference: what surfaces here is apathy, exhaustion, depletion. The theme is confinement, a pouring-out of the spectres of consciousness rather than atavistic terror.

At first you watch this endless chanting from the outside, suffered and caustic, but as usual you end up absorbing it and growing familiar with it, finding yourself in the same pot as the singer, adrift in his afflicted sea.

The opening track, "What Things Are", is very successful, floating in mid-air balance. Guts and surrounding darkness set the rule: dark notes, extremely low polar strings, slithering, loose-limbed, without pause. Confirmation, in short, that the bass is the instrument closest to, and most fitting as, the chosen voice for the author's misfortunes: it underpins, or rather hollows out, drags along and colours the lyrics with unease like nothing else.

The reprise of "Take My Will" (from the now-distant Glad To Get Away... occasionally harking back to his own artistic past) stirs something with so little, setting the heart ablaze while instilling a searing sense of unease and defeat.

Lately a comparison has been drawn between Jandek and the "outsider" and "accursed" draughtsman and painter Henry Darger: the public's curiosity and speculation toward their respective arts are indeed one and the same. Here I'll quote what Mark Greenberg had to say on the matter: "[Darger/Jandek] seemingly high work ethic, large output, very deeply personal expression… almost too personal for outsiders to view, but also many differences (i.e. Darger had NO contact with his audience…in fact there was no audience for his work until after his death)". Darger's boundless body of work, discovered after his death and consisting of thousands upon thousands of drawings and handwritten pages, sheds further light on the uncontainable urge of these isolated artists to create, to express themselves as much as possible, to be prolific. The very same self-therapy and theology undoubtedly characterises the personal creativity of the Corwood artist.

2005 will be remembered as the year Jandek became a stage performer. Even with his gaze lowered, grave, uncommunicative and fixed on the lyrics, he performs indiscriminately in theatres, churches, rock festivals, galleries.

Performances as states of constant trance. After Gateshead (Newcastle) and Glasgow in May, J. played, in autumn '05 alone, in New York (Brooklyn and Manhattan), in Texas (Austin), then again in Glasgow, Scotland (two nights of Instal05), England (London), Belgium (Hasselt) and Finland (Helsinki). He also cancelled a date in New Orleans because of the tornado. Meanwhile, Corwood kept releasing new studio albums: Khartoum came out in October 2005.

In this same period - on October 25th - Sterling Smith turned sixty. The concert footage would indeed seem to confirm someone older than the forty-something everyone expected to eventually meet (going by the cover images, but above all by Katy Vine's interview). This could push back the dating of Jandek's catalogue by quite a few years. What first reveals this to us is the author's voice, very youthful on the early records at a point when he should already have been in his forties. But it's also revealed by the famous early-'80s interviews with Chusid and Milstein, the only ones Smith granted for a very long time, in which he stated he had a vast amount of unreleased material. And finally, it's suggested by the stark difference in tone and style between The Beginning and I Threw You Away, released almost together yet by no means close kin.

Khartoum returns to the mood of 2002's I Threw You Away, the first true album of the contemporary Jandek, perhaps conceived after a long stretch of artistic inactivity and indeed similar to his current live shows. This album runs longer than usual (52' against the usual 40'); length aside, if for Seth Tisue Khartoum recalled the quiet, shimmering Graven Image and Glad to Get Away because of its "guitar playing and sound", it's equally true that, in terms of artistic outcome, of performance, of the masochistic, harsh delivery that typically marks his recent work, Khartoum doesn't budge an inch from his latest releases. Strictly for fans.

"I Shot Myself", "New Dimension" and "In A Chair I Stare" are the most significant tracks on this record. Rather surprisingly, Khartoum has been judged among the most intriguing recent Corwood releases, generating, amid spectral acoustic strings, relativistic lyrics and the performer's antagonistic bent, a peculiar chemistry - indeed quite common among recent jandekian studio efforts. Corwood thus decided to subsequently release some "Variations" on it: hence a new album titled Khartoum Variations, which turns electric in the style of The Place (electric guitar). Very similar, between Khartoum and its follow-up, is the helpless, degraded, tortured "contemporary" voice of the performer, but slowed down and more psycho-emotionally analytical, as if caged in a gravitational void, it turns into a catacomb blues that, by decelerating, expands the length of the tracks, here reduced to seven (instead of the eight of the original Khartoum). For this reason the two records seem to me to have been released in the exact chronological order: Khartoum Variations, more than a variant, remake or even a twin, can indeed be considered a work on the work, Khartoum "Meditations". Unlike what happened elsewhere when revisiting his own artistic repertoire (e.g. on "You Walk Alone" from '88), J. returns to examine the used body, but rather than spontaneously varying past tracks and stemming the bleeding, he deepens the cut, widens the wound, probing new and different motifs and reflections within the structure. This heightened emphasis on painful conflict sharpens the unease and establishes the record's meaning and autonomy.

Newcastle Sunday. The first double album in Jandek's discography: "Recorded Live: The sage gateshead England May 22, 2005.", reads the back of the CD. No mention, however, of the participants, who they are or how it came about. But that's the norm. The cover is dominated by a leaden image of a facade of Dover Castle (Kent); the record documents the concert given by the Texan musician - once again 'in black', voice and electric guitar - at the Sage Gateshead (near Newcastle) in May 2005, together with Richard Youngs on bass and Alexander Neilson on drums. The same line-up, one will note, as Smith's first English concert the previous October, in Glasgow.

A bootleg of poor sound fidelity circulated from this concert, as from many of the following ones; recovering it can nonetheless help to probe the notable mixing differences made in the studio by Corwood: a production that wraps the performance in something clear yet magmatic, more of a "smoothing" burbling effect, not unlike some reissues of the earliest repertoire.

Judging by how the whole thing comes across, it can only inspire enthusiasm and approval - it's even more immersive and magnetic than the first Glasgow Sunday: a flow that stuns and paralyzes, enchanting the listener by dragging them in medias res, into the event itself.

The live Jandek of these early electric concerts enacts a peculiar chemistry between different forms of improvisation; not unlike one another, since everything here is indeterminacy, but disjointed from the outset. There's the unsettling style of the songwriter's recent work, bluesy wails and masses of guitar textures, layered like bundles of nerves and burnt-out neurons, paired with a dark, spatial psychedelia (Youngs' bass) and convulsive, schizoid rhythmic hiccups (Neilson's drumming).

This unstable whole organizes itself as it unfolds, clouding over into dense, incandescent fumes as it explores darkness, exhaled and dispersed across this hour and a half.

All previously unreleased pieces, from "Depression" to "Other End of Town", "Mangled and Dead", "Some Other Name", "Shadow of the Clouds": the enigma of the man, the dry, emblematic radical pessimism of Jandek's "recent period", lends itself to migrating and detonating into an impetuous hallucinogenic trip, one that embodies the antinomy of imploded-exploded, of soul spirit and body instrument, grotesque and spiritual at once.

What Else Does The Time Mean is yet another reserved album, coded to the recent period, the 2000s (also referred to as the "jazz period"). Made by the artist alone with an electric guitar and the old, trusty echo-box used to scatter and reverberate debris and contrasts of sound waves, as in the days of White Box Requiem. A bewitched, allusive aura, sound and the unconscious, aided by the dilated echo of the strings, blankets and thickens the atmosphere, enveloping and submerging within itself the performer, who remains unseen but isn't hard to imagine isolated, latent, seated as in the cover image, even if years later, holding a guitar instead of an axe (see cover photo).

The album's core strength lies in a few specific, eloquent tracks. The opener "My Own Way" is exhausted and motionless, yet shifting; its blunt mimicry stretches past the quarter-hour mark ("I find that track to be rather meditative..Jandek focuses on hypnotic sounds with only occasional vocals", Danen D. Jobe).

Further on, The Place grows tense, striking and seductive with a sensitive lyric full of unsettling perceptions ("invisibile… invisibile… just passed through your house"), and then comes the striking transfiguration into fragility of I've been a body ("…I just want to be a spirit now/ I want to shine on you").

"I'm Sorry No" is enriched by the appearance of a harmonica, while the more explosive "If I Waited Twenty Hours" closes the album on a surprising, mid-tempo note.

Captured from a 90-minute live performance on May 23, 2005 at the "Center For Contemporary Arts Glasgow Scotland", Glasgow Monday aka "The Cell" fueled every kind of speculation, fantasy and legend right up until its release in July 2006.

Numerous accounts from those present reported, with enthusiasm or astonishment, something new and unheard-of regarding the jandekian opus, and, record in hand, that turned out to be true. Not only that: it proved to be the absolute (Apollonian) antithesis of the previous day's (Dionysian) Newcastle-Gateshead concert.

"The Cell", featured on this live double album recorded on a Monday evening in Glasgow, is a nine-part piano suite (plus an instrumental intro), with a calm classicist imprint, skillfully airy and spiritual. As an inexorable existential account, an enchanted trance, a pained X-ray in which the author once again plays a version of himself, more withdrawn than ever - a mild, inert progression with no peaks or sparks.

The sores of "I Threw You Away" overturn into a state of neutral naturalness, a tamed, docile and desolate outward expression. There is no more dismay, panic, or terror: Jandek's works used to tell of an endless fall; "The Cell" now speaks to us, without pain, from the surface of an inert depth, naming the infinitesimal part of himself.

Jandek produces a controlled, fluid gesture, with no interruption; akin to the casual-imitative approach of John Cage with Satie, already found in certain Basinski and in Chauveau. His piano looms large against the backdrop and is perfectly tuned. Jandek eventually generates quiet, minimal melodic lines (a pattern already sketched out on the 20 minutes of The Beginning, 1999), to which he adds an ethereal, angelic soliloquy modulated at a near-whisper, as balanced and rational as ever (think of the crooning of the quietest Lambchop, as has been said) — one of the most intense counterparts Corwood has ever offered, revisiting the magic and gentle swoon of Only Lover and of the youthful "Moon So Blue".

The audience, as if frozen in place, implodes and sinks into a silence that heightens the vigor and drama of the performance. "For me it lent a great tension to the silent passages between the playing, where I would sit as still as possible, trying to be totally silent, almost not even breathing. This tension was released each time when Jandek started playing again". (B. Krakow)

Jandek is magnificently backed, with intensity and discretion, sorcery and a faint unease, by Richard Youngs on double bass and Alex Neilson wrestling with an array of percussion and bowed cymbals, setting up a dusty backdrop of "feedback type noise". The two are now accomplices, ever more fitting and indispensable weavers for Corwood. The name, the very word "Jandek", belongs to and rightfully includes them too, just as it did in the '80s for Eddie, Nancy and the rest.

Every kind of speculation, as mentioned, has been raised around the central theme of "The Cell" and has accompanied this year-long wait: the leitmotif of this solemn, spellbound concept would be the chronic/terminal illness supposedly afflicting the artist, whose slight, bony frame would seem to confirm it (an observation, however, contradicted by numerous other Corwood releases and live appearances since) — along with the lyrics, inaptly described as "unusual" for Jandek (if one were to read, say, those of Worthless Recluse, no small number of similarities would emerge), which would offer a rather explicit metaphor: the cell as a hospital bed, or a tomb ("A Cell – solitary/ Well doctor, the wound has healed").

The double album Austin Sunday documents Jandek's fourth live performance, which took place on August 28, 2005, in the city of his native Texan soil: the very first ever outside his home turf. One of the best among those released, if not the best outright: after the reckless wonder, the supernatural classical piano of that Monday evening in Glasgow, the magic repeats itself, renewing that narrative style that makes our man "a true one-off". Rising on electric strings, in a frail, dry and limpid voice, and in elegies of renunciation and about renunciation, it all springs and seeps straight from pure blues roots.

As always with Jandek, on the instrumental level creation corresponds to performance: the rapport among the musicians is enchanting — two drummers, no less, Nick Hennies and Chris Cogburn, plus Juan Garcia on bass, sensing and supporting, with absolute, measured wisdom and weighed lightness, the flow and the contagion of this ancient, overwhelming stream, far greater than themselves. The whispered, diabolical spreading of a centuries-old tragic spirit, wandering, rootless, sorrowful.

Once again, then, self-affirmation lies in self-destruction. The only possible relief from everything is to take refuge, following a sort of homeopathic principle, in pain itself: fighting dissatisfaction and the unbearable, opening one's own wounds, letting one's own ghosts speak. The cure lies in this non-cure, assailing what the survival instinct drives and favors, feeding on chronic affliction and perpetual unease.

Within the vivid theatricality and the overexposure of the public dimension, the private dis/aster stands out, protrudes without losing its own measured, modest individual core (an ideal extension of the domestic solipsisms of Glad To Get Away and Khartoum), becoming collective consciousness and heightening mystery and deep unease.

Like a chorus leader, Jandek draws solitude and relativity into dialogue and expression, in sensory visions as disturbing and claustrophobic as the magnetic echo box that so often accompanies his studio sessions.

The Ruins Of Adventure is Corwood's seventh release in a single year, the last of 2006, renewing an artistic output with practically no equal.

A studio album made up of five long tracks for voice and instrument, a fretless bass. The Ruins of Adventure is an expressionist paroxysm, the most conceptually promiscuous entry in his trilogy for solo voice: a lazy, composed, decidedly exhausted spoken delivery — more a meditation than anything else. An almost 'growl'-like catalepsy filters and interprets persecutory mental images: an inhospitable, turbulent soul, interacting and merging with the instrument, the austere, grumbling bass circling around it.

An extension, almost identical, almost indistinct, the electric bass in fact raises a cavernous yet sober and frugal sound. The besieged space of the opener The Park captures, through the effectiveness of its own metaphor, the sense of disturbance and alienation emanating from this bounded world, stingy and airless, a blend of the unconscious, realism and illusion.

On September 6, 2005, in Manhattan, Jandek's fifth live performance took place. Released as a double CD in April 2007 under the title Manhattan Tuesday, it is the first of two days of concerts the Texan musician gave that same month in New York.

After the quiet, bewitched pallor of "Glasgow Sunday", our man is once again at the keyboard, a "Korg" synthesizer, evoking certain tones and timbres familiar to devotees of symphonic progressive rock.

From "The Cell" onward, the pursuit continues of a liberation, a redemption of the body from the unbearable weight of the world. This is the theme of a new double album, whose subtitle reads: "Afternoon of Insensitivity".

"Manhattan Tuesday" is a murky, listless revelation built from long instrumental textures, set in an imagined, suffocating afternoon where one lets oneself be acted upon, invested by events, and left to rummage and meditate.

The crooning offers up and dissects sensations, probing, as if from a protected alcove, through interior monologues, states of mistrust and suspicion, and awareness of one's own inadequacy. Hence the "insensitivity" referenced in the album's subtitle: a confessed admission, the failure of one's senses to engage with the world, a state in which support and participation are necessarily lacking.

As for the organ, mentioned earlier: obviously this isn't a virtuoso performance, the instrument serves as a means rather than an end — its use is calibrated, essentially the exact counterpart to the voice. Every intervention is extremely measured, concentrated into smears of sound that pave an unstable, sloping path, ground for the transient act of vocal communication. A strange, unprecedented combination takes shape between the sonic kaleidoscope offered by the crossings of organ and treated electric guitar, and the apathy — almost a "stream of consciousness" — of the delivery. It's constantly flanked by the 'effected' sounds of Loren Mazzacane Connors (another solitary, vibrant artist who has emerged from isolation in recent years), heightening a spatial sense, a transcendent, mystical, supernatural space that gives the manifestation of the soul a particular, almost objective, weight.

Matt Heyner (double bass) and Chris Corsano (drums) round out the lineup for this late-summer evening in Manhattan. We find a Jandek-ian voice at times similar to his early period; elsewhere, the peaks and imbalances more typical of his new-millennium work surface instead.

Or else, the Texan proves capable of fully breaking free from the past, revealing himself surprisingly, physiologically balanced — we might even say absolved, relieved, definitively freed from the state of victimhood, no longer a prisoner of his own senses.

Then comes Brooklyn Wednesday: the first quadruple album in the discography, documenting the torrential concert split into two distinct 75-minute sets, held on Wednesday, September 7, 2005, in Brooklyn, New York.

Jandek is on electric guitar alongside Matt Heyner of the resident No-Neck Blues Band/NNCK on double bass, and the young free-improv virtuoso percussionist Chris Corsano: the same session lineup as the day before in Manhattan.

In the second part of the performance, the Texan switches to a distinctive fretless guitar (a Multiac Nylon Fretless model), which he will also use throughout the following concert in Glasgow.

Musically, this show draws close, among the previously released recordings, to both Newcastle and Austin: similar interweavings of electric guitar with Heyner's double bass (standing in for his counterpart Richard Youngs on British soil), producing a tense, convulsive instrumental magma, alternating with the more restrained, calibrated moments that characterized in particular that first foray onto American soil; places whose deliberate, desolate unease is well matched by the Texan's two counterparts.

The two accomplices work in synergy, reading and supporting each other's intentions across uneven cadences, hiccups and black-outs (destroy the day, city punding down, just enough), offering Jandek the most favorable setting for his own anguish, an exorcism of that dread within the theater of performance, in a shared live fire.

Like tidal waves, the tracks stretch out into a lulling psychedelia well past the ten-minute mark, and in their own dreamlike improvisations, with or without conflict, without fanfare, they widen the field of vision (the live opener, put me there, is emblematic of this), like a long 'stream' horizon, an uninterrupted flow gradually emerging from the handling of the material. A whole interior world erupts, hovers and consumes itself between disenchanted clarity and transcendent escapism, where the captivated listener surrenders, lets themselves be flattered, and lies there, as if dead and floating. The narration, consistently 'low' and 'groggy', unmistakably asserts a leaden mood of desolation and wonder that is a yearning for freedom, an exhalation beyond the body's limits, suspended on the edge of the abyss, in a penetrating, restless breath of infinity.

The Myth of Blue Icicles, from February 2008, is an acoustic album recorded in the studio, for guitar and voice, among the most celebrated recent albums (perhaps because it's among the most recognizable) for fans of the artist. The stringed instrument, permeable as it is, is played panoramically, draping ambient textures in a narrative key.

Following a principle of similarity, of identity, consubstantial with the performer, it is played by loading it up with thoughts and anxieties, discomfort and ruin on the part of voice and body (which, in turn, lighten and absolve themselves); the effect is to charge, to saturate the notes that are emitted and propagated. The vocal performance, bloodless and dry, is as formal as it could possibly be, picking up here where the pale, helpless, cursory The Ruins of Adventure left off two years earlier. Apathetic, almost indifferent utterances, arising from a private place, from a safe and familiar corner in which to find support, draw life, and from which to present a blues, without seeking any kind of answer.

Glasgow Friday (2008, update to follow)

Glasgow Sunday 2005 (2008) – A concert recorded one evening in October 2005 in Glasgow; Jandek's second appearance for the Instal Festival, on the same Sunday, a year on, that he first revealed himself to the world live.

This is the shortest live recording the Texan artist ever directed, and one of the most original: just two tracks, twenty-five minutes each, with profound musical differences between them... almost completing each other through opposition.

That's how Seth Tisue's website sums it up: "Set 1: harmonica (with speaking and singing) + Loren Connors (electric guitar); set 2: drums (no vocals), Heather Leigh Murray (lap steel guitar, wordless vocals), Alan Licht (electric guitar)".

If one wanted to find parallels for this work, singled out even by The Wire magazine among its albums of the year, one could think of Lost Cause (1992, Corwood): two genuinely opposite sides, the first performed with an impalpable touch, sentimentally stricken and tormented, almost dissolving its creator into the atmosphere, into the congealed emptiness of a basement. The second, by contrast, is a wild, psychotic delirium, orgiastic and dissonant.

"Glasgow Sunday 2005" opens with "the grassy knoll", with Jandek on harmonica showing off an anguished, tamed crooning, almost a sweet and mournful, irreversible surrender. Loren Connors on electric guitar flawlessly stands in for the nameless guitarist of the '80s records; the elegiac, isolated blues of works like Blue Corpse and Living in a Moon so Blue blooms again... that feeling we'd still long for in other studio efforts.

"Tribal ether", which follows, is the flip side of the coin: a cathartic bacchanal saturating the field and the space; almost another "Electric End" but decidedly sharper in focus, with an orgiastic, scorching atmosphere, an incendiary collective ritual.

Either way, the disorientation, the mesmerizing power, remains the same.

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