Listless, bored, it's time for Jandek. Time because there's nothing else, this evening, that will accord with the flatness of this mood. The sense that everything is over, all possibilities. Over - and whatever began? The music rises like low islands from the flatness. Places where the flatness doubled itself up, where a kind of thickening occurred. Or a kind of scabbing - a crust formed over a wound, letting it heal. The crust in place of the secret healing, rising like a low mound, a barrow. Some wierd burial place. In which what is buried?
This is a numb music. His voice is high, breathy. He lets himself sing monotonously, flatly. There's hardly a wavering. A wispy, breathy voice, surprisingly high, since I know his later work much better. And a picked and strummed guitar playing the atonal ghost of a blues form. There's a restraint to the singing. A detachment. A numbness, I think. Like someone heavily medicated. Who sings in medicated detachment from everything.
This is not an an anguished music. I am listening to Staring at the Cellophane for the first time. It is very fine. It begins as though it ended a long time ago. Begins where an album like Smog's A Doctor Came at Dawn broke off. No - begins further on from that. From where everything becomes indifferent. From where all drama peters out. Where nothing begins, there's just the plains spreading indifferently along.
Ah, I very much like the strumming. Very much, as it accords with - what - inside me? In my chest - it reaches me there. Or I reach out from there - my chest. Strumming and wordless noises - I like this very much, and I want it to last much longer, but now, already, it is gone. But a new song comes, with tuning not much different. And then another.
This a restrained album. A variety of tempos. Songs so far blues variants. But controlled, focused in structure. Without losing that essential indifference. That sense of a voice floating, a singing that crosses without alighting, breathily. A breathy vocal.
I would like to say, dumbly: I like this music. It's very simple, almost too much so. It meets me in the chest, and very simply, viscerally. As though I'd be tuned to the music in advance. As though it played me, or across me. As though it had waited for me rather than I for it.
Sometimes I think I fell to find it. That you must fall, and fail. That failure is important, that the sense of breaking off is necessary. An experienced fragmentation. A breaking - as of the ice along the shore where Pelle the Conquerer runs. As if you have to be broken apart from others to know such breaking is always possible and there can be no connections that cannot also be broken. And that even where you are, a kind of breaking is happening.
Until you fall in your own site. Until what you is the hollow place of falling, and of failure. Only then, I tell myself, can this music come not as a balm but as an appropriately cool breeze. A breeze that is indifferent to you. That passes over you not in comfort but in total indifference. Like the truth. As though it were the breathy embodiment of truth.
This is the anaesthesised blues. The withdrawn blues, the catatonic blues, the blues that has worn away the blues. Until what is left? This - a ghost voice, a ghost playing, wandering far out from tonality. Far, but keeping - it is necessary - that structure, the ghost of a blues form.
A music that moves like a cloud or a breeze. A music that is of itself, inevitable. And sealed within itself. Cellophane wrapped. A plastic bag over its head. And suffocating - and singing. The songs are not conscious, or subconscious. Below that, prior to that. Having reached some great indifference. The blindness of Fate, of Destiny.
A singing that Knows, that has gone far ahead of us and seen everything. That knows what will come, that peoples will rise and fall, and the world pass through many aeons but in the end will freeze over and there will be nothing at all. A frozen rock falling through space.
And it sings from this far knowledge, from this detachment. Having seen everything, and with eyes that can only focus on the whole. Eyes for which the near is nothing, for which each of us is only one of a billion billion like us who will strive and struggle until the end. As though the end were already here. As though our deaths were written on our foreheads.
A singing that has ranged out very far ahead on a spirit-journey. Ranged out far and returned, a hollow prophet, a prophet of nothing who speaks of nothing. Numbed having seen everything. And just the blues left. Just the blues and a guitar tuned away from tuning.
Is he really singing about Napoleon? He is. Imagine blizzards in the vastness of Russia. Imagine a million soldiers lost, cut off from supply lines and the villages burnt away. To be lost thus, and without hope, far away from home, and in the vastness of Russia. Storms and ice-blizzards. And the cold wind that also bears this music.
As I listen I wonder whether this album is part of another run of greatness - whether the albums before and after it are as good, as vital. As though Jandek had found a way up to a plateau. Had learned to breathe a mountain air, very thin. And to sing there, being unable to draw air deep into his lungs. Singing from his throat, breathily, in the high snow.
In my imagination - not having heard the albums before and after - Jandek crosses a mountain range, and this the highest point. The way back, the way forward in glistening snow. And Jandek long since snowblind, long since lost. But losing his way across a landscape. Falling his way forward as though wounded and staggering home.
Short songs! Fifteen of them. And that murky black and white cover. That murky grey guitar propped up against a murky wall. And there a doorway. I bring the cover to me as if it can help me with the mystery. What is the music? How was it made? How did he sustain indifference to indifference - the fact he sold only 10 copies of his records in the first 10 years? Did he know how good the music was, how vital it was? Or was recording and releasing the music, getting the records pressed a way of falling, of failure, but of doubling them up, falling and failing, of letting a kind of scab form, encrusting itself?
Low islands emerging out of the murk. Rising and falling back there, grey on grey. Nothing that gets high, nothing that rises. Rising a little and falling back - no more. This is a modest music, a restrained music. It doesn't ask to be noticed. What does it want? To wander, to be left to itself. But to be left to itself on a recorded album. To fall there, in an LP, in the site called Jandek.
And wouldn't you like to fall, too? Isn't that what you want? Not to rise, but to fall. To fail forward, across the snowy wastes. This is why it seems you were hollowed out to listen to Jandek in advance. That you life was fatefully led towards Jandek. By a hollowing, an anaesthesis. As though you insides were scraped out by an ice-cream scoop. Leaving only your chest in which the music might reverberate. There in your chest, now a chamber of echoes.
What is this music? From where did it come? From what abyss of total desolation? From what despair beyond despair?