Wow, this is glorious. 'John Plays Drums' from Your Turn to Fall. Spastic drums. What's happening to the kit? And the atonal guitar, picked and strummed. And the singer's usual total resignation, voice rising a little against the drums. But this is glorious.
I am listening to Jandek on my new speakers, which I bought to listen to Jandek. The 50 CDs lined up on top of the gas fire, all of them. The room full of kitchen furniture, and the washing machine, and the boxes the speakers came in. And now the evening, because of my listening, is heading in a single direction.
Now it gathers me together, that listening, his voice. Listening to a singing from him more delicate than I've known. Delicate and more light, wandering the semitones this time, wavering more, and to the extent that what is sung is slightly blurred, so I cannot focus, quite.
Songs come and go - 16 of them on this album, Your Turn to Fall. Listen to it, the title: Your Turn to Fall, it's very beautiful. Your Turn - not his any longer, and To Fall - to suffer what he has. To suffer - and until there's no one there to suffer, until the singer's worn himself away. Who sings? The singer is made of air. A absence instead of a man. Or that, in a man, a particular man, although his particularity doesn't matter, in which absence is allowed to resound. In which absence sings there in his place.
Sings - breathes. Or blows - like a wind through leaves. Until the singing is just that: a sussuration, the wind in leaves. The rain at midnight. Falling from itself, of itself, like rain. No one sings, just as nothing rains. The singer is the dummy subject like the 'it' of 'it rains'. What rains? But there's no sense to that question. It rains. It just rains. And so with this singing, which is just itself. But an itself without itself - wandering. A space of the Same without identity. Of the Return without stability. That's what it means to sing, and to fall. And now it's your turn. Your Turn to Fall.