What's the relation between Khartoum and Khartoum Variations? The first is acoustic, the second electric - but the second is slower, too, spanning the songs out, swelling them, and I imagine that is as though a balloon had been blown up in each song, pushing the words apart from one another and stretching them - or that Jandek had discovered the song in the song, that secret more expansive song that is turned yet farther away from the world, that sings to itself and of itself pressing into its own darkness.
Why that image, of an inside that becomes an outside? Why an inside that collapses into itself, swirling lyrics and music around it as around a plughole? Because what Jandek reaches is never an interiority - never the closed space that would enclose a personality, a person. This is not a personal music, but belongs to no one. Or rather, it belongs to no one in someone, or that no one he shares with the others with whom he plays and sometimes and those of us who listen.
No one - and this is why, I imagine, the song becomes a cry, why words break into wails, and why instrumental passages stretch out between the phrases - why the Variations seem to swell the original Khartoum, making the songs vaster, as a sail is full of wind, letting them be carried by a wind from the outside that, becoming word, become music, does not let itself disappear into each, but remains wind, as it blows with the words and with the playing.
No interiority - or rather, that inner space a sail spread to catch a solar pressure, and I am thinking now of the yachts that may one day sail out between the stars. Solar pressure, a solar wind, but it is a black sun that burns at the heart of the music, and from a black sun that there comes the wind.
Why, gloomy, do I want to hear a gloomy music? Because it is more than that, more than gloomy. Because as I listen, and new ears are hollowed out in mine, I hear more than gloom. I hear that evacuation, that hollowing that is the vast space from which the songs seem to come. I hear the hollow space that has cored our Jandek's heart, making it not a space inside but one that presses outside, that is turned inside out and runs up against the darkness.
Who is he? And who am I that listens? Gloom finds a new direction. Gloom no longer gloom; a door opens. The door: the whole sky, and unto what does it give? I would like to be listening now. Would like new ears to grow within mine like the satellite dishes that scoop up rays from space. Khartoum, Khartoum Variations - from the one to the other is a movement of hollowing, of spacing out. From the one to the other a yacht on the sea to a solar one, a real sun to the black one that burns in the place of Jandek's heart.