Mystery Man

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

At first glance, Jandek might as well be any other underground musician on a summer tour. The Houston based singer-songwriter has a new album, “Raining Down Diamonds,” and is coming to New York after sold-out shows in Austin, Glasgow, and London.


Scratch just beneath the surface, though, and you’ll discover a bottomless pit of missing information, shrouded facts, and fanatic devotion that stretches back over three decades.


“Raining Down Diamonds” is the third Jandek album to come out this year and his 42nd album overall. But his sold-out concert tonight at Anthology Film Archives will be his first in New York, and only his second-ever appearance in the United States.


For the majority of the one-named artist’s inscrutable career he has been known only as the man behind a string of fascinatingly opaque albums that started with 1978’s “Ready for the House” – originally credited to the Units. He has declined interviews – save for one now legendary exception – but steadily releasing one or more albums a year. These were consistently ignored by even the underground and alternative press and cherished by a small coterie of fans.


Jandek’s spectral music hits the ears like a blast of cold air through a house. A guitar, sometimes electric, sometimes acoustic, sounds a series of dispassionate notes as meandering as a Charles Ives piece. Sometimes drums provide an arrhythmic pulse; sometimes a mysterious woman’s voice appears in a heart-stopping contralto that stands neck hairs on end.


For the most part, though, a Jandek song is nothing more than Jandek alone with his guitar – and, on later albums, a cappella, or with his piano or bass – sounding like he hasn’t enjoyed an uncomplicated thought since the day after he was born. The voice is a brittle, reedy presence that would sound positively excruciating in any other setting. He sings puzzling lines as simple and declarative as talking-blues lyrics but which are obscurely discursive, with lyrical motifs and titles alluding to other songs and albums throughout the entire oeuvre.


It’s cryptic music when heard for the first time that only becomes more and more baffling with familiarity.


For a quarter of a century, Jandek existed merely as a recorded enigma wrapped in a riddle hiding under a rock. All anybody knew about Jandek was that his albums each featured a blurry photograph of a room, a street scene, or the same reddish-haired man at various ages whom everybody assumes to be the artist himself; the post office box for Corwood Industries, the label behind every single Jandek release; the name of the songs; and the music itself.


One of the most enticing, if fruitless, tangents about becoming a Jandek fan is that the complete lack of biographical information invites speculation about the man behind the myth, and over the years wondering who or what Jandek really is has occupied fans and journalists as much as, if not more than, his music.


Many of these inspired hypotheses appeared in Chad Friedrichs’s 2003 “Jandek on Corwood,” as unconventional as music documentaries get. Here the Jandek story – such as it is – is told entirely through the music writers, disc jockeys, and record-store clerk fans who have paid attention to the output over the years, and while each of them has something to say about the albums, everybody’s take on the man is a guess at best.


The backstory theories are blindingly entertaining – for example, one early assumption was that Jandek was a mental patient/acid casualty who recorded a batch of songs in one sitting that would stop once they’d all been released. Two writers claim to have actually spoken with him – journalist John Trubee interviewed Jandek by phone for the startup Spin magazine in 1985, and Texas Monthly writer Katy Vine met with a Houston man she assumes to be Jandek in 1999.


About all anybody really agrees upon is that Jandek’s ambiguous career is almost more compelling than the music, but becoming a sincere fan can result in an obsessive streak to know more and more about the unknown – see Seth Tisue’s Web site dedicated to all things Jandek (tisue.net/jandek/).


Over the years the albums kept coming – all on Corwood Industries, a factory entirely in the business of producing Jandek music – the man on the cover aged, the voice began to sound more and more weathered, and each new album brought a new chapter to the constantly evolving Jandek saga. Then, for some completely unknown reason, he made his first public appearance October 17, 2004, at Glasgow’s Instal Festival, and has performed three times since.


All anybody really knows for sure is that tonight at Anthology Film Archives a man as thin and wiry as an Egon Schiele figure and more than likely clad entirely in black will step onstage with a guitar, probably backed by a drummer and another guitarist – as in previous concerts. He will play a series of songs unlike anything most of us have heard before, but totally familiar to the devoted. And he will be, at least for this evening, Jandek, live and in the flesh.


Tonight at 7 p.m. at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue, at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181) and tomorrow at 7:30 and 9 p.m. at the Issue Project Room (400 Carroll Street, between Bond and Nevins Streets, Brooklyn, 718-330-0313).

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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