Mommy, What's a Jandek?

Ever had sleep paralysis? I have. It's horrifying. In my case, I was trapped inside a liminal state while a nauseating but otherwise indescribable vibratory sensation assaulted my mind with such intensity I thought it might snuff me out, like some lethal alien pulse was applied directly to my life-force as the curtain was simultaneously pulled on a meta-reality so vastly incomprehensible and terrifying that it felt like I was dying of madness.And I have also listened to a handful of Jandek records!

Six of one, half dozen of the other. Jandek is a creepy mystery that's endured for three decades, so powerfully and faithfully maintained by those in the know that even with the surprising emergence five years ago of Jandek as a live entity, nobody is prepared to actually call him Jandek. Rather, he is gingerly referred to as "the Representative from Corwood."

Confused?

Okay, here goes. In 1978 (under one-time-only name 'the Units'), a label called Corwood Industries released Jandek's first album, Ready for the House; an otherwise-anonymous collection of part-whispered dirges accompanied by an "out-of-tune" acoustic guitar. As a listening experience, it's horrifyingly remote, cold, spooky, and I love it. Between the mournful sounds and its plain but oddly macabre cover image, Ready for the House establishes Jandek's ongoing achievement, in which he seems to exteriorize the dreadful black disorder of the unconscious mind itself.

Either that, or it's horseshit. Depends on your temperament, really, but in the film Jandek On Corwood, critic Byron Coley argues convincingly that Jandek's music has "a theoretical presence and an intellectual basis to it that has nothing to do with a measurable technique." He continues, "There's art going on here that's not supposed to be beautiful or attuned to any kind of standard in a commercial sense."

Jandek has a small, ardent fanbase, and rightly so; his work is challenging, but it's also breathakingly expressive. From the same movie, renaissance weirdo Gary Pig Gold states, "he’s not singing about an event that has to be in tune. What better than to accompany him being upset over something than a guitar which is just as hard to listen to as his lyrics are to absorb? It's perfect, it's brilliant. Eric Clapton wouldn’t know how to do it."

After a thoughtful beat, Gold adds, "I love Eric Clapton, but, you know. He's no Jandek."

Corwood Industries does absolutely nothing else besides manufacturing and distributing Jandek albums from a post office box in Houston, Texas. Since Ready for the House, there have been over 60 releases, each one as barren as the first to a greater or lesser extent, although there are distinct phases to the catalogue. By '82, Jandek was bringing other people and instrumentation into the picture.

By the late '80s, he seemed to descend into bottomless despair once again, while a series of a cappella albums earlier this century remain the most graphic and frigid of his dispatches from the submerged mind.

Some of his fans are prone to viewing the work as an ongoing suicide note, and those ghastly records seemed to suggest that Jandek's Doomsday clock was only seconds from midnight. But then, unbelievably, a lanky figure matching the nordic specimen seen on so many of his album covers made an unannounced appearance at the 2004 Instal Music Festival in Glasgow. After a quarter of a decade, Jandek made his live debut.

There have been some 50 performances since then, all of them improvised with local musicians, many of them recorded and eventually making their way into the Corwood catalogue. As a discreet nod to Jandek's aggressively non-representational approach to his work, not to mention his avoidance of publicity, these performances are billed to 'The Representative from Corwood Industries.'

On Monday, he comes to Vancouver, thanks to an encounter two years ago. The day after watching a performance by the Representative from Corwood in San Francisco, David Ames saw a familiar figure loping down the street, and nervously approached him. "He calls it, 'The Haight Street Conversation,'" Ames told The Tyee, about the ensuing conversation. "He gave it a title."

Ames and the Representative chatted again a year later in the U.K. Eventually, Corwood Industries wrote Ames asking if he could set something up in Vancouver and Victoria, which he did. Corwood decided on the venues, and trusted Ames to find the right supporting players. "I'm very honoured that he left that to me," Ames said, solemnly. "Very proud."

Ames has another reason to be proud; he ended up curating the two shows when no other promoters took an interest, and the Vancouver date is nearly sold out. Jandek appears at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Monday (Dec. 7), and at the Victoria Events Centre on Wednesday.

Until then, we should let the Representative from Corwood himself choose something to listen to. In his fabled 1985 interview with John Trubee -- he's only ever given two -- Jandek says: "The cut that I think has the most impact, out of everything so far -- and everybody has their own things that they like -- the one that I thought had the best poetry and everything was a cut on Six and Six called 'I Knew You Would Leave.' It's just about someone that left, the inevitable ebb and flow of people into your life, and someone who has left, quite totally."

Jandek plays at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on Monday (Dec. 7), accompanied by Jeffrey Allport, Josh Stevenson, Rachael Wadham, and Wendy Atkinson, and at the Victoria Events Centre on Wednesday (Dec. 9), with Dave Chokroun and Jeremy Van Wyck.