Karges Blog [Archive]

Outsider Music

I've been vaguely aware of the reclusive musician known as Jandek for several years, but I just recently took the plunge and checked out his music. I even watched a documentary about him from 2003, called Jandek on Corwood. The bare bones story is that he's a guy named Sterling Smith who lives outside of Houston somewhere and at some point worked a day job as a machinist. He's intensely private, wears cufflinks, and records and distributes his own self-produced music. His first album came out in 1978 and he's produced and average of 2 per year since then. You can read more about him here.

The music he plays is very hard to describe and it's simulaneously terrible and offensive to the ear and mysterious and intriguing. It's very easy to dismiss it instantly and I think many listeners do. His guitar is tuned to some strange tuning that he adjusts from song to song, but that doesn't conform to any standard scale. His voice is ethereal and strange and the production is very simple. Here's a fan produced music video I think is really cool:

I find the music very easy to get lost in. It's kind of seductive, if you give it a chance. I like to imagine that he's someone from the future who's never heard blues music trying to learn it from a warbly old record playing at half speed. It's very solitary music and doesn't seem to belong to any genre or tradition, but maybe that's what makes it interesting.