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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.
Posted by karges on August 31, 2009 ---> Comments (0)
Motico Outtakes
Posted by karges on June 30, 2009 ---> Comments (0)
Demystified Again
There are those things that terrified you when you were a child and that still give you chills when you think about them, all these years later. For me, these terrifying things are mostly half-remembered images from TV or the movies, usually of 1970s vintage. All you have to do is say THE CAR and I can immediately access all the excitement and terror that my first encounter with horror movies provided me. I was literally addicted to being scared as a kid and though I grew out of it, it's a bit disheartening to discover all these years later that the scary, terrifying things aren't really scary or terrifying at all, they're just lame.
The internet, in particular You Tube, has been responsible for gradually neutralizing the effect of these nightmares. Case in point: The Steve Austin vs. Sasquatch episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man (see below). For some reason, this was so scary to me as a kid I could barely watch it. How old was I? I don't know, does it matter? After reading some of the clip's comments, I'm happy to report that apparently I'm not alone. Maybe I need to go back and watch it in context somehow. All I can tell from watching the clips available online is that Sasquatch was an android and may or may not have been in league with some aliens. I certainly never realized how complex and sophisticated this show was.
Posted by karges on October 9, 2009 ---> Comments (0)