Jandek is the quintessential outsider artist. To a general audience, the Houston-based avant-folk misanthrope's work is the perfect example of fart-on-snare-drum noodling lauded as art—the kind of music only considered as such by the bookish philosophy majors and vinyl-obsessed shut-ins who embrace it as genius. Typified by strained vocals and tortured, disturbing lyrics set against sparse, discordant acoustic guitar lines, Jandek's songs are cold, cryptic and utterly unpalatable to most who hear them.
But for listeners who crave the challenge of mentally digesting the musically undigestable, Jandek's body of work offers a treasure trove of compositions unprecedented in their brutally haunting and unsettling solitude. In the 31 years since his debut, he's released more than 50 albums of this atonal, disjointed anti-music. Each record sleeve features a single faded photograph of a man (long presumed to be the artist), and for many years the albums were available exclusively through mail order, via a P.O. box bearing the name Corwood Industries.
What compels many of Jandek's listeners to follow him is the mystery of his identity—something he has gone to great lengths to protect and cloak in obscurity. The Boo Radley of experimental recording artists, even by outsider standards he is considered a recluse. It is believed—although unconfirmed—that the auteur behind the Jandek nom de plume is Sterling Richard Smith, a Houston renaissance man who admits only to being the "sole proprietor" of Corwood Industries.
For years the mystique grew, and Jandek fans and followers tried desperately to unearth any details of his personal life, speculating as to whether he would ever come out of the shadows. A breakthrough came in October of 2004, when Jandek made his first ever live appearance at an experimental music festival in Glasgow. The performance—which was neither announced nor acknowledged by Corwood after its completion—featured Jandek improvising on guitar and vocals, backed by a two-piece rhythm section. Since then, he's done 50 or so scattershot performances in cities seemingly chosen at random—or perhaps they randomly chose him. This upcoming Nashville appearance at The Basement—a haunting one day before Halloween—is his first ever in Tennessee. For music geeks far and wide, seeing it is tantamount to the Heavens Gate folks meeting up with the Hale-Bopp comet.
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