'Jandek on Corwood'

The rapacious pace with which the internet has consumed modern living —turning social groups into social networks, discourse into Tweeting, and music into compressed digital data— has sped up the course of history. 2003 seems, already, like an eternity ago. Case in point: Jandek on Corwood, Chad Freidrichs' occasionally evocative documentary of the ultimate elusive musician; an artist whose neverending discography has been shrouded in much mythology.

Though made only in 2003, Jandek on Corwood already plays as a sweet vestige of simpler times, a quaintly antique look at the kind of mystery whose possibilities only existed before someone coined that persistent neologism, the 'blogosphere.'

For 25 years, the outsider-art musician Jandek was the farthest outpost of the underground's lunatic fringe. The product of one unidentified man, Jandek records cobbled together a sort of freeform death blues; where the subject moaned, strummed a guitar set to no known tuning, and stumbled through intense exercises in isolationism. Leaving behind familiar forms of tune, rhythm, structure, and melody, Jandek records challenged the very notions of what passes for music; these borderline-unlistenable records forcing listeners to recalibrate their conception of what 'good' is.

Jandek never released biographical information, never gave interviews, and certainly never played live; for all intents and purposes, he didn't communicate with the outside world. With the utter lack of any facts, listeners turned to fiction; anyone able to invent any narrative about Jandek that they wished.

This, in many ways, made Jandek a natural subject for a talking heads rockumentary; a not-particularly-interesting genre in which (usually famous) people opine on (often dead) cult artists with no grounding in shared experience, no basis in facts. With Jandek, the complete absence of any concrete information actually lends itself to the kind of speculation and hearsay these documentary tributes trade in.

Here, instead of famous subjects, we get a shadowy coterie of Jandek 'superfans' (of whom Beat Happening/K Records' Calvin Johnson is the most 'well known'), a motley crew of journalists, writers, and record collectors who have clearly spent many hours pondering the mystery, the identity, of Jandek. There's much romanticization of the idea of Falknerian squalor; a sociophobic recluse, crippled with anxieties, locked alone in a spartan house, fearing death at every time. Thankfully, a contrary argument swims against this tide, suggesting that, perhaps, Jandek is a well-adjusted Houston businessman, and his home-run, roster-of-one record label, Corwood Industries, is little more than a (rather obscure and particularly deranged) vanity project.

Freidrichs uses the absence of any 'accompanying' footage —any live film of Jandek performing, any press shots, any confirmed images of the man at all— to his benefit; staging a series of visual interpretive dances, inspired music-videos where he takes emotional illustrative imagery —landscape is a big one— and cuts it to foregrounded music; taking viewers deep into the recesses of this difficult-to-penetrate sound.

As it stands, it's an interesting study in music's ability to stimulate the imagination, in the human need to create narratives where none exist, and in an artist's ability to dictate how they and their work is disseminated unto the world at large.

The sad punchline comes after the credits roll. In October 2004, at the Instal '04 festival in Glasgow, Jandek made a completely unannounced appearance shrouded in secrecy; merely appearing on stage, in collaboration with Scottish avant-folkie types Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson, and only ever obliquely referred to as a 'representative of Corwood Industries.'

Over the subsequent years, Jandek shows have become a regular occurrence, and, sadly, the man once considered the most mysterious, elusive, enigmatic spectre on record is now routinely out there in public, playing his once-hermetic studies in isolationism in communal, social, and, even, commercial settings.

As the 2000s marched on, and the years stretched away from Jandek on Corwood, the documentary's subject-of-devotion came to no longer symbolize mystery in music, but the very death of it.

Studio: Unicorn Stencil
Release Date: November 30, 2004