It’s impossible to mistakenly attribute any Jandek record to anyone else, but the Texas recluse has gone through several stylistic shifts in a recording career that’s about to enter its fourth decade. His work has gone from ghostly minimalism to ragged jam-blues, through avant-folk and on into vaguely jazz-influenced experimentalism, with a trio of creepy spoken-word albums thrown in for good measure. (Seriously, Put My Dream On This Planet is the single most eerie album I’ve ever heard, which is saying quite a lot. Even Seth Tisue, perhaps Jandek’s foremost chronicler and proponent, has gone on the record as saying he’s never been able to listen to it a second time.)

Six and Six is from the J-man’s “early period,” meaning that the only instruments that appear are a strangely-tuned acoustic guitar and Jandek’s voice, which wavers around pitches rather than really hitting any of them. It’s impossible to tell for sure, but it sounds as though for most of the record, Jandek is playing his guitar one-handed, without fretting anything. He simply plucks the strings as the mood strikes him, creating not the comforting Em9 of a standard tuning, but a dissonant chord that’s as unlike that as possible. The fidelity isn’t that great, even on the remastered version of the album, and there’s a tremendous amount of echo in the mix. It sounds like it was recorded in a stairwell, or possibly in a deep, dark cave.

“I observe that all collects dust here as everywhere / The most whited things fade and emerge to no color,” Jandek declares towards the end of the final track, “Delinquent Words,” and if this could be considered an aesthetic statement, then Six and Six would epitomize it. It’s almost impossible to tell the songs apart from one another without listening to the lyrics, as there’s no change in the nonexistent melody and little change in the tempo (aside from the fact that the guitar is played a bit faster and sounds angrier on “Wild Strawberries” than on the rest of the album). There is almost nothing to hang on to here; if, as Big Audio Dynamite II once proclaimed, “the only important thing these days is rhythm and melody,” then Six and Six is very unimportant indeed.

And yet I find it an utterly hypnotic album, one that doesn’t so much demand my attention as quietly steal it. It’s pure Alpha State music — it’s quite possible to look up during track seven and realize that not only do you not really remember listening to the last five songs, but you also don’t remember anything about the last half hour at all, kind of like when you’re in the middle of a long drive on an empty freeway late at night. But even if the songs themselves blend together into a gray, rain-soaked dream, they strongly evoke a mood, a mood of longing and boredom and an utter loneliness that’s as far beyond, say, Disintegration as that album is beyond Gonna Make You Sweat. In fact, much like a dream, the mood stays with you long after you’ve forgotten the details.

Reading back through what I’ve written so far, I’ve failed to convey why this album is so important to me, and indeed, I find that I’m almost helpless to describe why it has such a powerful impact on me. It’s a statement of musical emotion stripped down so far that the emotion is almost all that’s left; but that emotion is so powerful, so transcendent in its own sea-fog kind of way, that it can overcome everything else, can render the fact that this is an album without any of the normal defining markers of pop music not only irrelevant but in a strange way, majestic. It’s music that I’ve played on some dark, empty three o’clock in the mornings, that paradoxically, through its own solipsistic despair, lets me know that yes, someone else has known what life looks like when everything is closed and nothing is possible but thought.

“Now listen gently to the call,” Jandek says at the end of “Can I See Your Clock,” almost to himself, “Riding on the waves that fall / And rise to reach the sun and you /You’re living in a moon so blue.” Every word of it is true: listening to the call of Six and Six is very much like riding on wash of freezing waves, and it’s a transporting experience — even if the place that it finally takes you is the cold, blue moon.

Release date: 1981
Label: Corwood Industries
Rating: 10/10

1 Comment »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment