Beginning in the late 1980s, legendary Houston recluse Jandek issued a series of electric guitar-based records that stood out relative to the bulk of his enormous discography. On such albums as You Walk Alone and On the Way, the music skirted so closely to recognizable blues-rock forms that Corwood connoisseurs have long speculated that another unknown guitarist joined Jandek. And though Brussels-based artist Bram Devens is far too young and Belgian to be seriously considered as a candidate, with his ongoing solo project Ignatz he has proven to be veritably Jandekian in his ability to retreat into his own private, transfixing musical universe.
The original Ignatz, of course, appeared in George Herriman's classic comic strip Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat loves Ignatz Mouse, who enjoys throwing bricks at Krazy. Meanwhile, Offisa Pup is himself in love with Krazy, and spends his time trying to prevent the inevitable brick-beaning. And so it continued in Herriman's daily strip, in limitless variation, for more than 30 years. Using only a deliberately lo-fi arsenal of guitar, FX pedals and samplers, Devens is able to approximate something of Krazy Kat's captivating simplicity, repetition and symmetry. His improvised work draws heavily on Appalachian folk and bluegrass-- as well as on the hypnotic electric-blues of performers like Mississippi John Hurt-- but invariably continues his travels out into the alien wilderness.
True to its title, Ignatz II is a genuine sequel, following Devens' debut by a matter of months. (Deven's numbering system apparently doesn't take into account last year's CD-R release I Will Soothe My Eye To Feast It With A Sight Of Beauty). For this album, Devens moves his sound in a marginally more song-oriented direction, even delivering one acoustic track free from any disorienting effects. More typical, however, are such songs as the opening "He Deals With Love & Her Eyes Glaze", which buries Ignatz's blue notes beneath a moving carpet of spectral echoes and figures that dart like unearthly fireflies through the darkness.
At its essence, folk music concerns itself with memory. Its techniques, themes, and narratives are passed down hand-to-hand, so that the ghosts of the past might be granted admittance to the present. On Ignatz II, Devens translates this remembrance into his own uniquely scrambled vocabulary. The delicate Ben Chasny-like picking of "I Was Not There" gives way to the turbulent space-blues of "The Dreams", whose central riff eventually crumbles into an acrid cloud of amp distortion. The garbled repetitions of "Silver Moon... Shine Sun! Sun! Sun!" call to mind the hypnotic modal blues drones of Junior Kimbrough, while the ethereal "Hurling Incense" shimmers in blank space like a single, perfectly sustained harp note.
Devens sings and/or speaks on several of these tracks, but he chooses not to duplicate the strangely high-pitched vocals that graced his debut. On "She Will Freeze" and the set-closing blues shuffle "All Your Love", his voice could almost be that of a standard folk troubadour, chanting his impassioned mantras of faith and devotion from behind the crackled veil of a prewar blues 78. But as Ignatz II again demonstrates, Devens has proven regularly able to re-interpret these borrowed texts in his own singular fashion, his handmade bricks again gloriously shaped, baked, and thrown.
