Jandek, alone with a guitar and a microphone, sounds like a muttering sleepwalker aimlessly plucking amplified bicycle spokes. His music is dark and gloomy; but it won't make you sad-it will make you tense and uncomfortable. Here is the Ultimate Disconnect. You love it or hate it-and for every one of the former, there are one million of the latter. A sampling of his song titles: "Painted My Teeth," "Twelve Minutes Since February 32'nd" [sic], and "Janitor's Dead." Jandek accompanies himself on acoustic or electric guitar, but for the incoherence of his zombie-like strumming, his hands might as well be accidentally brushing against the strings. His occasional wheezing harmonica approximates early Dylan having an asthma attack. Sometimes Jandek is backed by a drummer who seems unfamiliar with the kit, and who pounds away relentlessly with no ground beat.

If the above seems too flattering a portrait of Jandek's cave-dweller primitivism, imagine a subterranean microphone wired down to a month-old tomb, capturing the sound of maggots nibbling on a decaying corpse and the agonized howls of a departed soul desperate to escape tortuous decomposition and eternal boredom. That's Burt Bacharach compared to Jandek.

Jandek is a recluse named Sterling R. Smith, and he's holed up somewhere near Houston, Texas. (Please don't call the one in the Houston phone book-wrong guy.) Since 1978 Smith has issued, mostly on 12" vinyl, 28 full-length albums-no 7" or 12" singles, no remixes, cassettes, or videos. A few of his cryptic album titles: Staring at the Cellophane, Telegraph Melts, Blue Corpse, Chair Beside a Window. He didn't begin issuing CDs until the early 1990s. His album covers are devoid of any information. He has never issued a press kit, and never performed in public. He rejects all requests for interviews. They found the Unabomber, but so far, no Jandek. Seth Tisue, curator of a Jandek website, notes, "His consistency in this regard far surpasses that of other legendary reclusives such as Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger." Jandek's records rarely turn up in stores-even second-hand shops. Smith is pouring a lot of money into a Deep Dark Hole. (If you'd like to pour in some of yours, write Corwood Industries, PO Box 15375, Houston TX 77220.)