Constraint, Converged: One Night in Houston

It’s 2006 in Houston, and the evening air hums with the strange promise of resonance. Nameless Sound, the city’s quietly radical nonprofit for experimental music and improvisation, is hosting a concert at the Friends Meeting House—a Quaker space of radical stillness designed by James Turrell, where light itself is disciplined into form.

The players tonight: Loren Connors and Alan Licht. Guitar alchemists. Minimalists of the fractured phrase. Connors makes ghost blues shimmer through decay; Licht interlaces feedback and tone into slow-burning textural essays. They set up not on a stage, but on the floor, under the soft geometric aperture of Turrell’s lightwork.

Then: an encore.

Out walks Jandek.

This is shortly after Sterling Smith—Houston native, enigmatic force behind the Corwood Industries catalog—began performing publicly. For decades, Jandek had been little more than a post office box and a mythology. No interviews. No tours. Just dissonant, haunted LPs that arrived with hand-stamped cryptic covers. Seeing him in the flesh was like glimpsing a folk cryptid stepping through the veil.

And now he’s sitting down beside Connors and Licht, guitar in hand, joining in their glacial drift. No announcement. No applause. Just a murmur of disbelief and then... silence again. The room held its breath. Not out of reverence, exactly, but out of something weirder: a recognition that something unrepeatable was happening.

After the show, my spouse—then a Nameless Sound board member—and I were invited to a small gathering with the musicians. There, amid folding chairs and shared awe, someone passed around a bottle of tequila. And there we were: sipping mezcal with Jandek.

He was warm. Funny, even. Not the brooding prophet of outsider lore, but a man at ease among weirdos, generous with anecdotes, curious about others. The mystique didn’t dissolve—it reshaped. What had felt like fortress now revealed itself as a kind of ritual architecture: a way to protect the work until the world was ready to meet it.

I later confirmed the show via the obsessive documentation of one Seth Tisue, whose GitHub chronology of Jandek performances is itself a kind of devotional record-keeping. April 2006, Houston. There it is.

What strikes me now is how that night—Turrell’s sacred geometry, Connors’ decayed blues, Licht’s ambient intellect, Jandek’s myth in the flesh—embodied every mode of constraint I’d come to write about years later:

• Style (Connors)
• Contortion (Licht)
• Ritual (the space itself)
• Survival (Jandek’s decades of privacy and deflection)
• Philosophy (Turrell’s light, the Quaker silence)

All of it converging, however briefly, in a room built for listening.

And maybe that’s what constraint at its best really is: not a wall, but a tuning chamber. A space to hold the strange, the slow, the not-yet-understood.

And sometimes, if you're lucky, a place to sip tequila with a ghost who turns out to be human after all.