"

"Yip/Jump Music (1983) is the fifth album by Daniel Johnston (then aged 22), and the first you’d listen to for reason of entertainment, more than the above. For better or for worse, it’s an Outsider Music classic. The percussion generally sounds like someone pounding meat, the guitar sounds like an elastic band being thrummed, and the chord organ either chugs or chirps or squelches, depending on its proximity to the microphone. (That’s a good thing: it’s amazing how much variation you can get, recording through a boombox; several songs seem to have been played with instruments made out of jelly.) Plus, there are all kinds of musical surprises that take some inventiveness when you don’t have many instruments, presets, or samples. There's the way ‘Chord Organ Blues’ ends, Hendrix-like, with a pair of chords you’d swear say “thank you” (or, “vvvang vyoo…”); the way the organ on ‘Almost Got Hit by a Truck’ answers the chorus (“oh, I’m so sad…”) with a mournful “oh-oh-oh…”; the way the organ counts down before Daniel’s trip on a rocket-ship.

As you’d expect, the lyrics to Yip/Jump are sweet, sentimental and fun, but they’re also self-aware and riddled with subtexts. The one thing they don’t do is refuse to feel, or pave over emotion with surreal imagery saying nothing… and this is where you start to see the appeal in the years when there’s still a 50:50 split between naïve tunes and weird rhythmic monologues; years before the collaborations with Jad Fair (of Half Japanese), and Mark Linkous (of Sparklehorse)."     

- Drowned In Sound

These recordings were originally released on cassette by Stress Records in Austin, TX.

The audio was sourced courtesy of Jeff Tartakov, Stress founder and Daniel's manager between 1986-1993.