Music Is Invisible to Close Jon Hassell's Pentimento Trilogy
Recorded at St John at Hackney church with Rick Cox and John von Seggern, and mixed by Jeff Rona.
Ndeya, the record label founded by the late Jon Hassell, has announced the release of MUSIC IS INVISIBLE (PENTIMENTO VOLUME THREE), the third and final installment in Hassell's Pentimento trilogy, following LISTENING TO PICTURES and SEEING THROUGH SOUND. The announcement arrives alongside a new single, BLUE BA-YA (EXCERPT), and an accompanying video. MUSIC IS INVISIBLE will be released on vinyl, CD, and streaming platforms, along with THE PENTIMENTO TRILOGY, a deluxe 3CD set containing all three albums.
Themes, motifs and riffs from Hassell's two final albums, Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound, occur throughout these unique, semi-improvised mutations, making this a fitting final volume in the late career renaissance of the Pentimento series. 'Pentimento' is defined as 'the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over', a methodology that Jon applied in a musical sense throughout his career, refining and developing his approach over time.
Specifically, Hassell would take previous recordings, whether captured audio from a concert he had performed, or snippets of rehearsals, and use it as base material to play fresh parts over, or take certain sections and loop them into a whole new piece, echoing the 'version' approach of dub reggae music from Jamaica, filtered through his love of Teo Macero's radical tape cut-ups of Miles Davis in the 1970s. Examples of this can be seen as early as 1980's Brian Eno-produced Fourth World Vol. 1 - Possible Musics where material taken from previous album Earthquake Island, and a live concert recording from the Art Gallery Of Ontario, serve as the launchpad for the musicians to play over as a sound bed, and make entirely new pieces out of the resulting parts. This continues right up to final studio album Seeing Through Sound, where recordings of Jon and band in a church in Vienna, or laying down a session for Radio France are edited, overdubbed, or even overlaid with a completely different recording to create a kind of sonic collage.
All of this is to say that whilst MUSIC IS INVISIBLE does capture Jon Hassell and band performing live, the blurred lines between 'studio' and 'live' in the Hassell discography means that the category distinctions become somewhat meaningless. The musicians here are playing using a sound bed of samples taken from different sources (often their own previous performances), combined with the extensive editing, clean-up work and subtle sampling employed at the mixing and post-production stage, means this is as much a 'studio' record as many other entries in the artist's body of work. The other two ostensibly 'live' albums in the rich Hassell discography, The Surgeon Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of Sound (1987) and The Living City (issued 2023, recorded in 1989), were also created using this sensibility.
Work continues on the cataloging and digitising of the archive of material Jon left behind as this release comes out. Solid progress has been made with this, and there are a number of exciting unheard recordings and reissues of classic records that will be coming out in the next few years.
Jon Hassell passed away at the age of 84 on 26 June 2021, leaving behind a significant legacy of highly influential music and art created over his lifetime. A trumpet player, composer and musical conceptualist, he was a Zelig-like figure who interconnected with an enormous range of 20th century art and music: growing up going to juke joints and blues parties in post-WWII Memphis, Tennessee; studying under Stockhausen with Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt of Can; befriending Terry Riley and playing on the classic recording of 'In C'; forming part of the Theatre Of Eternal Dream Music with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela; mentored in raga by Prandit Pran Nath; playing with David Rosenboom and Naná Vasconcelos on his first record; collaborating with Eno; playing on Remain In Light with Talking Heads; a lifelong friendship with the artist Mati Klarwein; recording with Farafina, Ry Cooder, Leslie Winer, Juan Atkins, Moritz Von Oswald, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian and Björk, amongst many others; film soundtracks, theatre work, an opera, a children's book, the full list goes on and on, and it is only in the last few years that people are beginning to appreciate the full breadth of his achievements.
Pre-order at https://ndeya.ffm.to/musicisinvisible
MUSIC IS INVISIBLE captures Hassell performing as part of a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern at St John at Hackney church in London, in what proved to be his final live performance. The recording was edited and mixed by Jeff Rona, incorporating themes and motifs from Hassell's two prior Pentimento albums.
