Jon Hassell's MUSIC IS INVISIBLE Album Releases Second Single
The track features a musical collage blending 1940s jazz with experimental club sounds and accompanies Menken's silent short film Mood Mondrian.
The second single from the forthcoming posthumous Jon Hassell album Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three) has been released. 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie' pairs new music with an underground film from 1965 by Marie Menken, a mentor to Andy Warhol.
In the same way that Hassell applied the painterly definition of 'pentimento' to illustrate the way his own music subtly revealed itself under overlaid layers, there are also hidden strands of inspiration and influence under the surface of this track, which when joined up form the fragments of a map of twentieth century avant-garde art made in the United States.
'Broadway Boogie-Woogie' is named after a 1945 painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, who moved to New York City in 1940, and Broadway Boogie-Woogie was his last completed work, inspired equally by his admiration for the neat, rigid architecture of his adopted home, and the blues and jazz records he was listening to. The finished piece was intended as a 'graphic score' for musicians. Mondrian described the painting as 'destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.'
Broadway Boogie-Woogie had long been an inspirational work of art for Jon, and it was used as a Working Title for one of the pieces on Listening To Pictures, before being switched out at the last moment and filed away for future use. It felt entirely appropriate to use it for this section of the concert, a musical collage alive with the energy of the city streets, a shuffling insectoid rhythm underpinning fog-like clouds of trumpet, like steam billowing out of a Manhattan manhole cover. In its truly genreless melange of sound and rhythm, the track joins the dots between 1940s jazz and the kind of future-facing club experiments heard at the furthest experimental reaches of the early dubstep scene, or being released at the moment by labels such as Principe. Just like Mondrian, Jon mentioned in more than one interview how the local blues and juke joint jazz that he heard as a teenager growing up in 1940s and 50s Memphis informed his work.
To find accompanying visuals for the track, Ndeya worked with the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York to license a silent short film, Mood Mondrian, made by Marie Menken in 1965, described by the artist as 'a film of a painting of a sound. Piet Mondrian's 'Broadway Boogie-Woogie' is translated into visual boogie rhythm.' Training a 16mm Bolex film camera on the painting itself and deploying rapid-fire movements, Menken brings some of the energy trapped in the coloured lines of the painting to life. The resulting video is a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional connection between art, music, and film, in tribute to all three artists' careers.
Marie Menken was a groundbreaking experimental artist at a time when women were severely under-represented in such fields. She made her first film in 1945, Visual Variations on Noguchi, co-founded the Gryphon Group, and tutored Andy Warhol in the use of a handheld camera. Ndeya is collaborating on the use of Menken's film with the Film-Makers' Cooperative / New American Cinema Group, a non-profit group founded in 1961 by a group of film makers including Jonas Mekas, Jack Smith and Stan Brakhage, devoted to the collection, preservation and distribution of experimental film and media art in New York City.
On 19th September 2026, Ndeya and Dublab will partner for an event at The Airliner in Los Angeles which includes the album getting a full pre-release play through, a panel discussion between album contributors Jeff Rona, John von Seggern, and Rick Cox chaired by Geeta Dayal (The New York Times), as well as DJs Photay and Celia Hollander. Further listening events will be announced shortly in Berlin, Oslo, Stockholm, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Porto, Taipei, and more.
Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three) will be released on 2nd October 2026 on vinyl, CD, and streaming, alongside The Pentimento Trilogy, a deluxe 3CD set including all three albums in the Pentimento series.
About Jon Hassell
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.
The Ndeya label was set up by Jon in partnership with Warp Records as a home for his music. So far Ndeya has issued his two Pentimento albums - Listening To Pictures (2018) and Seeing Through Sound (2020), a remarkable curtain call from a true auteur, as well as a much-needed reissue of his debut album Vernal Equinox, remastered from the original tapes, and a limited run collection of his writing about his own music, Atmospherics. Now that he is no longer with us, Ndeya is working with Jon's estate on preserving his legacy going forward, with a number of archival projects underway.
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