MUSIC IS INVISIBLE (PENTIMENTO VOLUME THREE) to Complete Jon Hassell Trilogy
A deluxe 3CD set titled THE PENTIMENTO TRILOGY will also compile all three volumes of the late composer's final work.
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. Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three), the third part in Hassell's Pentimento trilogy, following Listening To Pictures (2018) and Seeing Through Sound (2020), is being released by Ndeya, the record label he founded. This is the first issue of previously unreleased work since his passing in 2021. The first single from the collection is 'Blue Ba-Ya (Excerpt)', which comes with an accompanying video. Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three) will be released on October 2nd on Vinyl, CD, and streaming, alongside 'The Pentimento Trilogy' a deluxe 3CD including all three aforementioned albums.
Hassell 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; 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; lifelong friendship with the artist Mati Klarwein; recording with Farafina, Ry Cooder, Leslie Winer, Juan Atkins and Moritz Von Oswald, amongst many others; the full list goes on and on.
A trumpet player, composer and musical conceptualist, Jon Hassell's career bisects a multitude of strands in the history of the avant-garde and the development of genuinely new forms of music. Having studied under Karl-Heinz Stockhausen in Cologne (alongside future members of the band Can), he played on the original recording of Terry Riley's In C (1968), was part of La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music and studied Kiranic singing with Pandit Pran Nath, all of which informed his own instrumental technique and treatment of the trumpet with various electronic effects.
A growing interest in the indigenous music of other cultures led to the invention of his 'Fourth World' blend of different styles, first heard on albums such as Vernal Equinox and Earthquake Island in the late-1970s. These caught the ear of Brian Eno, who collaborated with Hassell on the Possible Musics album, and used many of the Fourth World ideas on his My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts album with David Byrne. He has played on albums by artists including Talking Heads (the seminal Remain In Light), Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian and Björk, composed film soundtracks and contributed to theatre works. In the past few years he has been acknowledged as a key influence on a new wave of artists including Oneohtrix Point Never, Huerco S and Visible Cloaks. In 2017 his music was celebrated with a compilation album on Optimo Music, Miracle Steps: Music From The Fourth World 1983 - 2017.
In 2018 the Ndeya label was set up by Jon in partnership with Warp Records as a home for his music. In the same year he released his first album in nine years, the widely acclaimed Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). This was followed by his final studio album: Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) in 2020. Both albums are a remarkable curtain call from a true auteur, and regarded by fans and critics alike as a high watermark in what was already an astounding musical career.
After a period of poor health, Jon Hassell passed away in 2021. Ndeya is working with Jon's estate on preserving his legacy going forward, with a number of archival projects including a remastered reissue of his classic debut album, 1977's Vernal Equinox, a limited run collection of his writing about his own music, Atmospherics, and Further Fictions - a deep dive into the innovative work that Jon was exploring with his group in the late 1980s.
About Music Is Invisible
Music Is Invisible captures Jon Hassell performing as part of a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern at St John at Hackney church, London on 23 May 2015, what would prove to be Jon's final ever live performance. The audio was subsequently carefully edited and mixed by Jeff Rona into something that is much more than a traditional 'live album'.
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.
Pre-order: https://ndeya.ffm.to/musicisinvisible
