Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)
Jon Hassell was 81 when he returned from a nine-year hiatus to release 2018’s *Listening to Pictures (Pentimento, Vol. One)*, yet the composer’s ambient-jazz fusion sounded every bit as fresh as it had four decades earlier—a searching swirl of aquatic rhythms and his habitual trumpet treatments. Two years later, on that album’s companion, Hassell keeps pushing outward. His signature, as ever, is the kaleidoscopic processing that splits the tone of his horn into eerie open fifths, but he continues to find new contexts for it. He has never sounded as amorphous as he does on the liquid “Moons of Titan,” which suggests a conversation with the 2020s’ ambient revival; on “Delicado,” he delves into looped drums reminiscent of classic Detroit downtempo. Gorgeous, immersive, and genuinely experimental, it’s a late-career triumph; the title of its closing track, “Timeless,” feels duly earned.
“Listen as if you were being told a secret” - Federico Fellini A companion piece to 2018’s Listening To Pictures, this second volume in the pentimento series presents eight new tracks by the music visionary, continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing. Pentimento is defined as the “reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over” and this is evident in the innovative production style that ‘paints with sound’ using overlapping nuances to create an undefinable and intoxicating new palette. In classic Hassell fashion, the title can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, but perhaps the most pertinent at the moment is the human instinct to sing and play through a rain of difficulties. A future blues of indeterminate and ever-shifting shape. The album is buffered by two 8-minute plus epics at the beginning and the end - the hypnotic “Fearless” with it’s metronomic, almost Can-like rhythm, and blurry, noir-ish texture of sound emerging like car headlights from the fog; mirrored at the end of the record by the beautiful sci-fi lullaby of “Timeless”, a track with a gaseous, billowing quality as electronic clicks and bubbles float over a landscape of shimmering, glacially paced complexity. The bridge between those two worlds is no less compelling, from the frantic, spidery IDM sketch of “Reykjavik” to the collapsed-time ballad of “Unknown Wish”. Whilst containing seeds of classic ‘fourth world’ fusion, this record finds the artist still questing to create new forms and mutations of music, a thrilling window into what music could sound like in a world to come.
On the sequel to last year’s Listening to Pictures, the octogenarian trumpet player slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.
Veteran of the avant garde Jon Hassell is one of those name that generally hovers below the mainstream radar while maintaining a Zelig-like knack for cropping up whenever something interesting is going on.
Jon Hassell is still in the Fourth World, and boy, it sounds like a better place than wherever the hell we are.
Two years ago, the then 81-year-old Jon Hassell claimed in an interview that he was working on a book, The North and South of You.