Jon Hassell -- Classic Or Dud?

I want to speak in parentheses...

it sounds like a modern update of The Surgeon of the Nightsky Restores Dead Things By the Power of Sound (which did the same thing to live versions of things from the 1980-1983 fourth world trilogy).

No, no, I just saw it announced, without any details.

great site. no sound samples though.

Whaaa??!?

ok I bought Maarifa Street last night -- it's great. Fuzzy, liquid, and weird again. All the sharp techno edges and slickness of City & Dressing For Pleasure have been dropped, everything's muted and gauzy and mysterious again, although the tracks are still a lot more straightforward than the original trilogy; the rhythmic backing is less alienating & weird, in support for the lead trumpet, but it fits, it works

co-produced by Peter Freeman, who also played bass & laptop in the original concerts. the rhythms are slow & dubby, especially the bass lines; One track samples a dub filtersweep hit from Pole's CD1 for the downbeat (it's such a generic 'dub' sound that I wouldn't have noticed if not for the liner notes).

the album packaging is incredible, a huge sprawling tree filled with dozens of people. when you look very closely, it dawns on you that it's a sprawling multi-racial orgy. it's by Mati Klarwein, same guy who did Earthquake Island & Bitches Brew.

fits the music perfectly, this is an unusually erotically charged album even for Hassell, feels almost awkward listening to this by myself. it's all about the trumpet playing here, and no one sounds like Hassell, I love this record...

I have it -- I just don't think I ever noticed that. That's a fantastic description of the record, btw.

I'd forgotten Richard Horowitz was on Surgeon... have you heard Horowitz & Sussan Deihim's Azax Attra : Desert Equations? that is one classic record, definitely related to the fourth world series...

just found this interview online:

RH: I met Paul thanks to Brion Gysin...  I had been working on my music in between Paris and Morocco since 1969 when I received my first infusion of magnetic ecstatic blood thunder and I knew I was on to something...

http://www.richardhorowitz.com/press2.shtml

wow, she sings on Eros as well, RS, let me know if you want to trade (all these things are way out of print)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009LI7U/qid%3D1116131185/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-2848508-8628646

I don't like that tree painting on the package. If it's meant to be celebratory of life energy and sexuality and so forth, for me it just comes across as grotesque (and something about the stylized figures turns me off too). A piece of the 60s better left in that era.

after the first two weeks with Maarifa I just went back through the catalog and listened to the first five albums like crazy... I hear rumors that Dream Theory is getting reissued. hope so.

weird that Eno, Budd and Hassell all have new albums out within months of each other. Budd & Guthrie's Mysterious Skin is particularly good.

the new one

total winning streak, same mood as 'Maarifa Street' but even fuzzier & spaced out. and live percussion this time, not hearing loops, it's all gauze

he also put up a linked autobiography on his website which is very readable. strewn with polaroids of his muses.

That sounds promising. I've been appreciating Fascinoma a little more, recently.

So, so glad I got to see him play live.

i went down to see him in london a couple of years ago and was super disappointed. he was on fine form but the other two guys he was playing with were lameorama.

i couldn't get out quickly enough and as the lights came up i made a swift exit and stood on someone's toe. i turned round to apologise and it was brian eno. oops!

And that's why you should never go see Jon Hassel in London, you might step on Brian Eno's toes.

(Twenty-five years or so of listening to his music and I still have not learned how to spell his last name.)

living with it this week, new album is a lot more traditional & upfront. a lot more recognizable. less mysterious but that doesn't stop it from being beautiful. whereas late 70's / early 80's Hassell is too exotic and mutant to recognize as anything, you just fall into them with no compass, but this telegraphs itself a bit more directly.

I need to hear Fascinoma, that was clearly a reset for him. there's a track on here that quotes Ellington's 'Caravan', a quote that familiar should be too bald to work but here it doesn't sound like a reference, it just sounds perfect

You've never heard Fascinoma at all, or just not lately? I guess you know he coves "Caravan" on Fascinoma (one of my favorite tracks on that album). My favorite part of that album is probably still Jacky Terrasson 's piano playing, but I've come back to appreciating Hassell's playing on it more.

(I don't mean to act so shocked that you might not have heard Fascinoma, but you seem to have heard everything lse b him.)

(Can't see the end of the line when I type, incidentally. I think that makes me nervous and I start making misakes.)

(Exactly.)

It's the only one I haven't heard. When it came out, after City & Dressing For Pleasure I just wasn't as excited about a new Hassell record. Definitely going to pick it up next time I see it.

aahhhh xpost that's too bad re:forthcoming live stuff. that material *is* worth revisiting. this is the cd edition i picked up years ago and it's p spiff.

also yes ned! love him so much on that material. words with the shaman probably already mentioned as such, but i am officially stating my vote for "classic hassell" across the board for all of the sylvian collabs. stating the obvious perhaps, but it's nice to be right for once!

sounds like a bad david sylvian song

funny because one of the few things I know about duncan shiek is that he's a big sylvian fan and stated in interviews after Barely Breathing became a huge hit that he was surprised to get any commercial success as he thought of himself as a Sylvian type.

Never understood why Alfred had such a bad reaction to Brilliant Trees. Hassell’s work there (and on Words w the Shaman which was stapled to my CD edition) is so, so good.

Even though I love that he went out on top, I miss this guy.

duncan shiek is that he's a big sylvian fan

yeah i definitely got that sense after listening to the two tracks with hassell and almost made me want to check out some of his other stuff to see if he had some good sylvian-inspired deep cuts

aka/dabari/java >>>>>>

decided to listen through the whole catalog and spend time with some of his records i've only glancingly heard and wow what a knockout

That one is killer. A discography listen sounds just the thing. Lately, I've been listening to *Last Night the Moon* and goddamn.

agreed, so great, very subtle/minimal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2CO0kFhjwE

i'm glad the living city was given its own release. i don't know that i would've ever heard it otherwise and it's one of the very best hassell things

First heard Hassell w/his track Amsterdam Blue (Cortege) on the soundtrack for the The Million Dollar Hotel. I don't think it appeared anywhere else.

he was a genius, such a rich catalog.

Hadn't heard *The Living City* before. Some deep weirdness going on in there. The bassline on the opening track is like having a fly in a tooth cavity.

I like Earthquake Island though some don't

Well, they're wrong, it's great!

I’ve been on an Eno trip of late and pouring back through his catalogue with Hassell: Possible Musics, Dream Theory in Malaya, Power Spot, Surgeon of the Nightsky, and Flash of the Spirit with Farafina. I’ve always been sort of fascinated by their relationship. Eno got the lion’s share of the credit for the first one and Hassell felt betrayed by Bush of Ghosts. And even though Hassell ended up building a reputation mostly separate from Eno, they continued collaborating and Eno produced or co-produced all but one of his 80s records (Aka/Dabari/Java, credited to Lanois, the most sample-heavy and my current favorite). Supposedly Eno and Hassell would spend time after each tour culling tapes to use for the next album.

Then there’s Living City – the live performance at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden atrium where Hassell and band performed to an audio-visual installation of Eno’s, which the latter mixed live in surround for 200(!) speakers and included recordings of nature sounds and Pygmy tribes from Cameroon. One review somewhat hilariously described the experience as “tripping on ayahuasca while being led through a tropical rainforest by Miles Davis.”

The video is here, tho perhaps I shared it upthread. In many ways, it’s the culmination of their decade-long collaboration and, I believe, the last time they worked together.

Lastly, Perfect Sound Forever did a terrific tribute to Hassell after he passed away in 2021, with Jason Gross interviewing a bunch of his longtime collaborators – musicians, his engineer and manager. It’s fascinating stuff—and honestly pretty grim at the end—but it gives a great series of perspectives on how he worked:

https://www.furious.com/~furious/perfect/jonhassellrip.html

https://www.furious.com/~furious/perfect/jonhassellrip2.html

Aka/Dabari/Java totally rules

According to his manager that record was made with a Fairlight, I had no idea.

There’s a great Hassell quote shared by one of his guys in there, maybe Rick Cox, that he had to learn how to sample like three or four times because just as he’d get the hang of the latest technology, it would change again.