With a recording career spanning over five decades and appearances with artists such as Terry Riley, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, Jon Hassell’s influence upon minimalism, ambient and electronic music is strong.
This was a single album when released in 1990, and this expanded reissue comes with two extra discs’ worth of material as engaging as the original, and essential for fans of Hassell’s self-styled ‘Fourth World’, genre-blurring classification. Disc Two contains the first ever official release of a 1989 gig by Hassell and band alongside a Brian Eno audio installation in the Wintergarden of New York’s World Trade Centre. Disc Three showcases numerous remixes and outtakes. His breathy, voice-like trumpet playing is refracted through a prism of filters. It’s both malleable and mysterious. Wind-blown ghost notes drift across Blade Runner landscapes shimmering with fleeting voices, chirruping wildlife, tribal echoes, flickering electronica and guerilla dissonance. With hints of shape-shifting funk, it’s a surprisingly powerful aggregate, from whose percussive sub-strata thin vaporous melodies are elegantly extracted and refined.
Via All Saints
