Jon Hassell
Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)

In this era of barbarism, the world of music at all levels is finally rediscovering Jon Hassell. Perhaps it is no coincidence. I mean that beyond the great quality of his compositions and works, his music has always been marked by a certain ideological component inspired by cosmological content (in the "Alexandrian" sense of the term) and a mix of cultures and sounds, with the aim of breaking down any barriers, both temporal and geographical. Beyond his fundamental role in the evolution of concrete and experimental music, and his great influence in the world of modern electronic music, his theories on the so-called "fourth world"—a kind of didactic yet practical ethics in composition that results in a reworking of traditions while always decisively looking to the present future—are becoming a constant not only in the highest experimental music but also in various artists and groups that can be placed within the macro-genre of avant-jazz or fusion, or even in the world of psychedelic music.

In this sense, Jon Hassell's music can be defined in every respect as "world music," transcending those pathetic allegorical and folkloric manifestations that interpret the definition in a provincial manner, as if the context and ideal dimension of this definition were that of a large village fair and set each time in a different geographical context: as if the definition of "world" in this case takes us back to a smaller world, like Virgil's bucolic watercolors where everything revolves around the problems of the shepherd Meliboeus. Thus, while the world seems to want to shrink all around us, a new release by this artist, who is now eighty-one years old (born in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 22, 1937), is needed to somehow give us a real dimension of the world we live in. He does so with "Listening To Pictures," subtitled "Pentimento (Volume 1)," the first release in nine years (meanwhile, Glitterbeat has re-released the two seminal volumes "Possible Musics" and "Dream Theory In Malaya"), in which he ideally adopts the pictorial technique of rethinking in a series of compositions that constitute a real challenge with himself, clearly undertaken with musicians who share this same cosmic orientation with him and who, without limitations and definitions of genre, engage in a work of continuous takes and overdubs, a sort of macroscopic three-dimensional genetic intervention, where the music itself is a body in rotation and each time shows a different face.

Jon releases "Listening To Pictures" in conjunction with the launch of his label (Ndeya), the aim is clearly to put the listener back at the center of the auditory experience and in this sense into a dimension where they find themselves literally disoriented and a part of the same "challenge" faced by Hassell during the recording processes. It's not so much about those usual rehashing of acid trips and the search for new levels of understanding, but rather pushing the listener to be the protagonist of this "fourth world," which ideally no longer coincides with one where a man is forced to live on less than a dollar a month, but calls attention to a different dimension where each is truly responsible for themselves as well as others. From ambient to glitch, and from experimental jazz to electronic minimalism, it becomes difficult to offer a typical track-to-track description of the eight pieces that make up the album: their seemingly cerebral and hi-tech nature might invite us to further intellectual reflections and speculations, but the sound, that, escapes like the vision of jade-colored tiger eyes in the dense jungle of the island of Sumatra.