jon hassell: memory, musicology, hauntology, psychogeography
the future isn’t what it used to be . . .
[ A MUSIC: Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street (2009) by Jon Hassell ]
Bandcamp — (Archival Material from Ndeya)
Bandcamp — Glitterbeat Records
and a Live Recording: Festival Jazz Onze+ 2009
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Now is the time for the technoworld to use its knowledge to go beyond this pattern-to begin to see the unforeseen ways in which the best of their attitudes will become ours, and ours become theirs, resulting in modalities which I refer to as Fourth World -a returning to, and a stepping forward at the same time.
- Jon Hassell, “Artificial Boundaries, Expanding Horizons, Possible Musics” in Heavy Metal, March 1982
A BRIEF HISTORY:
Jon Hassell had a vision.
Born 22 March 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, Jon Hassell learned to play a cornet in jazz bands. He graduated from Rochester, New York’s Eastman School of Music with a master’s degree in music. He was interested in twelve-tone music and hung out with radicals, a set apart from the broad “Americana” of the rest of the school. To avoid getting drafted he went into the army band in Washington D.C.*
[ *better brass bands than brass bullets ]
He performed in La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music in New York City, contributing to the 1974 LP Dream House 78' 17". He didn’t quite finish his PhD in musicology at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
He went to Europe where he studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne Course for New Music (Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay were some of his classmates: they later formed the band Can). Hassell returned to the USA in 1967 where he met Terry Riley in Buffalo, New York and performed on the first recording of Riley’s seminal work In C in 1968.
On his return to Buffalo in the early 1970s, Hassell was introduced to the music of Indian classical raga singer the Pandit* Pran Nath, a specialist in the Kiranic or kirana gharana style. Hassell and co went to India to study with Nath who awoke his appetite for traditional musics of the world.
[ *in Hinduism, a man with specialised knowledge or a teacher of any field of knowledge ]
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PERFECT SOUND FOREVER: It does seem like your trumpet playing is very similar to the Indian singing style.
[HASSELL:] Just about everything I have, I owe to Pran Nath. For the first few months with him, I learned by singing. A phrase would be sung to you, you’d sing it back and if it was correct, you’d move on to something more complex. If not, you work on it again or do something simpler. It was aural/oral transmission.
Then I started to try to do that on trumpet. I had to completely forget everything that I’d ever been taught I’m still trying to forget it. It was a matter of trying to make the mouthpiece sound like a voice merged with a conch shell.
I worked on the “alap,” the slow introductory section, of one raga for the first two years. The whole technique evolved out my having to draw, or figure out a way to draw, the kind of curves he was drawing with his voice.
— interview with Jon Hassell conducted by Jason Gross for Perfect Sound Forever, July 1997
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[ hassell offhandedly mentioned that “invented a television lightscreen and was partners in a corporation to exploit it. this sidetracked [him] from music for a couple of years” in an interview with jason gross for perfect sound forever from july 1997. i couldn’t find any other reference to it. i don’t know if it’s true. either way: very funny!!! ]
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His debut 1977 album Vernal Equinox is a first glimpse of Hassell’s vision. Along with his trumpet, Hassell put to use synths and other drones from electronic keyboards. The performers on the album are the likes of synth pioneer David Rosenbloom, percussionist William Winant (a John Cage collaborator), and Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconçelos. Hassell treated his trumpet with effects like pitch shifting and reverb to imitate the vocal techniques to which Nath had exposed him.
[ to my ear, vernal equinox has a charming, naive optimism. hassell has yet to fully nail down his signature style. he is still gathering smoke. ]
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The last track, “Caracas Nights, September 11, 1975,” is me playing alone up on the hill in Altamira with distant barking from Perrasita, a wandering dog I had taken in and, heartbreakingly, had to leave behind.
— Jon Hassell: “1977 Vernal Equinox” in Atmospherics [Second Edition], Ndeya 2023
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In parallel, Western liberal democracies described themselves as the First World. They described the now-defunct bloc of socialist countries as the Second World. They described non-aligned nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America as the Third World.
[ they built a hierarchy to dominate and exploit. up came the timber, the sugar, the iron, the copper, the people, the labour ]
Hassell did what anyone living under the long shadow of the American imperial project should do and reject every convention laid at his feet. He imagined a world where all music cultures were equal:
— “metaclassical and metapop” that assimilated disparate styles, from traditional African to Indian music
— a “unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques”
— “a proposal for a ‘coffee coloured’* classical music of the future” with new modes of structural organisation and and expansion of allowable musical vocabulary away from Eurocentric ascetic aesthetics
[ *‘coffee coloured’ means exactly what you think a 1970s counterculture dude would mean. ]
— a “techno/primitive paradigm” that used electronics in place of a tambura and effected his microtonally-inflected trumpet playing with a harmonizer, pitch-shifter, and reverb.
The musical traditions of the Third World plus the electronics of the First World . . .
3 + 1 = 4
Fourth World music, he called it.
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Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, part I
Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street was released by ECM Records on 10 February 2009. Hassell used the same process as he had done for many of his previous records: a montage of years of concerts with expert collaborating musicians in a living and morphing process.
The title comes from a poem called “The New Rule” by Rumi*, a thirteenth-century Persian poet, Hanafi faqih, Islamic scholar, Maturidi theologian and Sufi mystic from originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. Rumi’s influence transcends national borders and ethnic divisions, particularly the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent who have greatly appreciated his spiritual legacy for the past seven centuries.
[ i’m cribbing from wikipedia here. i don’t know anything about rumi. i’m making a note to learn more. hassell’s curiosity and interest in the world is infectious. ]
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
— excerpt from “The New Rule” by Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks
[* (also known as Jalal al-Din Rumi
or Rūmī Ǧalāl al-Dīn
or Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (جلالالدین محمد بلخى)
or Mevlânâ/Mawlānā (Persian: مولانا, lit. ‘our master’)
and Mevlevî/Mawlawī (Persian: مولوی, lit. ‘my master’)]
MEMORY
Every time I think about Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street I fall down a new rabbit hole.
A man born in 1930s Memphis, Tennesse synthesised Miles Davis’ modal harmony and minimal vibrato and understated lyricism with Stockhausenian electronics with Indian Kirana gharana vocal stylings applied to heavily-effected trumpeting that emulated the harmomising practices of Gergorian chant with minimalism with sampling and with texture.
And then on Fascinoma (1999), he abandoned the effects and played jazz standard “Nature Boy” with elements of his breathy style but otherwise straightforwardly. After twentysomething years it was the first time he’d played someone else’s tune on one of his own records. “Caravanesque” and “Suite De Caravan” are obvious riffs on “Caravan,” the jazz standard by Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington, reincorporating jazz explicitly into his sound.
And then! On “Abu Gil”* from Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, at roughly the six-and-a-half minute mark Hassell quotes the melody of “Caravan.” He played a memory. I remember it too.
[ *the name referencing musician and orchestrator Gil Evans who worked on Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool ]
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Hassell’s nature is not the sometimes threatening or sublime nature of Romanticism; it is more along the lines of Romanticism’s own countering construction of nature as utopia or paradise […]. Hassell’s nature never overpowers or destroys. It is the field of sensual activity, of memory and longing, of peaceful relations — the Ba-Benzélé do not fear the coming of the storm, the waves are gently rolling, the birds sing peacefully about their business. This also reflects a particularly modern experience of place. Those of us (like Hassell) from the industrialized West experience a multitude of places temporarily as tourists, vacationers, business-travellers, passers-through; we see them on TV or in films, mediated and safely contained; we experience the natural world similarly, as a weekend escape, in parks framed by city streets, in nature and ethnographic documentaries. We understand little or nothing of longterm lived experiences of these environments.
— David Dennen: “From the Jungle to the City: Ecomimesis and Imagining Emplacement in the Music of Jon Hassell,” 2013
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For a music journal, he was asked if he ever considered the socio-political implications of his music and he said he did not and that he was purely a pleasure listener. He then also rhetorically asked:
“Political”? What is NOT political in the megamarket?
— Santoro, Alyce: “Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Socio‐Political Implications of their Work,” Leonardo Music Journal 25: 100–101, MIT Press Direct, 2015
And then in the liner notes for Psychogeography (2023) it describes that archival release as “a situationist re-thinking of the 1990 City: Works Of Fiction album, a carefully edited sequence of alternate takes, demos and studio jams put together by Jon Hassell in 2014 using Debordian philosophy as his guide.” He is referring to French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International: Guy Debord.
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Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities has already been cited as an inspiration for the original City: Works of Fiction recording. Since then, I revisited a favorite thinker, Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist movement, who had proposed the idea of “psychogeography” — where “zones of feeling” were the criterion for mapping instead of conventional geographic features (sparked by finding that Simon Reynolds piece that refers to this). So there was the title and a kind of magnetic pole for both sonics and psychology to be attracted to.
— Jon Hassell: “1990 City: Works of Fiction” in Atmospherics [Second Edition], Ndeya 2023
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Hassell is the type that only the 20th century could have produced: from the great Black American art form of jazz, catching a connecting flight through Germany to India and back to the US, becoming an avid internet user and pushing the use of sampling forward in ways that connect to deep traditions, collecting and interpolating everything from Massai hunting calls to Public Enemy samples.
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PERFECT SOUND FOREVER: You also mentioned a “techno/primitive paradigm.”
[HASSELL:] My very first notion of how to describe this music was “future/primitive.” That came from Albert Goldman’s book on Brazilian culture. That was another was to say Fourth World. It’s become debased as a catchphrase now and I try not to use it. I don’t want to join in the herd trampling through the campsites where I delicately and respectfully visited 15 or 20 years ago.
— interview with Jon Hassell conducted by Jason Gross for Perfect Sound Forever, July 1997
[ hassell seemingly tried to avoid orientalising or exoticising the music on which he was drawing. there are other references to him using terms like “world music” or “ethnic music” as was the style of the time. i would give him the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he learned directly from the pandit pran nath. that’s a sense of authenticity at the very least. ]
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All of his music is in some way about memory: torch-bearer for old traditions into the imagined future, sampling as an act of hanging on to a moment for ever, releasing live recording mixed with studio albums to savour the spontaneity with the contrast of worked-over editing, objects turned to process, process turned to objects.
It makes sense in a way: Hassell had a career that lasted about seventy years. Enough for several lifetimes. Enough to reinvent himself beneath the surface. Enough to remember again older versions of himself. Time enough to change and time enough to come full circle.
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There’s more than enough material and questions and whathaveyou to pull together a PhD. I thought about while thinking about all this music. It would be unwieldy. He either didn’t quite finish his PhD in the 70s or had one by the early 90s in time for Nirvana, as he claimed in a 2018 interview with The Quietus (I couldn’t find his thesis but I found mention of it in a republished Sound on Sound article on his website as “involving advanced studies in Gregorian chant” — if you find it please send it to me). There’s a snake eating its own tail plus the tails of a dozen other snakes.
I would have to become an expert in all of the musics that Hassell was an expert in, plus all of Hassell’s music. I’m reminded of the Jorge Luis Borges short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where the titular character’s tries to go beyond a mere “translation” of Miguel de Cervantes’ epic novel Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually “re-create” it, line for line, in the original seventeenth-century Spanish.* I would have to do that but for an entire other human being. So I’m not doing that. I’m doing this instead, and remaining myself as best I can.
[ *it seems fitting to reference borges here, one of the key figures of the magical realsim literary style, considering hassell titled albums such as Aka/Darbari/Java: Magic Realism (1983) and Maarifa Street: Magic Realism Volume Two (2005) ]
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Architecture and music are the most abstract of the arts. They are both rooted in precise mathematical relationships played out across space and time. Still, their abstractness can become representational when it starts to symbolize something. What does a Gothic cathedral symbolize? Technological progress? The victory of ideas over matter? Or, the power of religion? The importance of piety? For most people, it will be the latter more than the former, and in a quite literal way: the Gothic cathedral and all the buildings modeled on it, are didactic symbols of devotion to Christianity. So, too, a Bach Cantata cannot be heard entirely apart from its intended setting. Even the most agnostic listeners will feel the force of its religious passion.
— excerpt from Lebbeus Woods writing “The Politics of Abstraction,” lebbeuswoods.blogspot.com, 28 October 2008
Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, part II
Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street is a contradiction: it’s easy listening with an academic rigour, delicate ambiences made eerie and clashing, a live album and an studio album in one, glitched-out sampling and moody real jazz- and raga-informed trumpeting, an imaginary country that exists in a real internal emotional landscape.
It wasn’t completely clear to me what/where/when the Fourth World might be. When I first heard the term and listened to Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, I had the image in my head of the future: a world after a cataclysm with all the surviving musical cultures coming together to make art using the leftover scraps of tape loops and samples.
Seems more relevant now in 2023 than ever. The future isn’t what it used to be.
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My days and nights in India — with Pran Nath showing me the holy caves and rivers and palaces where the art of raga unfolded — allowed me to time-travel back to an age of flickering candlelight, splashing water and laughter, with serpentine melodies unfurling in perfumed air.
— Jon Hassell: “1983 Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism” in Atmospherics [Second Edition], Ndeya 2023
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I could show you from a dryly musicological angle what I mean. However, I choose not to transcribe the rhythm or melody to Western music notation or make any diagrammatic stab at musical analysis. As much as any piece of art can be said to have meaning, I care more for what it can convey. Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street showed me a learned world, a curious world, of imaging solidarity and unity. It comes from Indian music and 20th century electronics, it comes from 21st century sampling methods and Algerian jazz, it comes from the heartlands of the US and the alien world of Stockhausen, it comes from the past and future. Rendering it in notation would strip some essential element and pointing out recurring motifs or fragments or broader organising principles feels small in comparison to the sum of its parts.
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[ stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (literally “Song of the Youths”), 1955–56t. the sampled vocal parts were supplied by twelve-year-old josef protschka. sampling was once the cutting edge, performed by german scientists in specially designed labs full of expensive, sturdy equipment. now it is one of the defaults of twenty-first century music making. ]
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[ALYCE SANTORO, VIA EMAIL:] Have you, or has anyone ever used your music for political or social ends?
[HASSELL:] I’m for full‐on pleasure in listening with no excuses necessary — “Les Baxter and Beyond.” I’m lightyears away from any idea of “political” with regard to music. But that’s my personal credo. This canonization of the chorus‐verse form (and all the other conventions that come with it) is unstoppable. It’s a colossal loop. (See Simon Reynolds ‐ Retromania ‐ Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past). What would Guy Debord have to say about iTunes and Spotify?
And here’s the secret — Music is Invisible. It exists only as an interior experience in an individual. Who can say what this or that person is experiencing? We inevitably try to get close with word descriptions but that is essentially a language experience about a musical experience. In discussing a painting, one can actually touch an area and say, “This is quite Picasso‐like” — it’s visible — there’s a common database for visual culture.
But the Entertainment Industrial Complex knows how to spot an opportunity to supply the “missing” visuals and descriptions to keep those clicks and dollars pouring in.
“Political”? What is NOT political in the megamarket?
— excerpt from Alyce Santoro: “Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Socio‐Political Implications of their Work,” Leonardo Music Journal 25: 100–101, MIT Press Direct, 2015
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ONTOLOGY // HAUNTOLOGY
Let’s think about musicology for a second. Y’know: the study of music.
One of the failures of my third level education was the focus on music to the detriment of everything else. Music exists in this strange space in an academic context where there is a technical component that needs to be addressed extensively, as well as a time-consuming performance element. I had a weekly multi-hour lecture on tonal harmony and another lecture where we only talked about first-movement sonata forms across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I had to go to choir practice after hours as a necessity to pass.
While I did have courses on the philosophy of music and the sociology of music (as well as multiple modules on ethnomusicology), in hindsight my education was lacking. I’ve tried to fill in as much as I can but there are certain key philosophical texts that need to be taught by the knowledgeable, rather than me: a fool rummaging around in the dustbins of history.
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I spent a long time learning music theory that deals exclusively with European music from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, otherwise known as common practice tonality. I had my Bachs, my Mozarts, my Beethovens and we took a look at Brahms, Liszt, and Bruckner under certain conditions. All the Bs of entrenched Euroculture. We touched briefly on Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. We didn’t go much further than that.
It took me a long time to realise that the toolbox I was given is full of hammers. Sure, those hammers are of increasing sophistication and but they still are hammers. Not all the world is nails, mate.
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Applying what I was taught to music that comes from jazz of particular periods or any Indian classical musics or mid-twentieth century electronic music would miss the point of each in due course. To apply the methods of nineteenth century Euroculture to jazz, with its roots in the roots in the African-American experience, or to the complexities of Indian raga would be to push further colonial mindsets on unsuspecting parts of the world. I also don’t want to “Orientalise” raga as a mysticism that cannot be understood by a little white boy like me. I simply do not have the experience or toolset necessary to not trample indelicately over a thousand years of culture.
We spent a lot of time learning and practicing Schenkerian analysis: a method of analysing tonal* music to find and demonstrate an underlying coherence to the work. Schenker explained it poorly and theoreticians have been pulling it apart since. We were taught this uncritically, as though it were a mathematical theorem.
[ *Schenker and music theorists use a strict definition that involves a hierarchy of relationships between chords — don’t worry about it. ]
Heinrich Schenker, the nineteenth and twentieth century music theorist who developed this method, was a racist. I won’t repeat the things he has said here. He was criticised in his own lifetime for his views and those arguments against him have only gotten louder. This was not brought up in my undergrad.
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[…] if one argues that the hierarchic thinking that lies at the core of Schenkerian theory is white and racist, what is one to make of the fact that in West Africa, too, modes of hierarchic thinking are pronounced and functionally indispensable to an understanding of many an expressive structure, musical as well as non-musical? The worst consequence of claiming technical procedures for whiteness is denying the existence of shared ways of proceeding, and in effect enjoining our hypothetical West African theorist to go look for something different, a new grounding principle, better if it is anchored in nonhierarchy, something uniquely his own, something ‘black.’ The domain of blackness is thus defined in its non-intersection with whiteness. I fail to see how such a strategy can be empowering for black scholars.
— V. Kofi Agawu: “Lives in Musicology: My Life in Writings,” Acta Musicologica 93/1, 2021, pp. 15–16
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How much of Schenker’s views on race exist in his theories exploring the “deep structure” of music? How much of this was instilled in me with no second thought?
I was taught to do this. I don’t want to do that any more. I don’t want to make every problem worse. I wouldn’t trust any of my former classmate or teachers who are afraid to admit the very same.
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So Jon Hassell’s music presents a musicological problem: what is the most fruitful analysis available to us? one that doesn’t trample on people and culture and history?
His trumpet playing connects Miles Davis and the Pandit Pran Nath, and his use of an Eventide Harmonizer to draw parallel lines of sound from a single source recalls the harmony of European pre-tonal church music, sometimes called Gregorian chant or plainsong (if his PhD really was on Gregorian chant then we’re getting closer). While Gregorian chant would harmonise in parallel fourths, fifths, and octaves, Hassell sometimes sets it to harmonise in fourths and sevenths. I can see it all from the corner of my eye and it eludes me when I look directly at it.
To describe the timbral effects of Hassell’s breathy playing, we run into the limits of language. There is a maxim attributed to a great many people that I now leave unattributed that goes:
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
We’re poor at talking about sound. Most of music opinion boils down to “I like this” or “I don’t like this.” It’s instinctual. The human brain stores language and music in separate places. Culturally, there is no shared language of sound. Methods of analysis like the work of Schenker are developed to find a shared language. They carry the same risks as any language: the capactiy for damage.
We could track down all of the samples Hassell used, or describe in detail those that he or his collaborators made. We would run into the same problem.
Putting all of these together would create an unwieldy three- or four-dimensional diagram that I think would show us less than the sum of the part of Hassell’s music. We return then to our “Pierre Menard” problem: the only way to fully analyse his music would be to live his life again and recreate exactly every musical decision he made. We risk then trampling on the memory of Hassell himself.
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ontology
/ɒnˈtɒlədʒi/
noun
noun: ontology; plural noun: ontologies
the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.
a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.
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Philip V. Bohlman’s essay “Ontologies of Music” in Rethinking Music begins:
“Music may be what we think it is; it may not be.”
Bohlman highlights a number of ethnomusicological points of tension to keep in mind as questions. Let’s not get too bogged down in this. I’ll explain in simple terms, just in case you are not musicologically inclined.
For example:
— My music / Your music :: My music may be the music that a person has grown up with or had at a particular moment in time or about which one has a special interest or control. Your music has all of the same characteristics but from a different point of view. My music and your music cannot be the same, just as you and me are not the same: one negates the other.
I’m telling you here about my music. Someday you can tell me about your music.
or . . .
— Our music / Their music :: Our music can contribute to a sense of community or draw borders between one community from another. Their music is its counterpart. Both have been used to instantiate community, polity, history. Both have been used to justify racism. Think of traditional music. Think of nationalistic music.
National anthems at football matches are a perfect example of this. It’s another way of drawing a line between one side and another.
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Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street demands complicated answers to any of these ontologies.
For example:
— Authentic sound / recorded sound :: Authentic sound we might consider as a musician performing unmediated through technology right in front of an engaged audience. There is no abstraction, no alienation. With the advent of audio technology, be it amplification or recording or electronic effects, music got a little stranger. It’s hard to imagine now with huge swathes of music at our fingertips that there was once no such thing as “live performance.” There was music and there was nothing. Live performance was invented on the day the first audio recording was made. No longer does a person have to be within earshot for you to hear them. No longer does a person still have to be alive for you to hear them.
Recorded sound conflates musical production and reproduction into a single moment: the music itself.
A jazz standard, a raga, a piece of prerecorded audio: ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl in the classic introductory textbook The Study of Ethnomusicology collates the terms that collect all of these as the basis for an improvisation — “model,” or “point of departure,” or “catalytic referent.” He settles on point of departure so that’s what I’ll use too.
We’ve already seen Hassell using “Nature Boy” and “Caravan” as points of departure: jazz standards, collections of specific melodies and rhythms and chord changes. He improvises on top of these in his distinct style. They existed before and he brought them into the present.
We’ve seen too Hassell inflecting all of his music with what he learned from the Pandit Pran Nath. He described his trumpet playing as being like calligraphy, and when he added a harmoniser to his setup, like a row of pencils all held in one hand tracing the same line in parallel.
A tanpura/tambura/tanpuri is a drone-producing instrument used in Indian musics. Hassell also creates in the studio beds of electronics that serve the same function. It’s another point of departure.
Hassell’s music cannot be pulled apart from live performance or recorded sound. Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street features live performance over samples and atmospherics of previously recorded music which are then presented in a single object a mix of studio and stage music as process.
He is composer, finder of sound, finder of melody, improviser, editor. Sound is made into an object and then he improvises on top as a process which get turned back into an object. Then City: Works of Fiction (1990) as a whole gets turned into a point of departure for the archival release of Psychogeography (recorded 2014, released 2023).
All of these happen simultaneously in his music. To explain them we would need to use text, which can only present one word at time, one idea at a time (in a sense; you know what I mean.) Choosing one as a starting point would carry with it assumptions about the others:
— Hassell started in jazz: we should consider his use of Indian ragas as an extension of jazz — after all, they are both improvisational art forms.
— Hassell himself stated that he learned to forget everything before studying with the Pandit Pran Nath: we should consider his use of samples as a direct replacement for the tambura drone.
— Hassell uses a lot of samples: we should consider the influence and practice of different musical traditions in his music as found sound.
[ i’m going completely mad. ]
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I’ll admit I haven’t done any serious musicology since handing in my master’s thesis in the last week of August 2015. Since then, I have thought about music differently: less rigid than the demands of the scope of an academic text or the necessities of producing an analysis or essay in a timely fashion. I cared more about what different features speak to me as a practicing musician. At times, these are technical. At other times, they are mood or attitude.
During my master’s, the theme of the year was “subjectivities.” The lectures would remember three weeks in that they were meant to be covering ideas like gender, race, disability, and how these play into different aspects of musicWe spoke briefly of gender, but only along a strict binary. We never once spoke of race or disability or neurodivergence. We never once spoke of class or politics at all. We never once spoke of the intersection these things.
I’m remembering subjectivities now.
I wonder if instead I need to take an artistic approach to understanding Hassell’s music. I think about my own subjective experience of life and his music. I think if I can find a way to interpret my life as a text through Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street as a text that I might come up with a fruitful analysis, one that drives me to create a piece of music that I would not have arrive at by myself.
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hauntology
French hantologie: equivalent to haunt + -ology, and a near-homonym to ontologie (“ontology”)
noun
(uncountable)In Derridan philosophy, a concept involving the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past.
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Hauntology is French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau of haunting and ontology (in French hantologie and ontologie are homophones). In his 1993 book Specters of Marx he describes a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.
[ being honest with myself, i find derrida too opaque. i wish i was smart enough. i wish i was smart at all. i wish i had a teacher who could teach me philosophy. i don’t know if something is lost in translation. my french isn’t good enough to go to the source. ]
Merlin Coverley summarises it neatly:
“[…] the paradox at the heart of hauntology, in which certain futures have the potential to haunt us even before they have come to pass.”
— Coverley, Merlin: Hauntology: GHOSTS OF FUTURES PAST, Oldcastle Books, Kindle Edition, 22 October 2020
Or more pithily: the future isn’t what it used to be.
For our purpose, important here is the use of hauntology in relation to music put forward by the likes of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds. In short: it’s a loose set of stylistic features that evokes cultural memory and aesthetics of the past, mostly drawn from post-World War II Britain, and repurposed via sampling in British electronic musicians. The UK record label Ghost Box, in addition to artists such as the Caretaker, Burial, and Philip Jeck are typically held up as examples.
//
[…] What if the disc had still been playing […]? What if those subtle and distant architectural sounds had actually been part of the CD? This would be music as the illusion of architecture.
You move into a house without a basement — but you purchase this CD, or download these tracks, and you achieve the uncanny sonic effect of having more floors below you. Or perhaps you want an attic, or even a next-door neighbour.
You would buy soundtracks for architecture: producing the illusion of architecture through nothing but sound.
[…]
So instead of an addition, or a home renovation, perhaps you should commission a new piece of ambient music: For as long as that music is playing, your house has several thousand more square feet . . . and a Tube line nearby . . . and distant boilers . . .
— Manaugh, Geoff: “MUSIC/SOUND/NOISE: Soundtracks for Architecture,” The BLDG Blog Book, Chronicle Books, 2009
[ i used to read geoff manaugh’s bldgblog a lot. i bought his book. i remembered this section from it. it gives me a pseudo-hauntological feeling. substitute place for time — that’s what i’m thinking. ]
//
Hassell’s music carries with it a lot of similar stylistic features like Fisher and Reynolds identified:
“a mold, a footprint, a negative, a series of suggestions that function independent of the ideal
[…]
the wavering otherworldliness is the starting point of his aesthetic, not the sum of [its] decay
[…]
half-erased or never-quite-attained songform [quoting Simon Reynolds]”
— Fisher, Mark: “Hauntology Now,” k-punk.abstractdynamics.org, 17 January 2006
//
In “What is Hauntology?” for Film Quarterly, Fisher specifically highlights Karlheinz Stockhausen, former teacher of Hassell, as a vision of what once a future. In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Fisher notes that the 1970s seemed to be returning. A moment in time where late capitalism began to be take over from the revolutionary spirit of the counterculture. Hassell collaborated with Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the 1970s and released his first album as leader Vernal Equinox in 1977. Hassell himself is the ghost and his music is the memory.
To me, Hassell’s music is a cousin to British hauntological music. It’s edges are blurry and indistinct. It’s out of focus, corner of the eye stuff. I can hear the ghosts in it. They’re not sad like in the other examples. They’re alive. Time moves different for them. Time is different here and now and back then and over there. The future may yet arrive.
//
In the book William Basinski: Musician Snapshots: The Music You Should Hear Series on the work of ambient musician William Basinski, J. Simpson describes hauntological music as:
“[…] sonic fictions or intentional forgeries, creating half-baked memories of things that never were — approximating the imprecise nature of memory itself.”
I don’t know enough French to come up with a better name than that.
//
[…] Hassell has always been sound-painting the ever-transitional and mutable spirit of our times, now in an unduly prolonged millenial hauntological haze, with the twenty-first century still struggling to be born and the pentimenti of the twentieth century persistently emerging through. Hassell has always shown us how the future does not create itself from a vacuum but through re-actualizing untapped potentials of past forms. He blows his trumpet once again into the void of the twentieth century, but the echo continues on in a transfigured form.
— Danijela Bočev: “Reviews: Jon Hassell — Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two),” The Quietus, 24 August 2020
//
An obvious inspiration for Hassell is Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969), the trumpeter’s first studio record of his electric period. It combines heretical-to-jazz-at-the-time electric pianos and electric guitars with European classical sonata or ternary forms (ABA).* The tunes were recorded over a period of a couple of days and then edited together, a new process for Davis. In other words, the band improvised and then the album was assembled with careful consideration. It’s another album that embraces the past and the future in equal measure.
[ *“Shhh” / “Peaceful” could be quickly formally analysed as:
A — “Shhh” — 6:14
B — “Peaceful” — 5:42
A — “Shhh (Reprise)” — 6:20
and . . .
“In a Silent Way” / “It’s About That Time” as:
A — “In a Silent Way” — 4:11
B — “It’s About That Time” — 11:27
A — “In a Silent Way (Reprise)” — 4:14 ]
//
A likely successor to Hassell’s position is Norwegian trumpeter/vocalist/electronic musician Arve Henrikson. His trumpet playing seems as influence by traditional Japanese shakuhachi bamboo flute playing as it does by Miles Davis. He also sings in an extreme falsetto, controlled, in vocalise. Several of Hassell’s collaborators feature on Henrikson’s 2008 album Cartography: Jan Bang on live sampling, Eivind Aarset on guitar, David Sylvian with voice, samples, and programming.
OTHER CREDITS
You’ve probably heard Hassell elsewhere:
— he played on Talking Heads’ “Houses in Motion” from 1980’s Remain in Light in his distinctive effect-laden style.
— he collaborated with Brian Eno on Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics from 1980. This is where he first used the term “Fourth World.”
— he played on “Shadow” from Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land from 1982.
— he played on “Passion” Peter Gabriel’s 1989 Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ.
— throughout the 90s, his music was often included on “world music” and “ambient” compilations and has probably soundtracked your visit to a shopping centre that has seen better days.
— he played on a number of former Japan singer David Sylvian albums from 1984 to 2000. it sounds like him on “Weathered Wall” and “Brilliant Trees” from Sylvian’s solo debut Brilliant Trees (1984).
— he played on a number of Ry Cooder albums from 1992 to 2008. it sounds like him on “One Cat, One Vote, One Beer!” from My Name Is Buddy (2007). [ i don’t like it. ]
— he is credited as a session player on Paul Haslinger’s score for the Patrick Tatopoulos directed Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009). look sometimes you are offered a paycheck and you have to take it.
— there’s plenty more elsewhere . . .
//
A STORY
Hassell’s music takes place in a nowhere, an imagined country, a Fourth World. A place laying bare the artificiality of our own borders. An expanding horizon, expanding forever. It’s also definitely a real place made of our cultural pasts superimposed over the present. It remembers when we cannot.
The possible musics made from montage: of instruments and traditions handed down over centuries to the soft whirring dreams on a machine built by hands using simpler machine, of raga and sampling and all that jazz laid down next to one another in equal measure and not competing.
Time folds in on itself. It takes the future and the past and pulls it together in the here and now. It’s all happening at once. Forget about the present: past isn’t past and the future has already arrived.
SEPARATING THE BABY FROM THE BATHWATER
Just as many natural things may be separated by abstract boundaries, so other things may be joined artificially, by either habit or custom.
In Western culture, religion is naturally associated with sobriety and rigidity. Cultures where spirit life is joyful and sexual, or where leaders are expected to communicate the wisdom of grace and strength by dancing, are seldom taken seriously by Eurocentric minds, who, by media attitudes, are taught to observe this from a safe distance as a bizarre kind of Mondo Cane behaviour.
In the same way, classical or formal music in the West takes place in an atmosphere of reverence governed by rules of etiquette. In Euroculture, no form in which improvisation is a major element is considered “classical,” while in most other parts of the world the high musical experiences are always those in which some response to the feeling of the moment is included. Furthermore, Western thought habits dictate that anything that is overtly sensuous, with certain rhythmic inflections, is automatically perceived as belonging on a lower rung of the cultural ladder (jazz, rock, pop, and so on). Obviously what we have here is a kind of cultural racism that reduces non-European-derived art to “curio” status and thus neatly dismisses it from serious consideration in the same rank as our Western masters — all of whom, it may be pointed out, are white, born in the last three hundred years, and from cold climates.
— Jon Hassell, “Artificial Boundaries, Expanding Horizons, Possible Musics” in Heavy Metal, March 1982
//
[ First edition : 1689. Original size : 48.3 x 56.0 cm. Produced using copper engraving. Extremely rare set of maps, only known in one other example in the Amsterdam University. No copies in American libraries. In original hand color…. ]
//
I bought the Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street CD on a whim in 2010. I didn’t know much about jazz but I was curious. This was labelled as jazz and reviewed as jazz and it’s not really jazz. It is jazz-adjacent. It reviewed well. It breaks borders real and imaginary: between cultures, between machine and organism, between the different layers of time on which music can operate simultaneously. My curiosity had served me well.
I copied the CD to my computer and copied the tracks to my 6th generation 120GB black iPod Classic. I listened to music constantly, shutting the world out. I stopped going to school for a while: nightmarish sensory overload from a thousand slovenly unwashed stinking teenaged apes clattering moronically up and down the polished floors and cramped classrooms. Come lunch time, I would walk home. I had trouble in school. I hated it in a silent way.
Moments separated by years are montage together.
//
The word “montage” suddenly pops out of my memory bank. I read the definition again. Not only does it describe the little montages that serve as transitions between longer pieces (themselves montages of motifs that keep reappearing in new contexts) but the music presented here is a montage of the last years of concerts and the changing cast of the group I call Maarifa Street — all great musicians who have contributed their personalities — the way a great actor does to a great film — to this living, morphing process that occasionally gets set down as a “record.”
A reading of the definition below, substituting “musical elements” for “pictorial elements,” results in a perfect description of the processes at work here:
mon-tage
1. the technique of combining in a single composition pictorial element from various sources, as parts of different photographs or fragments of printing, either to give the illusion that the elements belonged together originally or to allow each element to retain its separate identity as a means of adding interest or meaning to the composition
a. juxtaposition or partial superimposition of several shots to form a single image
b. a technique of film editing in which this is used to present an idea or set of interconnected ideas
2. any combination of disparate elements that forms or is felt to form a unified whole, single image, etc.
— Jon Hassell, liner notes for Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, ECM, 2009
//
MUSIC // MAP
I look inward for an analysis.
ONE OF THE BASIC situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
— Debord, Guy: “Theory of the Dérive,” translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, Les Lèvres Nues #9, November 1956
//
We spoke of my musicological education not being appropriate for Hassell’s music. We spoke of memory. We spoke of a unified past/present/future. We spoke of a unified multicultural music, Hassell’s Fourth World concept.
[HASSELL:] And here’s the secret — Music is Invisible. It exists only as an interior experience in an individual. Who can say what this or that person is experiencing? We inevitably try to get close with word descriptions but that is essentially a language experience about a musical experience.
— excerpt from Alyce Santoro: “Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Socio‐Political Implications of their Work,” Leonardo Music Journal 25: 100–101, MIT Press Direct, 2015
//
In the way that Debord with psychogeoraphy and the dérive sought to break across the functions of a city, I will apply a bastardised process to my subjective memory and the music of Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. I hope to use the text of the album to circle in on the constant currents, fixed points, and vortexes of my memory, to unfuck the disorderly continuum of my experience of time.
All writing is about memory. To write about music is to write about memory.
[ i’m going out on a limb here: if jon hassell can use sound to imagine landscapes then i will use music to and academic tools to examine memory. it seems fitting to reference guy debord here, considering hassell titled albums such as City: Works of Fiction (1990 / expanded edition 2014) and Psychogeography (2023) ⟨ “a situationist re-thinking of the 1990 City: Works Of Fiction album, a carefully edited sequence of alternate takes, demos and studio jams put together by Jon Hassell in 2014 using Debordian philosophy as his guide.” ⟩ ]
My method is as follows:
I am sitting in front of my laptop. I am wearing headphones. I will switch off the light above me and be lit solely by the harshness of my laptop screen. I will press play on the album. I will write down the memories I have of listening and of walking. If necessary for my typing speed, I will repeat a track. I may recall new details. I will repeat until I remember nothing new. I will not proceed until I recall nothing new.
Each recall will destroy an old memory. It will reshape it into a new fiction. I will try not to lie. I will fail.
The music is my map and my memory is the landscape. I will take a Debordian-infulence psychogeographical solo dérive through a real emotional landscape. I will follow threads of memory through an internal cityscape of fact and fiction, truth and lies, subjective and subjectivities.
I will edit the result for clarity. It will be entirely subjective. You will not understand. You cannot understand. This is how it has to be.
//
But music is invisible. It’s an interior experience. Who can say what this or that person is experiencing?
— Jon Hassell: “2012 What I’m Thinking Now” in Atmospherics [Second Edition], Ndeya 2023
It is about to cross midnight between 7 February 2023 and 8 February 2023.
Someday you can tell me about your music. I’m telling you here about my music.
//
//
“Aurora”
Raining lightly. 2005. Midday. Perhaps a Wednesday. Let’s call it a Wednesday. Almost lunchtime. I leave school through the side entrance. I walk through grey rain on grey stone between grey walls. It was less likely for me to run into anyone who might ask questions that way. My eyes were stinging and not from the rain. I pass by a middle-aged woman who folds her arms and does that terse smile that people do. Her hair was black as midnight.
“Time and Place”
The teacher says she will be gone five minutes. She picks me. I walk to the front of the class with a piece of chalk and write the names of anybody and everybody that speaks. I am a sprog in a uniform. March 2001. I look at the clock. I look at the other children in my class. They look at me. They laugh. I write down a name. They go quiet. I understand authority. I look at the clock. I erase the name. They are still quiet. I understand authority and power. In the yard, the noisemaker thanks me for erasing his name. His friend says I shouldn’t have written it in the first place. They go back and forth in the falling-leaf logic of children. The friend grows up to be beloved and then a thief.
“Abu Gil”
2012. Workman’s. A multi-storey trip hazard. A nightclub for people who pretend to have good taste in music. The noise makes it too hard to hear. No one else has this problem. I am tightly wound. I walk up and down the stairs pretending to look for my friends but mostly to avoid talking to anyone. A group of boys sitting around a table in the smoking area laugh at my appearance. I am carrying a pint glass of water. I pour the entirety on the crotch of the nearest one. I disappear in the crowd. They find me later. The wet-crotch boy finds the situation funny, like he had pissed himself. He says his friends think we should fight. He has hemophilia. I have type one diabetes. We bond. His friends don’t understand. I say they were in the wrong. He apologises. His friends still don’t understand.
“Last Night the Moon Came”
I walk home. Sunlight. The cobbles in the ground faded from a once red lustre. A black and white cat sat on the wall.
At first, beyond the tender age of kitten and bloodied, missing a part of her scalp between her ears. I left out food for her. She came back. She kept coming back. She got better.
One summer night. Hot. I left the window open a crack and she reached her paw in and pulled. Early morning I woke up and she jumped off my bed. She put her head in one of my Homer Simpson slippers and vomited up a chicken wing.
A soft, hungry animal. I went inside the house, myself a hungry, soft, and shattered animal. She meowed for the packet of gelatinous wet food. She walked in circles. I paused for a second. I closed the lid of the toilet seat in the bathroom. I sat down. I was tired in a way that teenagers shouldn’t be. I was sick in a way I didn’t understand. The cat hopped up on my knee and replaced her meows with purrs. I didn’t get better but I stopped getting worse.
I never gave her a name.
I never asked for her name.
//
//
“Clairvoyance”
Maynooth. December 2014. Ivy grows on the old music building. The library is much newer. It is named after a dead pope. The train is on the other line due to fault. I briskly walk up and across the crossway. I make it with too much time to spare. I’m sweating. It’s a long time till I’m home again. I never quite get around to doing a PhD.
“Courtrais”
My cousin asks me what I want to do and I say travel. He’s been everywhere. I’m too anxious. Logistical nightmare, sensory nightmare. The moment passes. I don’t travel.
Another memory. I walk a college campus. I hide in rooms and pretend to study. I do all my work at home and don’t bring a laptop. I lie about why I am allowed an alternative examination centre. They pry. I lie some more.
“Scintilla”
I’m handed a beer I don’t want. November 2012. I’m in a flat after a pub. I don’t like the people here. I leave and walk the wrong way for a while. I get where I need to go.
“Northline”
I walk into the radiography department of Beaumont hospital through a rat’s warren of cobbled together corridors. The architecture has forgotten how to help us. It’s 2018. There are curtained cubicles that face the wide-open corridor and in them are doors that lead into rooms of specialists with specialist equipment. I drank a litre of water before coming here. They scan my kidneys. The gel on the wand is cold. They tell me to empty my bladder. I struggle with the gown. Undignified in the way everyone pretends not to notice. I piss in the toilet next door. They scan my kidneys again. I get dressed and walk back the way I came. The news is mixed.
“Blue Period”
I wake up early and go for a walk. I am in Munich. March 2019. I’m on my brother’s stag. They all drink beer and I don’t drink beer. There’s not much I can drink so I don’t drink at all. I looked up nearby coffee shops. I walk down perfectly straight roads that intersect at perfect right angles. I cross where there are roadworks. I order coffee and a bagel in clumsy German and they answer in perfect English. I take them back to the hotel room. The bagel is bad and the coffee is really good. The sky is blue like it isn’t back home.
“Light On Water”
Summer 2020. Everyday I walk the same route. I choose paths were there are no people or wide enough to leave space when there are. I am in shorts and a t-shirt for the first time in a long time. I can hide out in the open. I exercise to give me a fighting chance, should it come to it. The roads are silent, the cars in shelter. The leaves are doubly-hammered gold. There is great sadness in the air. The situation gets worse but the sadness evaporates. Everyone buries the memory but I can’t.
//
A shadow looms. The city constricts.
In 2021, a still shadow looms. The city constricts more.
In 2022, a shadow looms as large as ever. The city constricts to near-nothing while everyone else is let loose.
In 2023, for the fourth time a shadow looms. There is no city. There is no map. There never was.
//
Here space is everything, for time ceases to quicken memory. Memory — what a strange thing it is! — does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness. The finest specimens of fossilized duration concretized as a result of long sojourn, are to be found in and through space. The unconscious abides. Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are. To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.
— Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space, 1958
//
In daylight I came dripping wet-clothed from the street
I took it as a sign to start again,
rising up from the pit of the earth.
— my now-at-the-end-of-this-essay improvised response to “The New Rule” by Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks
//
//
[JASON GROSS:] Do you hope to do shows again at some point?
[HASSELL:] Well, I would LOVE to do that. But remember, the other looming shadow hanging over everything is the virus, right? So, any show that you’re going to do is going to have to be designed in such a way that you do the “stay in place” and “don’t go out” mode that’s become our burden to handle.
— interview with Jon Hassell conducted by Jason Gross for Rock & Roll Globe, 30 July 2020
//
Jon Hassell died from natural causes after a period of illness on 26 June 2021 at the age of 84.
Without him, the future isn’t what it used to be.
ar dheis dé go raibh a anam
//
Family Statement:
Our beloved Jon M. Hassell — iconic trumpet player, author, and composer — has passed away at the age of 84 years on June 26th 2021. After a little more than a year of fighting through health complications, Jon died peacefully in the early morning hours of natural causes. His final days were surrounded by family and loved ones who celebrated with him the lifetime of contributions he gave to this world — personally and professionally. He cherished life and leaving this world was a struggle as there was much more he wished to share in music, philosophy, and writing.
It was his great joy to be able to compose and produce music until the end. We thank all those who contributed to ensuring that he was able to continue expressing his ideas through his final days and maintain a quality end of life.
Jon Hassell was able to leave behind many gifts. We are excited and committed to sharing those ongoing with his fans across time and support his enduring legacy. All donations to Jon Hassell’s GoFundMe will allow the tremendous personal archive of his music, much unreleased, to be preserved and shared with the world for years to come. We also hope to provide philanthropic gifts of scholarship and contributions to issues close to Jon’s heart, like supporting the working rights of musicians.
As Jon is now free of a constricting body, he is liberated to be in his musical soul and will continue to play in the Fourth World. We hope you find solace in his words and dreams for this earthly place he now leaves behind. We hold him, and you, in this loss and grief.
FOURTH WORLD IS
A KIND OF PHILOSOPHICAL GUIDELINE, A CREATIVE POSTURE, DIRECTED TOWARDS THE CONDITIONS CREATED BY THE INTERSECTION OF TECHNOLOGY WITH INDIGINOUS [sic] MUSIC AND CULTURE.
THE UNDERLYING GOAL IS TO PROVIDE A KIND OF CREATIVE MIDWIFERY TO THE INEVITABLE MERGING OF CULTURES WHILE PROVIDING AN ANTIDOTE TO A GLOBAL “MONOCULTURE” CREATED BY MEDIA COLONIZATION.
THE UNDERLYING PREMISE IS THAT EACH INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ MUSIC AND CULTURE — THE RESULT OF THEIR UNIQUE RESPONSE TO THEIR UNIQUE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT — FUNCTIONS IN THE SAME WAY AS, AS AN “ELEMENT” IN THE PERIODIC TABLE OF CHEMISTRY: AS PURE BUILDING BLOCKS FROM WHICH ALL OTHER “CULTURAL COMPOUNDS” WILL ARISE.
IN OTHER WORDS, THESE CULTURES ARE OUR “VOCABULARY” IN TRYING TO THINK ABOUT WAYS TO RESPOND TO OUR PLACE IN THE NEW GEOGRAPHY CREATED BY OUR MEDIA WORLD, AND MUST BE RESPECTED RELATIVE TO THEIR IMPORTANCE TO OUR SURVIVAL.
Jon Hassell
— “Jon Hassell Facebook Page: FAMILY STATEMENT.” Facebook, 26 June 2021
//
At the end of Guy Debord’s “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” he writes:
The primary moral deficiency remains indulgence, in all its forms.
Looking at the word count: Oops. . . !
//
Like I said, I fall down a rabbit hole when I think of this one album. This whole thing was a big meander and I have come to no worthwhile conclusion. But it feels good to think. That’s all I care about. My brain feels like it’s working again. I almost certainly missed something obvious but I learned something. This isn’t rigorous academia. This is just fun. :)
me:
Anyway. That’ll do us for now. I feel better already. I hope you learned something. I wrote most of this in a manic state in February and March 2023. There are a lot of loose ends in there but thankfully I am not under any academic scrutiny so I can take only what I need and nothing more. I had a lot of fun listening through Hassell’s discography. I like when I give myself the opportunity to do that. You should try it sometime: pick a musician you like and go chronologically through everything you can get your grubby little mitts on.
Just try to remember.
Slán go fóil
— aidan
//
if you made it this far and have any thoughts or comments or feedback or secrets to tell me or just want to say hello, you can send me an email here:
att.feedbacker [at] gmail [dot] com
(don’t be shy~!)
WORKS CITED AND/OR MENTIONED:
MUSIC:
— Can: Tago Mago, Schloss Nörvenich, 1971
— Cooder, Ry: My Name Is Buddy, Nonesuch, 2007
— Miles Davis: In a Silent Way, Colombia, 1969
— Brian Eno: Ambient 4: On Land, Editions EG, 1980
— Duke Ellington: The Duke: The Columbia Years (1927–1962), Sony BMG, 20 January 2000
— Peter Gabriel: Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ, Real World/Geffen/Virgin, 1989
— Paul Haslinger: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans — Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Lakeshore, 2009
— Jon Hassell: Aka/Darbari/Java: Magic Realism, Editions EG, 1983
— Jon Hassell: City: Works of Fiction, Opal/Warner Bros., 1990 and expanded edition on All Saints, 2014
— Jon Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two, Editions EG, 1981
— Jon Hassell: Dressing for Pleasure (with Bluescreen), Warner, 1994
— Jon Hassell: Earthquake Island, Tomato, 1978
— Jon Hassell: Fascinoma, Water Lily Acoustics, 1999
— Jon Hassell: Festival Jazz Onze+, Switzerland, 29 October 2009
— Jon Hassell: Flash of the Spirit (with Farafina), Intuition/EMI Electrola, 1988
— Jon Hassell: Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics (with Brian Eno), Editions EG, 1980
— Jon Hassell: Hollow Bamboo ( with Ry Cooder, Ronu Majumdar and Abhijit Banerjee), Water Lily Acoustics, 2000
— Jon Hassell: Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, ECM, 2009
— Jon Hassell: Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), Ndeya, 2018
— Jon Hassell: Maarifa Street: Magic Realism Volume Two, Label Bleu, 2005
— Jon Hassell: Power Spot, ECM, 1986
— Jon Hassell: Psychogeography, Ndeya, 2023 [“a situationist re-thinking of the 1990 City: Works Of Fiction album, a carefully edited sequence of alternate takes, demos and studio jams put together by Jon Hassell in 2014”]
— Jon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two), Ndeya, 2020
— Jon Hassell: Sulla Strada (with I Magazzini), Materiali Sonori, 1995
— Jon Hassell: The Living City, Ndeya, 2023 [archival material from September 1989]
— Jon Hassell: The Surgeon of the Nightsky Restores Dead Things by the Power of Sound, Intuition, 1987 [live recordings]
— Jon Hassell: The Vertical Collection (Sketches) (with Peter Freeman as Bluescreen Project), Earshot, 1997
— Jon Hassell: Vernal Equinox, Lovely Music, 1977
— Arve Henrikson: Cartography, ECM, 2008
— Terry Riley: In C, Columbia Masterworks, 1968
— David Sylvian: Brilliant Trees, Virgin, 1984
— Talking Heads: Remain in Light, Sire, 1980
— Karlheinz Stockhausen: Gesang Der Junglinge, LTM Recordings, 2013
TEXT:
— Agawu, V. Kofi: “Lives in Musicology: My Life in Writings,” Acta Musicologica 93/1, 2021, pp. 15–16
— Ankeny, Jason: “Jon Hassell: Biography, Songs, & Albums,” AllMusic, 2021, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/jon-hassell-mn0000177588/biography?1675013338697
— Bachelard, Gaston, et al: The Poetics of Space, Penguin Books, 2014
— Barbiero, Daniel: “The Very Idea of Fourth World Music,” Perfect Sound Forever: Jon Hassell Tribute, Perfect Sound Forever, August 2021, https://www.furious.com/perfect/hassell-barbiero.html
— Bočev, Danijela: “Reviews: Jon Hassell — Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two),” The Quietus, 24 August 2020, https://thequietus.com/articles/28799-jon-jon-hassell-seeing-through-sound-review
— Bohlman, Philip V.: “Musicology as a Political Act,” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 11, №4, pages 411 to 436, University of California Press, Autumn 1993
— Bohlman, Philip V.: “Ontologies of Music,” Rethinking Music (edited by Cook, Nicholas, and Everist, Mark), Oxford University Press, 2010
— Borges, Jorge Luis: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Ficciones, Alianza, 1991
— Brunet, Alain: “Jon Hassell: The Regenerative Mantra (Interview),” PAN M 360, 3 August 2020, https://panm360.com/en/2020/07/31/jon-hassell-le-mantra-regenerateur-interview/
— Cervantes Saavedra Miguel de, translated by Edith Grossman, et al.: Don Quixote, The Arion Press, 2009
— Cook, Nicholas, and Everist, Mark: Rethinking Music, Oxford University Press, 2010
— Coverley, Merlin: Hauntology: GHOSTS OF FUTURES PAST, Oldcastle Books, Kindle Edition, 22 October 2020
— Coverley, Merlin: Psychogeography, third edition, Oldcastle Books, 28 June 2018
— Debord, Guy: “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, Les Lèvres Nues #6, September 1955, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html
— Debord, Guy: “Theory of the Dérive,” translated by Ken Knabb, Situationist International Online, Les Lèvres Nues #9, November 1956, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
— Dennen, David: “From the Jungle to the City: Ecomimesis and Imagining Emplacement in the Music of Jon Hassell,” 2013, https://www.academia.edu/19736138/From_the_Jungle_to_the_City_Ecomimesis_and_Imagining_Emplacement_in_the_Music_of_Jon_Hassell
— Derrida, Jacques: Specters of Marx, Taylor and Francis, 2012
— Fisher, Mark: Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester: Zero Books, 2014
— Fisher, Mark: “Hauntology Now,” k-punk.abstractdynamics.org, 17 January 2006 http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/007230.html
— Fisher, Mark: “What is Hauntology?,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 66, №1, Fall 2012, pp. 16–24
— Gross, Jason: “A Travelogue of Jon Hassell’s ‘Fourth World’ Journey into the Mystical.” PopMatters, 20 January 2015, https://www.popmatters.com/189828-a-travelogue-of-jon-hassells-fourth-world-journey-into-the-mystic-2495568887.html
— Gross, Jason: “Interview with Jon Hassell,” Perfect Sound Forever, July 1997, https://web.archive.org/web/20130512201203/http://www.furious.com/Perfect/hassell.html
— Gross, Jason: “Jon Hassell: The Rock & Roll Globe Interview,” Rock & Roll Globe, 30 July 2020, https://rockandrollglobe.com/electronic/jon-hassell-the-rock-roll-globe-interview/
— Hansen, Liane: “Trumpeter Jon Hassell’s ‘Fourth World’ Music,” NPR, 8 February 2009, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/100345729
— Hassell, Jon: “Artificial Boundaries, Expanding Horizons, Possible Musics.” Brian Eno Is More Dark Than Shark, 2006, http://www.moredarkthanshark.org/eno_int_hm-mar82.html [originally published in Heavy Metal, March 1982]
— Hassell, Jon: “Jon Hassell Facebook Page: FAMILY STATEMENT.” Facebook, 26 June 2021
— Hassell, Jon: Atmospherics [Second Edition], Ndeya 2023
— Idjer, Amine: “Kheireddine M’kachiche: Oriental Jazz,” bianet.org, 25 Nisan 2011, https://m.bianet.org/bianet/other/129532-kheireddine-m-kachiche-oriental-jazz
— Manaugh, Geoff: The BLDG Blog Book, Chronicle Books, 2009
— Nettl, Bruno: The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions, University of Illinois Press, 2015
— Obituaries, Telegraph: “Jon Hassell, Visionary Trumpeter and Composer Who Worked with Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and Ry Cooder — Obituary,” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 1 July 2021, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/07/01/jon-hassell-visionary-trumpeter-composer-worked-brian-eno-peter/
— Prendergast, Mark J.: “Jon Hassell,” Sound on Sound, 1991, [republished: https://jonhassell.com/soundon/]
— Reynolds, Simon: “HAUNTOLOGY: the GHOST BOX label (Frieze, 2005),” 15 October 2017, http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2012/05/
— Reynolds, Simon: Retromania pop culture’s addiction to its own past, London, Faber and Faber, 2012
— Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne): “The New Rule, ” PoetSeers.org, undated, https://www.poetseers.org/spiritual-and-devotional-poets/contemp/rumibarks/the-new-rule/
— Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne): Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, Shambala, 1999
— Santoro, Alyce: “Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Socio‐Political Implications of their Work,” Leonardo Music Journal 25: 100–101, MIT Press Direct, 2015
— Sawers, Claire: “Features: The Strange World of Jon Hassell,” The Quietus, 2 July 2018, https://thequietus.com/articles/24863-jon-hassell-interview-strange-world
— Simpson, J.: “Chapter Three — The Disintegration Loops, Hauntology, & Hypnagogic Pop,” William Basinski: Musician Snapshots: The Music You Should Hear Series, SBE Media (Stone Blue Editors), 2015
— Small, Christopher: Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, University Press of New England, 1998
— Titon, Jeff Todd: Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World’s Peoples Shorter Version, Third Edition, Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2009
— Toop, David: Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, Virgin, 1996
— Woods, Lebbeus: “The Politics of Abstraction,” lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com, 23 October 2008, https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/the-politics-of-abstraction/
— Young, Rob: Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, London: Faber and Faber, 2019
MISC LINKS:
— Concerts, jonhassell.com, https://jonhassell.com/concerts/
— “Hauntology,” Wiktionary, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hauntology
— “Ontology Definition & Meaning,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ontology
originally published on a naysayer and hatchman in the fight against violence
