Jon Hassell/Brian Eno: Fourth World Volume 1 - Possible Musics

Hassell's stuff remains an enigma to me. He's cropped up a few times on Music Arcades already (1, 2), but no matter how much I listen, I don't feel any the wiser.

I'm intrigued by the discourse that Hassell wraps round the music. Wikipedia says

"Fourth World" is a term used by trumpeter Jon Hassell to describe a style of music employing modern technological treatments and influenced by various cultures and eras. He wanted the music in this album to be "future primitive", or "a coffee-coloured classical music".

And Eno adds,

there was a deeper idea: that music was a place where you conducted and displayed new social experiments. Jon's experiment was to imagine a "coffee coloured" world — a globalised world constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences were celebrated and dignified — and to try to realise it in music.

My problem is that when I listen to the music, what I hear doesn't connect to that manifesto. A synthetic primitivism, maybe, but Possible Musics just doesn't sound like I would expect coffee-coloured classical music to sound. (Perhaps that's just as well: I think of that description applying to something like Nithin Sawhney's work, and I'm not keen on that.) As an exploration of "possible musics", it also seems a little thin; too self-similar.

Better ears than mine beg to differ, however. Allmusic gives it five stars and remarks, "its influence on what has since become known as tribal techno is incalculable." OK, if you say so — tribal techno hasn't played a big part in my life. Colin Buttimer's claims for Hassell are both grander and, somehow, more persuasive,

Jon Hassell is the only consistently original successor to Miles Davis’ electric output and one of the most original instrumental stylists of the last thirty years. His regrettably low profile is ascribable to the sui generis nature of the thirteen albums he has recorded.

In one of Fripp's maxim's, "What we hear is the quality of our listening." I subconsciously echoed this when describing my experience of Hassell's Vernal Equinox, and I concede the quality of my listening this week is pretty piss poor.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7 Listen to this album in full at Spotify

Comments

[Nitya]

Check out: http://emusician.com/interviews/jon-hassell-ambassador-fourth-world/

[David]

Thanks, Nitya, Interesting to see the comments about My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and also the comment that the Fourth World tag "came from knowing that you've got to have some little knife, a quick logo that cuts through, to give journalists something that they can say about [my music]", almost as though it were a PR tactic.

However, more fine words don't solve the conundrum for me, which is matching up those words to the music I hear.