Name: Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)
Brand: Jon Hassell

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

LP-NDEYA-7

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Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2020-07-24

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Redeye

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

5060384617695

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Total Cap

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

NDEYA7CD

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5060384617701

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "5060384617701"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Jon Hassell

Genre US

Modern Composition

Label US

Ndeya

American trumpeter, composer and author Jon Hassell was born on March 22, 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee. He passed away on June 26, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. Known as the creator of Fourth World music, a unique blend of ancient and digital sounds from both Eastern and Western traditions. After studying composition and earning degrees in the USA, he traveled to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Back in New York, he collaborated with minimalist masters La Monte Young and Terry Riley before meeting Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath. This encounter inspired him to develop a new trumpet sound and style.

A companion piece to 2018’s Listening To Pictures, this second volume in the pentimento series presents eight new tracks by the music visionary, continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing. Pentimento is defined as the “reappearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over” and this is evident in the innovative production style that ‘paints with sound’ using overlapping nuances to create an undefinable and intoxicating new palette.

In classic Hassell fashion, the title can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, but perhaps the most pertinent at the moment is the human instinct to sing and play through a rain of difficulties. A future blues of indeterminate and ever-shifting shape. The album is buffered by two 8-minute plus epics at the beginning and the end - the hypnotic Fearless with it’s metronomic, almost Can-like rhythm, and blurry, noir-ish texture of sound emerging like car headlights from the fog; mirrored at the end of the record by the beautiful sci-fi lullaby of Timeless, a track with a gaseous, billowing quality as electronic clicks and bubbles float over a landscape of shimmering, glacially paced complexity. The bridge between those two worlds is no less compelling, from the frantic, spidery IDM sketch of Reykjavik to the collapsed-time ballad of Unknown Wish. Whilst containing seeds of classic ‘fourth world’ fusion, this record finds the artist still questing to create new forms and mutations of music, a thrilling window into what music could sound like in a world to come.

Seeing Through Sound  (Pentimento Volume Two)

Music US