#ndeya

[carpediemduude]

Ndeya

[burlveneer-music]

Jon Hassell - Further Fictions - combined CD/digital release of two archival LPs (actually the first physical release of bonus material originally issued in the digital-only City: Works of Fiction Expanded Edition in 2014)

Part of a series of three new archival releases from Ndeya that showcase Jon Hassell and group in the late 1980s exploring a radical tangent on his Fourth World sensibility. Further Fictions is a double CD anthology of the music on the vinyl editions, with a disc devoted to each album in hardbound book style packaging, and an extensive booklet containing sleevenotes and archival images. The first disc ‘The Living City’ documents a performance at the Winter Garden in New York City on 17 September 1989, mixed live by Brian Eno. The second disc ‘Psychogeography’ sees Jon taking a Teo Macero style scalpel to the original session tapes of the 'City: Works Of Fiction' album and coming up with a situationist inspired alternate version of the City album. Beguilingly different takes and the raw excitement of early demos are skillfully sequenced to concoct a different dimension of sounds from the original release. Comes with 32 page booklet featuring extensive liner notes and photos. JON HASSELL trumpet, keyboards GREGG ARREGUIN guitar JEFF RONA keyboards, sampled percussion ADAM RUDOLPH acoustic and sampled percussion DANIEL SCHWARTZ bass BRIAN ENO live mix on Disc One All compositions written by Jon Hassell, except “Harambe” by Jon Hassell and Adam Rudolph. Jon Hassell published by Warp Publishing on behalf of Nyen Music. Audio edited by Jon Hassell. Mastered by Noel Summerville at 3345. Designed by Peter Salmon-Lomas. Photos by Zhenya Nesterov. Jon Hassell notes written 2014. Other interviews and notes by Jason Gross 2022. Original source material on Disc Two produced by Jon Hassell and co-produced by Arreguin, Rona, Rudolph, Schwartz and Andronis. Studio recordings from Group IV Studios, Hollywood, June 1989, mixed by Harry Andronis. Sampling and programming by Jeff Rona, with additional sampling by Richard Henderson, Bob Bielecki, Connie Kieltyka and Jean-Philippe Rykiel.

[iamlisteningto]

Jon Hassell’s Psychogeography

[zef-zef]

Jon Hassell - Vernal Equinox (remastered) from: Jon Hassell - Vernal Equinox (Lovely Music, 1978)

Hassell processes his trumpet sound and focuses on notes that change in tiny increments, giving his melodies a slippery quality where you’re never quite sure where they are coming from or where they might go next. The background is filled with quiet twitches of rattles and bells, gurgling talking drum, and snippets of bird songs, creating a bed of sound that is hard to pin down but easy to absorb as a whole. (Mark Richardson, Pitchfork)

Fully remastered from the original tape on the 2020 re-release (Ndeya – NDEYA2CD)

[disease]

JON HASSELL // AL KONGO UDU [LISTENING TO PICTURES (PV1), 2018]

[musicollage]

Jon Hassell – Seeing Through Sound. Ndeya : 2020.

[dustedmagazine]

Jon Hassell— Vernal Equinox (Ndeya)

Vernal Equinox (Remastered) by Jon Hassell

There are albums that serve, in hindsight, as points of reference even as they can be heard navigating toward self-definition. Vernal Equinox, trumpeter and philosopher Jon Hassell’s 1977 debut, is one of these. More than 40 years later, there is nothing that sounds quite like it’s raw but somehow delicate blend of heady improvisation and carefully constructed environmental soundscape.

The album’s final piece pulls it all into a sort of focus. “Caracas Night September 11 1975” opens on a deliciously hazy patina of evening wildlife, a dog or two in monosyllabic counterpoint, paving the way for Hassell’s sultry trumpet. Throughout the very brief miniature, he deconstructs the blues, stating, restating, reconfiguring and turning it all over again in a series of moves befitting a skater over the ice of long-established tradition. It’s not so much the notes he plays but how he lays them down, reluctantly giving each up, handling potentially sharp edges with the care of a Bill Dixon or Arve Henriksen as that gorgeously transparent environment nourishes everything. The same is true for the album’s longest track, the stirring and amoebic title track. Slowly undulating and unfurling synthesizer is complemented, periodically and aperiodically, by percussion from David Rosenboom and Naná Vasconcelos. Hassell’s raga trumpet, a technique, his new liner notes attest, that he was working on at the time resulting from his lessons with Pandit Pran Nat. Again, the fluidity of his playing, the absolutely stunning way he approaches and departs from various pitches, is indicative of the melding of style and timbre that has exemplified his work ever since, right up to his most recent studio work from 2018. There are even points at which synthesizer and trumpet demonstrate such timbral parity as to become indistinguishable.

The new package is well worth acquiring, even, as in my case, if you’ve gotten considerable mileage out of the earlier CD version. This is one of the rare cases where the new liner notes and the music are of a piece. Hassell and Brian Eno, whose future conceptions would show marked Hassell influence, have very different writing styles. Compared to Eno’s relative austerity, Hassell’s is a kind of controlled breathlessness, a wonderfully engaging transtemporal and trans-geographical precis similar to the fragmented webs he spins from fractured lines. The new restoration presents a similarly heightened experience. The percussion on “Hex” rips into the sonic environment rather than gliding over its surface. Deeper listening also yields astonishing results as the pulsating and grinding background of “Blues Nile” bites rather than caresses. Of course, Hassell’s playing exhibits many more layers of that ever-evolving breathiness and microtonal inflection which makes it unique, whether effect-driven like electric Miles Davis or beautifully unadorned. Sometimes, we are even treated to the best of both worlds, as on “Blues Nile,” where the effects create simultaneous and simultaneously shifting environments while that characteristic trumpet timbre cuts through each layer, highlighting interstice and creating its own larger space. All relationships, in wonderful flux, are enhanced by a really fine mix, and if the volume’s a bit too high, just turn it down and revel in all that multi-genre goodness. This is an album that lives up to its own legend, and, in contrast to so many of the pointless reissues flooding the market today, it just got better.

Marc Medwin

[burlveneer-music]

New Jon Hassell album on the way! “Fearless” is the advance track from Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two), out July 24 on his Ndeya label