Jon Hassell – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Gioconda of the Mausoleum

“MAGIC REALISM • Like the video technique of “keying in” where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. • A trumpet, branched into a chorus of trumpets by computer, traces the motifs of the Indian raga DARBARI over Senegalese drumming recorded in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950’s [a sonic texture like a “Mona Lisa” which, in close up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal], while the ancient call of an AKA pygmy voice in the Central African Rainforest—transposed to move in sequences of chords unheard of until the 20th century—rises and falls among gamelan-like cascades, multiplications of a single “digital snapshot” of a traditional instrument played on the Indonesian island of JAVA, on the other side of the world.” — Jon Hassell

Jon Hassell’s text is part of the sleeve note for his Aka—Darbari—Java (Magic Realism) album which was released on Editions EG in 1983. The description of a picture of the Mona Lisa made from tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal always intrigued me even though it’s only a shorthand metaphor for the sampling process, as well as being an encapsulation in miniature of one aspect of Hassell”s “Fourth World” concept: the blending of East and West, the sacred and the profane. Nevertheless, 20 years ago—17th May, 2001, according to the date on the file—after realising that Photoshop allowed the creation of just this kind of mosaic imagery, I decided to try and bring Hassell’s metaphor to digital life.

The end result in its full-size version looks at a distance like an ordinary halftone rendering of the painting but it really is made of tiny images of the Taj Mahal, albeit very rough ones since the process always resulted in a bitmap image. So much time has elapsed I’ve forgotten the procedural details although I do recall the involvement of one of those legacy features of Photoshop that most people ignore, possibly the Apply Image function. And I only did this at all because I’d found a tutorial somewhere that described how to create a mosaic image in this manner. The resulting picture wasn’t particularly satisfying but as a proof of concept it did at least work.

Continue reading “Gioconda of the Mausoleum”

Sounds off the Beaten Track

In 1987 the Glastonbury Festival opened its WOMAD stage for the first time to provide a showcase for the kind of acts you might expect to see at the separate World Of Music And Dance festival. Sounds off the Beaten Track is a 52-minute TV documentary about the acts who appeared on the WOMAD stage at Worthy Farm that year, and also about the WOMAD ethos itself, a project inaugurated in 1980 by Peter Gabriel and others to give greater prominence to musicians from all over the world. One of the WOMAD initiators, Mark Kidel, also directed the film, while co-founders Peter Gabriel and Thomas Brooman talk on camera. The film captures the Glastonbury Festival at a time when it was still a relatively small and rather ramshackle affair, closer to its hippy roots, and very different from the sprawling tent city of later years.

The main interest, however, is the music, especially the amount of time given to the Burkina Faso group, Farafina, and to Jon Hassell, whose Flash Of The Spirit collaboration with Farafina was released the following year. This was the first I saw of Hassell on TV, and also the last until he turned up much later as a guest on MTV’s Seal Unplugged session. I remembered the Farafina performance but I’d forgotten that Hassell also talks a little about his Fourth World idea. Among the other featured artists are The Bhundu Boys, Toumani Diabaté, Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, The Inspirational Choir, and Najma Akhtar who subsequently appeared on another unplugged (or partly plugged) session with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Jon Hassell had been under the WOMAD umbrella since 1982 via the excellent Music And Rhythm compilation album which included an exclusive live recording of Ba-Benzélé. He was often critical of the “world music” marketing label, seeing it as a convenient way for record companies and music sellers to appear to be supporting musical diversity while placing all the non-Anglophone recordings in a ghetto area away from everything else. He preferred to talk of “worldly music”, an idiom that was of the world, uncloistered, freed from the ghetto; music where the beaten and unbeaten tracks might combine to form a new highway.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, 1937–2021
• Jon Hassell, live 1989
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins

Jon Hassell, 1937–2021

Goodbye, Nature Boy, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with you for a brief time.

One of my Mixcloud mixes was a Jon Hassell special, a collection of odds and ends rather than a best of, but it serves as an introduction to his unique music. Or you could go here and gorge yourself on a collection of albums that only sound like the people who followed in his footsteps.

• The Guardian
• Libération
• The New York Times

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, live 1989
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins

Weekend links 535

The Wagnerites (1894) by Aubrey Beardsley.

• “Part of my problem with influence is that the concept is too univocal; most of us are impacted by many others during our lifetimes, but often in oblique ways. So many of the most interesting bits of cultural transmission happen nonlinearly, via large groups of people, and in zigzag mutations. Assigning influence can also have the unintentional effect of stripping artists of their own originality and vision.” Geeta Dayal reviewing Wagnerism by Alex Ross.

• “Buñuel stubbornly refused to have any group affiliation whatsoever. Even though critics always tried to categorize him, he never wanted to explain the hidden meanings of any of his films and often denied that there were any.” Matt Hanson on the surreal banality of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

• Next month Soul Jazz release the fourth multi-disc compilation in their Deutsche Elektronische Musik series devoted to German music from the 1970s and 80s. The third collection was the weakest of the lot so I wasn’t expecting another but this one looks like it may be better.

• James Balmont chooses the five best films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who he calls “cinema’s master of horror”. I’ve yet to see any of these so I can’t say whether the label is warranted or not.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine in a two-part post here and here charts the emergence of an under-examined sub-genre, the metaphysical thriller.

• Power Spots: 13 artists choose favourite pieces of music by Jon Hassell. A surprising amount of interest in his first album, Vernal Equinox.

• At Spine: George Orwell’s Animal Farm receives new cover designs for its 75th anniversary.

• “Pierre Guyotat’s work is more relevant now than ever,” says Donatien Grau.

• Mix of the week: FACT mix 775 by Sarah Davachi.

• May 24th by Matthew Cardinal.

• Ry Cooder with Jon Hassell & Jim Keltner: Video Drive-By (1993) | Goose And Lucky (1993) | Totally Boxed In (1993)

Weekend links 528

The Rhinoceros (after 1620) by Albrecht Dürer.

• “Today—Tolkien, Lovecraft, Miéville and M John Harrison!” Paul StJohn Mackintosh at Greydogtales explores HP Lovecraft’s lack of interest in fictional worldbuilding. The piece includes one of my book covers (ta!) plus a link to an earlier post I wrote about the cover designs of M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books. Since I’m connected to the thesis I’ll suggest that Lovecraft was resistant to the worldbuilding impulse in part because he was almost always writing horror stories. Having studied the genre at length he was well aware of the need to leave suggestive voids for the reader’s imagination.

• RIP Denise Johnson. All the obituaries mention the big names she worked with, notably New Order and Primal Scream, but being in the pool of Manchester session artists she also appeared on a couple of records by my colleagues at Savoy. Her voice is one of those you first hear on the PJ Proby cover of I’m On Fire, while with friend Rowetta she improvised her way through a Hi-NRG original (and a favourite of Anohni’s), the scurrilous Shoot Yer Load.

• At the BFI: Axel Madsen interviews Fritz Lang in 1967; Serena Scateni on where to begin with Nobuhiko Obayashi; and Roger Luckhurst reviews the spomenik-infested Last and First Men by Jóhann Jóhannsson.

• “Be more aware of the rest of the world!” says Jon Hassell, talking to Alexis Petridis about a life spent making music.

• John Boardley on the Renaissance origins of the printed poster. Worth it for the selection of engraved details alone.

• “What Ever Happened To Chicken Fat?” Jackson Arn on a tendency to over-abundance in Jewish humour.

• Erik Davis has a new writing home at Substack that he calls The Burning Shore. Bookmarked.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XXII by David Colohan.

• Garry Hensey on The Strange World of John Foxx.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Sergei Parajanov Day.

• Romantic Rhino (1981) by Ananda Shankar | The Lone Rhinoceros (1982) by Adrian Belew | Blastic Rhino (2000) by King Crimson