Of all the terms coined by musicians to describe their own work, few have travelled as far, or been borrowed as freely, as Jon Hassell's Fourth World. He arrived at it in the second half of the 1970s, after years of study with Pandit Pran Nath, having taught himself to play the trumpet as though it were a raga voice, breath bending microtonally against a wash of electronics. Vernal Equinox in 1977 and Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, made with Brian Eno three years later, proposed a music belonging to no map: not a fusion of existing traditions but an imagined one, coherent enough to be mistaken for something ancient. Its traces run through Talking Heads, through David Sylvian and Björk, and through an entire generation of producers who found their way back to him four decades later.
The Pentimento series was his last act, and an unexpected one. In 2018, after nine years without a record, he founded Ndeya in partnership with Warp and released Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), followed in 2020 by Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two). The title came from painting: a pentimento is the older image surfacing beneath the one that covers it, the artist's earlier intention refusing to disappear. Hassell had worked that way for most of his life, building tracks by burying them, and the two albums made the method audible. He died in June 2021, at 84.
Music Is Invisible closes the sequence with a recording nobody expected to hear. On 23 May 2015, at St John at Hackney in London, Hassell played what turned out to be his final concert, in a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern. Jeff Rona has edited and mixed the tapes into four long pieces in which motifs from the two studio albums drift back through semi-improvised form, which is to say the concert has itself been painted over.
Ndeya gathers all three volumes here, twenty pieces across three discs in a casebound edition with a 28 page booklet. For anyone who came to Hassell through the late records, it collects the whole of the last chapter in one place. For anyone who has followed him since Vernal Equinox, it is the sound of a musician still revising, right up to the end.
