Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Mojo JANUARY 2015 - by David Sheppard

JON HASSELL/BRIAN ENO - FOURTH WORLD VOLUME 1: POSSIBLE MUSICS

Long out-of-print 1980 ambient/global fusion benchmark reissued.

Brian Eno landed in New York in 1978 for a week's production work but ended up staying for five years. one of the lures was local trumpet experimenter Jon Hassell, whose predilection for playing his horn through atomising harmonizers, allied to a profound philosophical adherence to various 'world musics', chimed seamlessly with Eno's incipient ambient and African interests.

Essentially a Hassell album produced by Eno (who nonetheless lends signature synthetic daubings), its half-dozen lengthy tracks meander through an exotic terra incognita located somewhere between electric Miles, minimalist electronica and myriad un-nameable ethnic forms. The eerily shape-shifting trumpet tones and harmonic bass guitar of Chemistry or the ghost-dervish brass cadences and numinous synths of the protracted Charm (Over "Burundi Cloud") still sound like transmissions from another (green) world, or the aural equivalent of the Earth's serene revolutions glimpsed from space.