Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Uncut JANUARY 2015 - by Jon Dale

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

Ghostly ambience for imagined territories.

By 1980, Brian Eno had pretty much all but trademarked 'ambient', and Jon Hassell had released two albums of miasmic drift music - Vernal Equinox and Earthquake Island - after having studied with Stockhausen and played with La Monte Young and Terry Riley in Young's drone outfit Theatre Of Eternal Music. The collaboration beween Eno and Hassell lit off into different terrain, their Possible Musics grounded in Hassell's vision of a 'Fourth World' music, which he's described as "a term to describe the possibility of music in global terms beyond First World, beyond Third World, beyond High-Tech Art classical, beyond pop". Despite simplistic readings that adopt Fourth World as synonymous with world music, Hassell was interested in creating music for imagined and unknown regions. With Possible Musics, Eno shrouded Hassell's electronically manipulated trumpet in a fog of texture, moving the latter's winding playing - inspired by his master Pandit Pran Nath, which makes perfect sense listening back - into humid territory. Nana Vasconcelos and Michael Brook guest, but the most impressive thing about Possible Musics is how everyone falls into place behind Hassell's simple, weaving melodies, deep but light.