JON HASSELL

Sulla Strada

Genre: ELECTRONIC

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Boomkat Product Review:

Originally released in 1995, Jon Hassell's 'Sulla Strada' is a blinding fourth world reinterpretation of ceremonial music from Cameroon - absolutely key listening if yr into anything on the Discrepant, Edições CN, Spencer Clark axis.

When Hassell came up with his concept of "fourth world" music, he likely never realized it would exert so much influence over four decades later. His idea to explore the intersection between what was then described as "world music" and the sounds he was hearing from emerging technologies anchored some of the most enduring avant-electronic records of the era, and we find ourselves looking back at his catalog alarmingly regularly. After all it's become completely commonplace for artists to list Hassell and his ideas as an influence - it's almost as expected from the 2023 new age/ambient set as a houseplant and a modest modular synth setup.

'Sulla Strada' if anything reminds us just how out-there the American trumpet player actually was. It's quite easy to pore over his gigantic catalog and only hone into the most obvious (and therefore most repeatable) expressions of his concept, but look a little closer and his story gets weirder and dramatically more fractal. On this one, he examines the music of the Beti and Bemileke peoples of Cameroon, blending ceremonial rhythms with glassy synthesized textures and disorienting, throbbing pads. This is still music that's influenced generations of artists, but it's influenced those creatives who almost inevitably still reside on the margins.

It's hard not to hear 'Temperature Variabili', with its interlocking woodblock rhythms, clouded chants and wonked stabs and not have our minds directed towards Spencer Clark, who most recently ushered us into another pulped mirror world with his Fourth World Magazine III album 'Neoplatonic Aquatic Symposiums'. Similarly, 'Tenera E' La Notte' and the dissociated 'Frontiera A Sud-Est' harmonize well with Discrepant's run of island- and water-themed concept albums. Hassell was there first, and there's no better way to unravel his ideas than to go straight to the source.

MP3 Release (9)