Jon Hassell - Music Is Invisible: Pentimento Volume Three (Vinyl LP)

Jon Hassell Music Is Invisible: Pentimento Volume Three on LP

The third part in Jon Hassell’s Pentimento trilogy captures Jon Hassell performing as part of a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern at St John at Hackney Church, London on May 23, 2015, carefully edited and mixed by Jeff Rona into something much more than a traditional ‘live album’. Themes, motifs and riffs from Hassell’s two final albums, Listening to Pictures and Seeing Through Sound, occur throughout these unique, semi-improvised mutations, making this a fitting final volume in the late career renaissance of the Pentimento series. It contains a liner note essay by Jon Hassell that inspired the title.

Before Jon Hassell passed away in June 2021, he released two remarkable and critically adored albums: Listening to Pictures (2018) and Seeing Through Sound (2020), presented as parts one and two of the Pentimento series. ‘Pentimento’ is defined as “the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over”, a methodology that Jon applied in a musical sense throughout his career, refining and developing his approach over time.

Whilst Music Is Invisible does capture Jon Hassell and band performing live, the blurred lines between ‘studio’ and ‘live’ in the Hassell discography means that the category distinctions become somewhat meaningless. The musicians here are playing using a sound bed of samples taken from different sources (often their own previous performances), combined with the extensive editing, clean-up work and subtle sampling employed at the mixing and post-production stage, means this is as much a ‘studio’ record as many other entries in the artist’s body of work.