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C o l l a b o r a t i o n s / s e s s i o n s • S o u n d t r a c k s |
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A K A - D A R B A R I - J A V A Editions EG EEGCD-31 1983 44.10
1 Empire I 2.00
Jon Hassell—trumpet, keyboards, treatments
All titles by Jon Hassell except 'Empire II' by Jon Hassell and Daniel Lanois Produced by Jon Hassell with Daniel Lanois Cover painting: 'Soundscape' |
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Album notes: MAGIC REALISM • Like the video technique of "keying in" where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. • A trumpet, branched into a chorus of trumpets by computer, traces the motifs of the Indian raga DARBARI over Senegalese drumming recorded in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950's (a sonic texture like a "Mona Lisa" which, in close up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal), while the ancient call of an AKA pygmy voice in the Central African Rainforest — transposed to move in sequences of chords unheard of until the 20th century — rises and fails among gamelan-like cascades, multiplications of a single "digital snapshot" of a traditional instrument played on the Indonesian island of JAVA, on the other side of the world. • Music which is to this degree self-referential, in which larger parts are related to and/or generated from smaller parts, shares certain qualities with "white" classical music of the past. AKA/DARBARI/JAVA is a proposal for a "coffee-colored" classical music of the future — both in terms of the adoption of entirely new modes of structural organisation (as might be suggested by the computer ability to re-arrange, dot-by-dot, a sound or video image) and in terms of the expansion of the "allowable" musical vocabulary in which one may speak this structure — leaving behind the ascetic face which Eurocentric tradition has come to associate with serious expression. Jon Hassell |
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Music like a mirage of fabulous, elusive temples, shimmering in a heat haze. Where Dream Theory took the digital delay as its main source of processing here the sampler is the main tool of manipulation at a time when these were still very rare and expensive items. The radical and visionary quality of this album is in its use of samples, not merely for purposes of collage or imitation of other instruments, but in their potential nature as fragments of a complex digital tapestry which it would be impossible to create otherwise. Despite the present ubiquity of samplers and sampled music, this is an approach that has been barely explored by subsequent electronic musicians. Hassell's ability once again to create a work that seems ancient and yet thoroughly contemporary never fails to astonish. • |