Jon Hassell Readies New Album 'Seeing Through Sound'

It's a companion piece to 2018's 'Listening to Pictures'

BY Calum SlingerlandPublished Jun 11, 2020

American composer Jon Hassell has shared details of a new album. Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) arrives July 24 via Ndeya.

As the title implies, Seeing Through Sound is a companion piece to Hassell's 2018 album Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). You can find album opener "Fearless" and a trailer for the effort in the player below.

A press release explains the following of the new album:

The album is buffered by two 8-minute plus epics at the beginning and the end - the hypnotic Fearless with it's metronomic, almost Can-like rhythm, and blurry, noir-ish texture of sound emerging like car headlights from the fog; mirrored at the end of the record by the beautiful sci-fi lullaby of Timeless, a track with a vaporous, billowing quality as electronic clicks and bubbles float over a landscape of shimmering, glacially paced complexity. The bridge between those two worlds is no less compelling, from the frantic, spidery IDM sketch of Reykjavik to the collapsed-time ballad of Unknown Wish. Whilst containing seeds of classic 'fourth world' fusion, this record finds the artist still questing to create new forms and mutations of music, a thrilling window into what music could sound like in a world to come.

This past April, Hassell's friends and family launched a GoFundMe campaign to assist with financial costs of "long-term health issues."

"Jon is going through hard times now," friend and collaborator Brian Eno wrote for the campaign. "I feel that many of us owe him a debt of gratitude, so perhaps making a contribution to this fund is a way we can thank him."



Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)
:

1. Fearless
2. Moons of Titan
3. Unknown Wish
4. Delicado
5. Reykjavik
6. Cool Down Coda
7. Lunar
8. Timeless

Pre-order Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two).

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