Well chuffed to have my Melody Maker review of City - in which I described the album as "a labyrinth of deadly deranging beauty, a maze of mirrors" - included in the CD booklet alongside sundry other texts by Glenn O'Brien, Brian Eno, and Jon H himself.
Jon Hassell - City: Works Of Fiction - Expanded Edition Trailer from All Saints Records on Vimeo.
Around the album's original release I also interviewed Hassell, writing it up for The Observer and also MM.
But not content with that I also made the 808 State versus Jon Hassell version of "Voiceprint" Single of the Week in Melody Maker.
Tireless supporter, I was!
SINGLE OF THE
WEEK
JON HASSELL/808
STATE
VOICEPRINT
(Land)
Jon Hassell is an avant-garde composer who
keeps an eye, or
rather an ear,
out for instinctively/unwittingly avant-garde pop
forms like rap
and house. (He's described his astonishing album
"City: Works
Of Fiction" as "classical rap"). 808 State are a
techno-dance
production team who flirt with the avant-garde.
Someone had the
bright idea of getting them together, and the
result is this
radical remix of "Voiceprint" off the "City" album.
Hassell's original method of composition
reveals how much of
an affinity his
way of working has with the sampling aesthetic.
Having got his
musicians to play six wildly different mixes of the
track, he chose
his favourite sections, drew up a complicated map
between the
segments, and programmed it into a computer. The
result: "a
mosaic in which each of the tiles is a spontaneous
event", and
a brilliant balance between improvisation and
composition,
seduction and alienation. 808 State have taken the
abstraction
process one step further, by sampling from a vinyl
version of
"Voiceprint" rather than remixing the original tapes.
It's a radical
reconstruction rather than a track underwrittn by a
standard-issue
1990 groove.
The result is a richly evocative exercise
in unspecific
exoticism: you
think of dunes, mosques, mirages, bazaars with their
hubbub of foregn
tongues and heady assault of pungent, unfamiliar
fragrances. Hassell's trumpet calligraphy darts in and
out of
808's
techno-vistas, synths shimmer like a heat-haze. "Voiceprint"
presents the city
of the future as a fractal labyrinth of uprooted
cultures that
co-exist but never mingle. Single of the week,
because it's a
work of imagination, and it works your imagination.
This week, that's
rare.
In retrospect, not all that as dancemix versions of 4thworldly ambientjazz go... a bit linear.
Here's a more recent remix by Patten that's included on the third disc of the reissue, Psychogeography: Zones of Feeling