Best of 2020
Jon Hassell is in his 80s but he really might as well stand outside of time. It's headspinning to think someone of his age is still capable of such innovation, and Seeing Through Sound (i'll allow him a free pass on that title), like much of his output over the years, remains charged with that same sense of (im)possibility. There's always been a weird and/or eerie element to what Hassell produces, the microtonal shifts, granular level of detail and endless layering providing that sense of 'No Origin', a kind of impossible otherness - noon at two o'clock as the French idiom goes. That's what they mean by Fourth World, i'd suppose. On listening to this latest effort, i'm struck that Hassell might in someways be considered the progenitor of post-internet music, his now typical (but no less radical) palimpsestic arrangement of sound representing a maximal 'everything all the time' approach to composition that recalls the work of Burial, all that West Mineral stuff and the like (and is what Mark Fisher was always talking about). To do that while forming a distinctly singular voice - one so clear it resonates 40 years later in new material - is the true skill. Hassell is always only talking his own language. No masters, no gods, but there is Jon Hassell. It will forever remain.
