Jon Hassell's First Posthumous Album Captures His Final Live Performance
Jon Hassell's first posthumous album, Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three), will be released on October 2 via Ndeya, the label he founded. The record captures a trio performance with guitarist Rick Cox and bassist John von Seggern, recorded at St John at Hackney Church in London on 23 May 2015 — what became Hassell's final live appearance before his death in 2021. Pitchfork
The four-song album was edited and mixed by Jeff Rona, a composer and musician whose own career in film scoring long ran parallel to Hassell's orbit. The tracklist reads: Blue Ba-Ya, Club Gris-Gris, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, and Electric Forest.
Music Is Invisible closes the Pentimento trilogy, a late-period series that Hassell began with Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) in 2018 — his first new album in nine years — and continued with Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) in July 2020. The word "pentimento" refers to the reappearance in a painting of an earlier image or composition that the artist had painted over; Hassell applied the concept to his own music, treating earlier ideas as layers that could resurface in new settings.
Hassell died on 26 June 2021 from natural causes after long-term health issues, at age 84. Across a career spanning more than five decades, he developed what he called the "Fourth World" aesthetic — a fusion of global folk and classical traditions with electronic processing, built around his heavily treated trumpet tone. His 1977 solo debut Vernal Equinox is widely cited as a foundational document of that approach; his collaborators ranged from Brian Eno and Talking Heads to Ry Cooder and the Senegalese drummer Doudou N'Diaye Rose.
For a general listener, the practical way into Hassell is the sound itself: a trumpet slowed, looped and reshaped until it resembles a voice from somewhere that doesn't appear on any map, set against textures that move between the acoustic and the synthetic without announcing the join. The Pentimento trilogy pursued that method with a smaller, more intimate ensemble than some of his earlier work, and the final volume adds the dimension of a live room — a church in east London, a single evening, no overdubs mentioned in the announcement.
Ndeya, which Hassell established to control his own catalogue, has also overseen a steady reissue programme. Remastered vinyl editions of Vernal Equinox (1977), Dream Theory in Malaya (1981) and The Surgeon of the Nightsky Restores Dead Things (1987) have all returned to print in recent years, bringing the back catalogue alongside the late work.
For listeners who followed Hassell's music, October's release is a last instalment from a project he shaped himself before his death. For anyone encountering his name for the first time, it is also a gateway — a short, live document that captures the end of one of modern music's most singular careers.
