Jon Hassell | Ambassador From the Fourth World

Jul 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

JON HASSELL REVEALS THE FASCINATING MUSICAL HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY BEHIND HIS LATEST RELEASE

What do they use for onstage sampling now?

Freeman: Jan's got a completely hardware-based system with some older gear. He knows Ableton [Live], but he doesn't like that whole laptop-onstage thing. He has an Akai Remix 16, an old '90s DJ sampler and a sample player. He likes interacting with the buttons, and he plays the thing. There's some hard-disk capability so he can play back existing tracks, as well as effects. I think he uses a [Korg] KAOSS Pad KP2, too.

What about Dino's sampler?

Freeman: Dino's running [STEIM] LiSa and Ableton together on a super-elaborate setup with an [M-Audio Evolution] UC-33. He's using every knob on the UC-33 to control LiSa and Ableton in an amazingly efficient way. He's the king of efficiency when it comes to equipment. He will squeeze every last ounce of functionality out of a piece of software or hardware and have the smallest, most compact, most easily transportable rig of any of us. He's really made that a priority. He takes great pains to set things up in advance to allow himself great flexibility between playing pre-existing material for the pieces of music that we're doing [and] integrating live sampling at the same time. He chooses to do that on a computer and he gets great results, where Jan does not use a computer onstage. There's a lot of conceptual similarity between them, but the way they do things is very different.

Hassell: In the title track of the new album, we used a lot of samples and harmonic ambience from the title track of the previous record, Maarifa Street (Nyen, 2005). When we went into the studio, we said, “Let's just make this into a super-weird, slowed-down remix of Maarifa Street.” So that's the way that began. [Guitarist] Rick Cox, who works with [film composer] Thomas Newman a lot, had this string phrase that might have been something recorded at a full-string session. He and Tom still don't know exactly where it came from.

Freeman: He had a handheld recorder, and he went out in the room with the orchestra. He just grabbed these two beautiful chords, and it had this magic thing about it. That became crucial to the fabric of the other elements that Jon introduced [to the track “Last Night the Moon Came”].

It's a very lovely atmosphere.

Hassell: If you look back to Possible Musics, the track called “Charm” is built the same way: a repeating string motif (it's synth, but it's strings) in the background that's built over that. Instead of thinking like in traditional jazz, for example, in terms where it's this chord and the next chord, it's more like creating a kind of harmonic atmosphere, harkening to my Indian raga study, where the foreground is the musical calligraphy of the voice or the instrument, and then the rhythmic background of the tambura. Instead of the tambura, it's a kind of harmonic atmosphere that came from the previous record, Earthquake Island (Tomato, 1978). And that also came from the title track. There's this long coda, with this loop of a sustained chord, and I was playing chords on top of it. That was what we built “Charm” on.

How did Possible Musics come about?

Hassell: I'd done two records before that. Vernal Equinox (Lovely Music, 1977) was what Brian Eno heard when he was in New York. He was living there for a couple of years, so he heard that and he came to hear a live concert that I did at The Kitchen. It was actually just me and a background, which I think was made from 10CC, like a big chord. I played what later became “Charm” over that. After the concert, [Brian] said it would be nice to do something together. And, of course, he was working with David Byrne at the time; they were doing [Talking Heads'] Remain in Light.

[For the Possible Musics sessions,] we had Naná Vasconcelos, the Brazilian percussionist, and Aiyb Deng, one of Naná's friends he turned me on to. Brian was brilliant at the console. He brought that whole art-school sensibility to mixing, asking the question, “What would it sound like if you did this instead of that?” He just turned the whole process inside out.

Did that have much influence on the way you produce music yourself?

Hassell: Well, certainly I learned from it. Anyone who went through that art training knew what questions to ask. Now there's a lot less questioning and more just, “What's the first thought that comes into your head? Why not follow that?” Why do you have to automatically censor the first thing that comes to mind? You'll never know how effective that strategy is unless you actually practice it and wind up with some duds, wind up with some winners. There's more winners than duds by following this intuitive process rather than trying to prethink it too much.

Didn't you have some involvement with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?

Hassell: After Possible Musics, Brian came to me, and said, “David and I have been talking, and we'd like to get some basic recording equipment and go to someplace in California or in the desert and make this kind of quasi-ethnic record.” What was that group that made that fake arctic thing?

The Residents' Eskimo?

Hassell: That was the original idea. The three of us were supposed to go and hole up and do this record together, the one that later became Bush of Ghosts, which later caused a great deal of friction because I was left out of the picture. They were the reigning stars at that point. Who was I? Just some unknown avant-gardist. I think we're close enough now to allow it to be put in the frame of a family squabble.