Digitally archiving an excellent 1981 Brian Eno interview featured in Musician Magazine. The ambient Mr. Eno again confounds his audience with a new creative collaboration with David Byrne […]
Traveling Through the Fourth World with Jon Hassell and Brian Eno

“Here’s some music for listening or not.”
It’s been nearly three years since the brilliant musical explorer Jon Hassell passed, and even in that brief time his influence and import has expanded. The creator of a sonic realm he dubbed “Fourth World” music, Hassell merged various elements of the global sounds he found during his travels and while absorbing his record collection. He first earned attention for his 1980 collaboration with Brian Eno, Possible Musics, and other records he released for Eno’s label Editions EG across the early 1980s. His discography after his work with Eno offers so many pathways and vistas that as you absorb them, his world becomes deeper and more detailed.
A profoundly thoughtful artist, Hassell eagerly discussed his work and ideas, some of which is excerpted on his website. One piece of writing in particular is worth taking time to read. It was published in the March, 1982 issue of the influential art magazine Heavy Metal. It’s too long to reprint in its entirety, but in these few paragraphs, Hassell discusses ambient music and the future.
In Western technoculture, the use of totally abstract music à la Muzak as background for human events inevitably results in trivialization and a loss of the sense of specialness and meaning. Brian Eno’s creation of the genre “ambient music” formalizes this affectless situation as it exists. In effect, the concept of ambient music says, “If there’s such constant sound input that you can’t listen to it all, why not say it’s okay not to listen and here’s some music for listening or not.”
The optimistic view might be that we’re going to reach such an overload level of symbol density that we’ll be forced to arrive at a new simplicity—an ability via artificial intelligence to combine many individual symbols operating in complex relationships into “chunks” of information which then can be treated as a single megaword.
The heading “new simplicity” is itself a simple example of chunking or a higher-level description of the detailed information in these paragraphs. Douglas Hofstadter, in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, refers to this as “pruning the giant tree of possibilities.”
One of our favorite performance videos is by Hassell. It took place at the foot of the World Trade Center in 1989, and is a glory to behold. Featuring an expanded band and Brian Eno mixing the extended improvisation live, the performance was recorded for public television.
Here’s an excerpt of Eno discussing how the concert came to be. He’s speaking to Susan James at WKCR:
The sequence was put together for the installation, but was mostly composed of pieces from the music Jon has been doing in Los Angeles with these guys. It was an outstanding performance, it really was very, very exciting. It was an absolute pleasure to be there for every moment and it was riveting, I thought, and a genuine new music. With this kind of music, which is really balancing on a knife edge between being constructed and being free and spontaneous, you have to pay a lot of attention to keeping it on that edge.
Of course, it’s easy to say to musicians of that quality “now you play exactly this, and you play exactly that”, and they could do it, they could play anything, they’re good musicians, but that isn’t what you want, you know? You don’t want classical music with everyone sitting there with pokers up their backsides playing it just right, and you want that kind of interaction and life between the musicians that is characteristic of jazz and various other improvised musics, but, I know Jon doesn’t want jamming either – just jamming where you feel that the musicians are doing it for their own amusement sort of, “Hey, this is clever isn’t it?” “Hey, what about this?” and trading off little funny games with one another.
It is an improvised music, but it’s actually very, very highly rehearsed, and there are very definite junctions in the structure where certain things must happen and that signal a change into this section, so there are distinct emotional spaces that are defined and whose elements are defined. So if you say, “in the third section of Ba-Ya D what are you playing?” this guy will say, “Well, I’m doing this on the pads”, the bass player will say: “this is the part I am playing”, the drummer will say “I’m going dat dat dat dat dat” and Jon will know what he is doing. It’s not improvised in the sense that everyone is making it up as they go along, it’s improvised in the sense that there is flexibility in the parts.
On Monday at In Sheep’s Clothing NYC, we’ll be embarking on a journey through fourth world ambient during our Monday Dedicated Listening Hours. From 2-5 pm, we’ll be playing album sides for heads looking to get lost. In addition to Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s seminal work, we’ll be setting the needle Music from Memory’s crucial compilation of Robert Musci’s work, Tower of Silence; Pepe Maina’s 1979 rhythmic new age record Scerizza; and Ambar, the 1997 record by Ellen Macari; and others.
On the docket:
- Jon Hassell / Brian Eno – Fourth World Vol. 1 Possible Musics
- Wolf Müller & Niklas Wandt – Instrumentalmusik von der Mitte der World
- Cass. & Gianni Brezzo – Masala Kiss
- Roberto Musci – Tower Of Silence
- Pepe Maina – Scerizza
- Eblen Macari – Ambar
- Richard Horowitz – Eros in Arabia
- Riccardo Giagni – Kaunis Maa