Pitchfork
83
In 1980, Brian Eno and trumpeter/downtown composer Jon Hassell released a collaborative album bearing the slightly cumbersome title of Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. There was no follow-up volume. It bore a trace of Eno’s ambient music explorations from the past few years, but it most closely echoed the work of Hassell. A collaborator with minimalists like La Monte Youngt and Terry Riley, Hassell also loved the needling timbre of Electric Miles Davis and ran his own horn through a harmonizer to delectably destabilizing effect. His music hovered just outside classification: ambient yes, but those thundering Burundi drums weren’t quite relaxing. There were glints of jazz and minimalism, but Indian classical and electronic washes also wormed through. It suggested ethnographs from an imaginary terrain, exotica from another green world, hence the term “fourth world” to try and put a border around it all.
Eno’s subsequent work has all but eclipsed Hassell, but in the past few years, Hassell’s influence on generations of producers has come to the surface. It’s a sound that arises amid the glistening ambience of Visible Cloaks, the contorted computer tones of Oneohtrix Point Never, and the techno productions of Call Super. Further underground you can hear it in the music that Andrew Pekler, Don’t DJ, and the Wah Wah Wino camp puts out. Well-regarded reissue imprints like Rvng Intl., Emotional Rescue, and Music From Memory seek out hybrids from that bygone era that also wed sleek western electronics with weirder folk forms. And now comes Miracle Steps (Music From the Fourth World 1983-2017), a thoughtful overview compiled by Optimo’s JD Twitch in conjunction with fellow Glaswegian and NTS Radio contributor Fergus Clark. Miracle Steps offers up a 14-track exploration of a previously untenable sound, spanning from post-punk goofs to library music loners, bedroom producers to classical composers wholly unaware that blending African instrumentation with western composition had a name.
The set opens with a radiant contribution from Mexico’s Jorge Reyes. Known primarily for abetting new age composer Steve Roach and ethno-chillout act Deep Forest, Reyes’ own ritualistic percussion charges the ether here. “Plight,” a mid-’90s piece, features a wordless chant, rainstick rattles that suggest the Amazon and a drum patter that mimics Indian tabla. It alludes to many sources that it soon sounds like it could only originate from no terrestrial plot. Newcomers like X.Y.R. and Iona Fortune seamlessly slot in alongside early ’80s industrial-ambient collective O Yuki Conjugate, who make a slow loop of flute hover over the track like a dark cloud, foreboding but never filling the sky.
The middle section of the comp offers up the most curious amalgam of sources. It features a Muzak-like take on Hassell’s sound thanks to the processed reeds bobbing around marimba lines. David Cunningham’s name might be familiar for the bristly and frisky punk deconstructions of “Summertime Blues” and “Money” that he rendered as the Flying Lizards. But “Blue River” showcases a more contemplative side of his from the early ’90s, with swells of pedal steel, electric keyboard, and metallophone. Soon each element becomes as slippery as river rocks, everything flowing together like a Javanese gamelan.
On his website, composer Larry Chernicoff boasts that the music he makes is “all organic”; his track “Woodstock, New York” provides the liveliest moment of the comp. It features dueling West African bow harps, soon joined by handclaps and a free jazz flare-up of trumpet and saxophone. It brings to mind Cameroonian renaissance man Francis Bebey and free jazz wanderer Don Cherry, but the propulsive piece stakes out its own space.
For music where the rhythms are primarily a texture—toggling between raindrops and a distant drum circle—Clark and Twitch are deft at making the set flow. The comp floats past like a train journey across numerous landscapes. At its end, it quietly builds to a mellow peak. The woefully named group Afro-Disiak has a kalimba slowly meld with a ghost choir and a growl, reaching a crescendo while still at a crawl. Zoviet-France side project Rapoon uses tabla and a wailing sound that might be voice or strings, subtly shifting between the two for 10 minutes of sustained trance.
Whether recent or from 35 years past, the spirit and sensibilities of Jon Hassell reside in the core of almost every track here. The man himself appears on the title track (taken from his 1986 Power Spot album). Against a waterfall pummel of drums, his trumpet electronically morphs from horse whinny to midnight train whistle. But as I attempt to add a more visual regional descriptor (are these sounds from a sand dune in the Sahara? From a desolate American landscape? Atop the Great Wall?), it all beads away like spilled mercury. While “fourth world” remains a slippery genre tag to affix, Miracle Steps’ curatorial and cartographical attempts to map out such a sound remains notable.
Sat Apr 15 05:00:00 GMT 2017