06: JON HASSELL / BRIAN ENO
FOURTH WORLD VOL.1: POSSIBLE MUSICS
(EG, 1980)

Eno has long been fascinated by musical forms and traditions outside of western rock orthodoxy. This was something he had in common with British trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, to whose breathtaking Possible Musics: Fourth World Vol.1 he so memorably contributed. We now know that Hassell regrets putting Eno’s name on the cover alongside his own, as it led people to overestimate his compositional role, but you need only compare this album with Hassell’s (no less terrific) Earthquake Island to discern the extent and significance of Eno’s input. Rather than adding to the burgeoning number of crudely positivist appropriations of “world” music, this album creates its own peculiar context and otherness – that of the “fourth world”, where primitivism and futurism are bound in a creative and expressive dynamic (a dynamic that resonates in jungle, dubstep, house and techno to this day).

Possible Musics is a far more complex and troubled work than any of the “ethno-tronic” garbage that it would unwittingly spawn; there’s something wonderfully queasy and strung-out about Hassell’s digitally treated trumpet lines, which are almost entirely unmoored from their jazz origins and sunk beautifully into Eno’s misty, murky synths. Its dubbed-out, gamelan-esque percussion prefigures the humid trip-hop of Tricky and Protection-era Massive Attack, not to mention the more recent psycho-tropic techno of Villalobos and Shackleton, but Fourth World Vol.1 remains too unsettling to be properly assimilated.

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