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Hi John, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
John von Seggern: Thanks for asking! I’ve been really busy lately in the wake of the release of this album. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and I’ve also been contacted by a number of younger artists and sound designers who have been influenced by Jon’s work, especially these last Pentimento albums. As a result I’m making some really exciting new music now. We’re going to be launching this new project soon called A Fourth World Is Still Possible, I’ve very excited about it. We have some early recordings online here https://johnvonseggern.com/fourth-world.html
Music Is Invisible captures Jon’s final public performance, but it also blurs the distinction between a live recording and a studio creation. What made this particular concert feel like the right material to become the final chapter of the Pentimento series?
John von Seggern: This concert was Jon’s final concert, as it turned out, although we were not aware of that at the time. It was also the best concert that we did on these tours, I believe, and we had the best recording from this one as well, so it was natural that we would go ahead and release this one.
As far as blurring the distinction between a live recording and a studio creation, all of the music that we did with Jon in this last iteration of his band, that’s how we did everything. So we were basically having sessions every weekend and just making new material every time, trying new techniques, finding new sounds, reprocessing old samples into new things. And we built up this huge library of material, and then we selected from that the fragments and moments and clips that best captured the essence of what Jon was trying to express at that time.
So, for our live concerts, I was like the rhythm section of the band and I was live mixing different fragments from our sessions. John was playing trumpet and piano live, and Rick was mostly playing guitar and but running it through a lot of processing that made it sound completely different than a guitar. I was playing the bulk of the grooves and sounds and kind of steering the performance, and those guys were improvising with what I was doing.
The Pentimento concept was central to Hassell’s way of working—revisiting, reshaping, layering and transforming existing musical material into something new. How did that philosophy influence the way he, you and his other collaborators approached this recording, particularly when deciding which moments to preserve, edit, or transform?
John von Seggern : You have to understand first that all of our studio recordings were live jams in the first place. It was all improvisational music. And then when we did play live, like in this concert, I wasn’t just playing chunks of our rehearsals, I had, for example, on Broadway Boogie Woogie, I had chopped up this long stretch of beats that I think Rick originally made in a recording session. But when we played live, I had all these little different versions of it, and I was live mixing between them and filtering them and putting effects on them. So that’s kind of how we approached it.
The concert recording itself is mostly just like it was in the concert, it hasn’t been transformed that much. Jeff can speak more to that himself, but I believe mostly he was focused on cleaning up the trumpet performance. That concert basically sounded like it sounds on the record.
“Blue Ba Ya” is the first glimpse listeners are getting of the album. What stood out to you about that piece and its ability to represent the atmosphere of the full performance?
John von Seggern : Blue Ba Ya is interesting because for part of it we’re recycling samples from Jon’s earlier music and reprocessing them and changing them. When I first started working with Jon, he gave me a giant folder of samples from his earlier records. We did not end up using a lot of them, but there were a few key percussion samples and other things that are very characteristic of Jon’s earlier work that I wanted to bring forward in a new form.
You had a very meticulous relationship with his music, from sequencing and transitions to mastering and artwork. When Jeff Rona began editing and mixing the concert, how did you balance making improvements to the recording with remaining faithful to what Jon himself would have wanted?
John von Seggern : Speaking for myself, when I first heard the mix of the concert to be released, there were some sounds in it that had not really been audible on stage that were very prominent in the recording, especially some loud bass sounds. And so I did a session with Jeff to try and get the sound of the record to more closely resemble what we heard when we were playing and what we were trying to express.
Jeff, you describe playing the performance back for Jon and seeing his relief as they worked through the problematic sections together. What does that part of the process reveal about Jon as an artist and about how seriously he took the relationship between the original performance and its final recorded form?
Jeff Rona: Nothing is precious or chiseled in stone in Jon’s mind. It’s part of his normal process to look at everything from every possible angle, including ones not thought of at first. And while he is a deep experimentalist as a composer, he is extremely intentional about his trumpet playing. He knows what he wants.
It didn’t matter to Jon if the some small parts of the trumpet on the final recording varied somewhat from the live performance. This isn’t meant to be a faithful recreation of that evening. Rather, the concert could be raw material to be used in any way that made sense. Given his physical issues that night, taking measures to replace a handful of small phrases with similar but better performed ones from other moments in the recording meant achieving his musical intent. And that’s what we got. Frankly, edits of live recordings is not particularly unusual.
Rick Cox and John von Seggern were both deeply involved in Jon’s Pentimento period and performed alongside him at this concert. How important was their input in reconstructing the musical context of the performance and making sure the finished album still felt authentically connected to that trio?
Jeff Rona: They were both more or less hands off while I did my work on the album. Rick came with Jon to my initial playback, but as this was mainly focused on Jon’s trumpet, and not the tracks overall, he didn’t have any specific input. The three of us listened and Jon requested I do more work on polishing the trumpet. He encouraged any additional creative input I wanted to have on the overall recording.
At some point I stepped away from it to do a film score, and by the time I came back to finish it, Jon had become ill. He never heard the final version.
Once I got the trumpet in good shape, I spent the rest of my time going through all the rest of the performance. I was working from a multi track recorded at the concert, which gave me substantial control over everybody’s instruments. I treated it the same way as when I worked with Jon in the studio, looking for interesting or surprising ways to treat or process ideas so everything hangs together as beautifully as possible and enhances the overall experience.
When Jon passed away, I reached out to his label, N’Deya at Warp Records. I’d become friends with some of the people there having done other projects with them and Jon. I told them I had finished work on this record from his final live concert, and asked if they were interested in hearing it, which they very much were. Though they were very excited with the record, there was some initial hesitation about the release, as this is the first posthumous Hassell release, and Jon did not approve the final master. Given that the concert itself was in 2015, and I worked on it that year into the next, this record sat for quite some time before the label decided that it was a fitting part of what is now this trilogy. On the label’s request I made a couple of small edits so it would fit onto vinyl. It only shortened the duration very modestly.
Before it was released, John Van Seggern gave it a listen and recommended another small edit, which I did with his input.
Your work often drew connections between seemingly different musical ideas, including dub’s versioning tradition and Teo Macero’s radical editing of Miles Davis. How do you hear those influences continuing to shape the approach behind Music Is Invisible?
Jeff Rona: I can’t make comparisons between the work I did on “Music is Invisible“ and other people’s working styles, but you are right that there are some conceptual crossovers. At the heart of Jon‘s music, from the beginning to now, is a relentless sense of investigation, perspective, experimentation, and a willingness to take some bold swings away from where things started. When I worked with Jon on the album “City: Works of Fiction“ there was this idea of “dub.“ It’s pretty common in most of Jon’s works that most of the musicians are playing consistently from beginning to end, and making subtle shifts and explorations throughout. But on City I wanted to see what it would sound like to use the mixing board as an instrument to pull out whole chunks of sound, put focus on certain elements, do some sudden unexpected and radical shifts, before coming back to the original sound. I was a bit inspired by some of Lee “Scratch” Perry‘s recordings. And it turned out to be a good fit for that record. Even after a lengthy meticulous mix on. City, John and I spent another few weeks back at my house taking apart everything, transforming it with different techniques and audio equipment, before settling on what became the final tracks.
On this album, I took the same ethos and applied it to the material – some things taken out, some things transformed, some things added, some things repeated. It’s much more subtle. Quite a lot of experimentation and thought went into my approach to the record, but it remains grounded in the vibe of the original recording.
The album title comes from one of your own working titles and his essay “On The Invisibility Of Music,” where he reflects on music as something that exists as an interior experience rather than something physically visible. How did that idea inform your understanding of this final recording?
Jeff Rona: The name “Music is Invisible” was proposed by someone at Jon’s label. And they got it from something Jon had written. So I didn’t come up with the idea. But when they ran it by me I was very happy. I think it’s an accurate reflection of how Jon viewed music, and his music in particular. It’s not the notes, it’s the experience. Jon’s music is quintessentially visceral.
There is still a significant amount of material being catalogued and digitised from Jon’s archive, with unreleased recordings and reissues on the horizon. As you continue exploring that archive, what has surprised you most about what he left behind, and what are you most excited for listeners to eventually hear?
Jeff Rona: Jon Hassell left behind a massive legacy of recordings. Any time he was practicing, rehearsing, experimenting, preparing for a new album or concert, doing countless alternative takes in the studio,he always had a recorder running. I’ve only heard a bit. John had been working extensively with Rick Cox on a deep dive into this archive while he was still in good health. Some of that is in the first two releases in the Pentimento Trilogy.
Instead of focusing on what may or may not come next, I would hope people – both longtime fans and first time listeners – go back and listen to any of Jon’s entire amazing catalog of works to get a sense of his unique and inimitable style, and his undeniable contributions to modern music. John had an open mind and open ears that you hear from his earliest recordings to his final. It’s beautiful, moving, inspiring, and timeless.
