John Hassell – Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two LP + CD Glitterbeat (Germany)

LP version. 180 gram vinyl; Includes CD. First reissue of Jon Hassell‘s “Fourth World” masterpiece, originally released in 1981. Featuring contributions from Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel), and Michael Brook (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan). Beautifully remastered, with a bonus track (“Ordinary Mind”) and liner notes written by Hassell himself. “Fourth World is a viewpoint out of which evolves guidelines for finding balances between accumulated knowledge and the conditions created by new technologies” –Jon Hassell. From his time studying with Stockhausen in Cologne and a passage through the New York minimalist sphere with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass to his mentorship with the Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath and collaborative excursions with Eno, the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Björk, and Ry Cooder, Jon Hassell has pursued a continuous questioning of the dichotomies between North and South, sacred and sensual, primitive and futurist. These cross-pollinating influences and pan-cultural musical educations led Hassell to the gradual development of musical concepts and gestures that he grouped under the “Fourth World” umbrella theory. “I wanted the mental and geographical landscapes to be more indeterminate — not Indonesia, not Africa, not this or that. . . . What would music be like if ‘classic’ had not been defined as what happened in Central Europe two hundred years ago. What if the world knew Javanese music and Pygmy music and Aborigine music? What would ‘classical music’ sound like then?” In the late 1970s in New York, Hassell began to produce a series of astonishing albums on which his trumpet explored both non-Western modalities and dramatic sound processing (deftly rendered by nascent digital effects like the AMS Harmonizer). Brian Eno, who was living New York at the time, was thrilled by Hassell’s 1978 debut album, Vernal Equinox, and sought out its creator. Together they produced the classic 1980 album Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics (GB 019CD/LP), before Eno charged headlong into “Fourth World”-ish collaborations with a new partner, David Byrne, on Remain in Light (1980) and My Life in The Bush of Ghosts (1981). Hassell began to feel that they were at least borrowing concepts and sounds to which he had introduced them, and at worst, that a full-scale appropriation was taking place. As Hassell undertook the process of recording and finalizing Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two — the follow-up to Possible Musics — Brian Eno was again present, as both mixer and musician, but this time the back cover credits leave no room for interpretation or confusion: “All compositions by Jon Hassell. Produced by Jon Hassell.”