Jazz
Ndeya · 2 October 2026
“Electric Forest” runs sixteen minutes eighteen and is the last thing on “Music Is Invisible”. It begins with muted conga percussion and Jon Hassell’s trumpet crossing it at a measured pace, and halfway through the landscape closes in on him: asynchronous rhythms, chirps and buzzes filling the space until whatever was left of the melodic line can no longer be followed. The record wasn’t made in a studio: it’s the concert at St John At Hackney Church on 23 May 2015, the last date the band played live, edited and released on 2 October by Ndeya, the label Hassell himself set up with Warp.
Four tracks and forty-two minutes thirty-seven, played by three people, which is hard to believe while “Blue Ba-Ya” lasts — eleven minutes twenty-three of it. Three minutes in, the six-note trumpet melody, unhurried, is swallowed by rhythmic displacements and reversed passages that come from nowhere other than Rick Cox’s guitar, synths and electronics and John von Seggern’s bass and drums. “Club Gris-Gris”, nine forty-three, runs the same operation in reverse: the trumpet enters over a rectangular pulse and the lag between the two layers is what fills the track.
Jeff Rona, credited with the mix and co-production and already at work on it while Hassell could still approve what he did, has hidden the seams a live recording usually shows, with the result that the record never sounds like a concert: the applause at the end of “Electric Forest” is smothered and you never learn what the room was doing. The Pentimento series took its name from recomposing archive on top of archive; here the material is one whole evening played top to bottom, and calling it the third volume of that trilogy is hard to justify.
The short track doesn’t help either. “Broadway Boogie-Woogie”, five thirteen, is a jittery piano assembling its melody out of isolated notes while a synth background pushes in over it, and next to the two long pieces it stays a sketch. Hassell died in 2021. Before this there had been “Listening to Pictures” (2018), his first record in nine years, and “Seeing Through Sound” (2020), built from its outtakes.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents