Jon Hassell - Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (LP)

Listening To Pictures arrives like a late afternoon change of weather. The trumpet does not announce itself so much as seep into the room, slightly humid, a little mysterious, and entirely itself. Jon Hassell released this one on 8 June 2018 through his own Ndeya imprint, his first album in nine years and the opening chapter of the Pentimento series. The title tells you how to hear it. In painting, a pentimento lets you glimpse earlier brushstrokes through the final surface. Hassell takes that idea into sound, letting old sketches, half-memories and new performances bleed into one another until time feels layered rather than linear.

If you have followed Hassell since the Fourth World days with Brian Eno, the DNA is familiar. That soft, breathy trumpet, often routed through electronics until it resembles a voice or a reed. Percussion that suggests geography without pinning it to a map. Harmonic beds that float, then subtly firm up into a pulse before dissolving again. You could queue Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, then drop the needle on Listening To Pictures, and feel a conversation across almost four decades. The difference here is how he trusts negative space. Even when a rhythm starts to percolate, there is an unrushed patience. He makes you lean in.

The opening stretch feels like waking in a strange city with the windows open. You hear traffic a few streets away, a fan turning, an instrument clearing its throat. Then a motif appears, small and deliberate, and everything orbits it for a while. Midway through, the temperature shifts. A scraped string or a hand drum skitters at the edge of the stereo field. The trumpet climbs into a brighter register. Hassell always liked to blur solo and ensemble roles, and that is true here. The horn leads, then it recedes into the texture, then it returns as a shadow. The final piece closes like a light dimming. Not abrupt. Just a fade to silence that makes you aware of your own breathing.

Hassell spoke around this time about building pieces from layers of new and archival material, which fits the pentimento idea and the album’s uncanny sense of déjà vu. The production is precise without feeling clinical. Attacks are soft, transients bloom and then wilt, and the low end has that supple quality you only notice when it is gone. On Listening To Pictures vinyl, those details feel tactile. You can almost trace the curve of a muted trumpet note as it curls back on itself. If you care about the physical ritual, this one earns the space on the shelf. It also makes a neat entry point if you are starting to buy Jon Hassell records online and want something that captures his language without demanding a study guide.

The record landed to a warm reception. Critics who had grown up with his work heard it as a focused late chapter, and newer listeners found a doorway. Outlets like The Guardian and Pitchfork took note of how alive his approach still sounded in 2018, not as a period piece but as a contemporary way of thinking about rhythm, ambience and the voice of a single instrument. It is a reminder that Hassell’s ideas had been quietly moving through jazz, electronic music and pop for years. You can hear his fingerprints in everything from ECM’s airier corners to modern ambient and certain strains of club music that prize atmosphere as a rhythmic tool.

There is also the simple pleasure of hearing a master return to his own myths. The album sets up the second volume, Seeing Through Sound, which arrived in 2020 and deepened the concept. Knowing that Hassell passed away in 2021 gives Listening To Pictures an added charge now. It feels like late work in the best sense, not nostalgic, just distilled. If you are crate digging for Jon Hassell vinyl, this is one that rewards time and a quiet room, preferably after sundown. And if you are browsing in a Melbourne record store, or scrolling through a shop that ships vinyl records Australia wide, you will see why Jon Hassell albums on vinyl continue to move. The music invites you to listen differently. It does not rush. It leaves traces. It stays with you long after the platter stops.