Jon Hassell - Psychogeography (2LP)

Jon Hassell spent a lifetime sketching maps for places that didn’t yet exist, and Psychogeography feels like one of the clearest postcards from that terrain. Released in 2023 on his Ndeya label as an archival live set drawn from late 80s and early 90s performances, it lands right in the City: Works of Fiction era, when his Fourth World idea hit a tougher, more electric stride. You can hear the trumpet as a human voice that’s been folded into circuitry, sighing and bending around drum machines, hand percussion, and vapor trails of guitar. It’s not ambient wallpaper. It moves. It prowls.

The hook here is in the title. Hassell always talked about sound as place, and Psychogeography lays out a traveler’s notebook of cities and rooms. You get the feel of signal bleeding into signal, of club PA hum and radio haze, of audiences leaning in. Rather than tidy up the edges, the recordings let the space speak. That choice suits this band’s vocabulary. Grooves emerge like a mirage, then lock tight. The trumpet draws a line through it all, pure and breathy one bar, snarling the next, often smeared with harmonizers or pitch shifters until it reads like an instrument invented on the spot.

If you came up on Possible Musics or Dream Theory in Malaya, this is the same river but a faster current. The drums are more present. The samples clip at the rhythm like bike spokes. There’s a city heat to it that places the music alongside the era’s most curious club experiments without losing the ritual heart that made Hassell so singular. He called his approach Fourth World for a reason. You can hear North Africa and India in the modal shapes, electric funk in the low end, NYC minimalism in the patience, yet none of it scans as fusion for fusion’s sake. It’s one language, learned by ear.

The live focus matters. Studio Hassell can feel like a perfectly arranged room. Psychogeography is that room with the windows open and traffic coming through. A theme will surface from a cloud of electronics, then the group hangs there, testing it, pushing air into it until it starts to glow. There’s tension and release, but the release never breaks the spell. Even the fiercest passages hold onto a kind of humid calm, the feeling of being awake at 3 a.m. in a city you don’t know, at once alert and happily lost.

What gives this set weight is how it reframes a period that already had a core document in City: Works of Fiction and a standout live portrait in The Living City. Psychogeography sits with them and pulls the camera back. You hear how the ideas traveled, how the band adapted the book of sketches to different nights, how the trumpet lines threaded through fresh permutations of rhythm and sample. It becomes a study in method as much as a pleasure listen. Put it on while you cook or read and it’s a pulse. Sit between the speakers and you catch the micro moves that keep that pulse alive.

As a physical object, Psychogeography vinyl makes a lot of sense. Hassell always cared about texture, and these mixes reward a system that lets the low end walk and the high end breathe. If you collect Jon Hassell vinyl, this one bridges his serene sides and his more streetlit ones. It also happens to be a rich entry point if you’re trying to buy Jon Hassell records online and want something that captures the premise without leaning on the usual collaborations. For anyone building a shelf of Jon Hassell albums on vinyl, this is the spine that ties early dreamwork to the late period glow of Listening to Pictures and Seeing Through Sound.

I first heard a chunk of this era in a Melbourne record store, the kind where the staff cue up a side and the room goes quiet. People stopped flipping through bins. They just stood there. Psychogeography brings that feeling back. It’s travel music for the mind, a guided walk through streets both real and imagined, with a trumpet line acting like your shadow on the pavement. If you see Psychogeography vinyl in the wild, grab it. Even better if you’re in Australia and combing through vinyl records Australia shops, because this is the sort of title that disappears for a while then comes back at twice the price. Hassell saw the map long before the rest of us. This is one of the clearest ways to trace his route.