Jon Hassell - The Living City (2LP)

If you want to hear Jon Hassell’s Fourth World ideas roaring through a real room rather than drifting in a studio haze, The Living City is the one to pull from the shelf. Captured live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1989 and released by All Saints Records in 2014, it’s the kinetic counterpart to City: Works of Fiction, the studio album Hassell issued around the same period. The Living City doesn’t feel like a document filed away after the fact. It feels like a blueprint for a city still under construction, all neon arteries and humid night air.

Hassell’s signature processed trumpet sits at the center, bent and smeared by harmonizers and delays until it becomes a voice you can’t quite place on the map. Around him, the band pushes a wired, urban pulse: crisp drum programming, liquid bass figures, shards of guitar, and live sampling that loops back on itself like reflections in a subway window. The late 80s New York setting isn’t just a backdrop. You can hear it in the rhythms, which lean toward street-lit funk and club geometry, and in the way the music keeps slipping between ambience and motion. One minute you’re floating above the grid, the next you’re in the traffic.

Compared to City: Works of Fiction, the live versions stretch and flex. Tempos breathe. Themes blur into each other. Hassell often talked about the Fourth World as a meeting place of time and geography, a collage where ancient timbres and electronic tools share the same room. On The Living City that idea gets muscle. The trumpet cuts across the mix like a ritual horn, but the machinery beneath it keeps everything moving forward. You can dance to sections of this record if you choose, though the beats carry a film of mystery that keeps it from settling into simple fusion.

The mix is unusually vivid for a late-80s concert tape. You can pick out the small moves: a delay tail that changes color, a sampled fragment that drifts into focus, a guitar harmonic landing exactly where the snare needs it. That clarity matters, because Hassell’s music is about edges as much as melodies. On a studio album you might assume some of those edges were the result of careful editing. Here you get proof that the band could summon that atmosphere in real time. The audience stays mostly out of the way, but their presence gives the set a slight lift at the ends of phrases, that electricity you can’t fake.

There’s a cool historical resonance too. Hassell had already defined his sound on earlier landmarks, but by 1989 he was folding in harder rhythm, the feel of clubs and traffic and video screens. The Living City catches that turn without making a fuss about it. It’s not a victory lap, just a night where the circuitry and the breath were perfectly aligned. If you’ve ever tried to explain to a friend what Fourth World actually sounds like, this is an easy needle drop that tells the story in minutes.

For anyone hunting Jon Hassell vinyl, The Living City vinyl is a satisfying way to anchor a collection that might already include Possible Musics or Power Spot. All Saints brought this show to light in 2014 alongside an expanded City: Works of Fiction edition, and it has circulated since as a standalone LP that suits the music’s sense of scale. On record, the low end has room to bloom and the trumpet’s halo rides just above the skyline. It’s one of those live albums that actually benefits from the ritual of sitting with a side, letting the city pulse rise and fall before flipping.

If you like to buy Jon Hassell records online, this one tends to surface with enough regularity that you won’t need to pay museum prices. And if you’re browsing a Melbourne record store or poking through crates of vinyl records Australia-wide, file this under live documents that play like studio statements. Among Jon Hassell albums on vinyl, it’s both a gateway and a destination: approachable, propulsive, and still strange in all the right ways. Cities change, technology dates, but the mood here stays clear. It’s night music for people who don’t want the world to quiet down just yet.