Jon Hassell - Aka-Darbari-Java: Magic Realism

Jon Hassell, a student of both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, created a deadly combination that would resonate for decades in world-music compositions: the ghostly sound of his trumpet lost in nightmarish electronic background. His trumpet was both a call of the wild and a wail of grief, both as ancestral as possible in a modernist setting.

The basic form of his music, trumpet improvisation on a substrate of cyclic noises (natural or electronic), finds accomplished definition in Aka-Darbari-Java: Magic Realism (Eg, 1983), where he is again accompanied only by percussion. For this work Hassell coins the term "coffee-colored classical music," which would perhaps like to give the idea of serious but at the same time easy listening music. It is actually a futuristic collage that accentuates the hallucinatory calligraphy of his hieroglyphics. More importantly, he further expands his musical vocabulary, assimilating cues from different civilizations and eras and organizing the material even more rigorously, even to the point of using computers.

Thus in Empire I-IV the sound of the trumpet is lost in a nebula of glacially artificial vibrations, in a minimalist continuum that filters and distorts all the sounds into a more homogeneous structure, a kind of "ambient concert" in several movements that can refine the constituent elements to the point of making them unrecognizable (see the cosmic warbles of the second movement or the haunting dissonances of the fourth). The two Darbari Extensions are even more futuristic and mechanized, indecipherable in the synthesizer's wave-like movement and the trumpet's breathy one, to the point of lapping (in the second) Subotnick's Dadaist tornadoes.

Source: https://www.scaruffi.com/avant/hassell.html

Tracklist:

A1 Empire I 00:00
A2 Empire II 02:01
A3 Empire III 06:54
A4 Empire IV 14:03
A5 Empire V 19:16
B1 Darbari Extension I 22:56
B2 Darbari Extension II 36:48