La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela | Dream House 78′ 17″

La Monte Young / Marian Zazeela 

Dream House 78′ 17″

San Francisco, USA: Superior Viaduct: 2024

12” vinyl LP, 78:17

Edition size unknown

Dream House 78′ 17″ was originally released in 1974 on Shandar records, a Parisian label specializing in avant-garde recordings by the likes of Albert Ayler, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Sunny Murray, Philip Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, Alan Silva, Pandit Pran Nath, Terry Riley, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. 

Housed in the basement of an art gallery where the founders worked, the label’s headquarters were flooded in 1979, precipitating its early demise. Much of their stock was destroyed, making many of their titles scarce and expensive on the secondary market. 

Before this 2024 reissue, copies of Dream House 78′ 17″ were selling for upwards of $500 on Ebay. 

It is among the more unusual releases from the label, featuring almost forty minutes per side, for a total duration of 78' 17", an LP length unheard of at the time. Young writes in the liner notes that "Time is so important to the experiencing and understanding of the music in the record that every effort was made to make the record last as much as the original master tapes”.

The Theatre of Eternal Music was a group formed byYoung in New York City in 1962, initially consisting of himself, Marian Zazeela, Angus MacLise, and Billy Name. Later incarnations of the group included a pre-Velvet Underground John Cale and Tony Conrad, as well as Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson and others. 

The group’s "dream music" explored drones and pure harmonic intervals, employing sustained tones and electric amplification in lengthy, all-night performances.

Dream House 78' 17" is a studio album featuring guest performances by Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone.  

The A-side features "13 I 73 5:35 – 6:14:03 PM NYC”, a work in which the group accompanies three sine waves. Their lack of harmonic content makes accompanying them extremely difficult.

The B-side composition "Drift Study 14 VII 73 9:27:27–10:06:41 PM NYC (39" 14")", is played entirely by sine wave generators. 

Jon Hassell, RIP

My favourite trumpet player - a distinction without competition - died yesterday, at the age of 84. 

Jon Hassell was a musician and composer best known for his "fourth world" music, which has managed to bypass the now-ubiquitous charges of 'cultural appropriation' through sheer rigour and respect. In an essay titled The Debt I Owe To Jon Hassell, Brian Eno wrote “If I had to name one over-riding principle in Jon’s work, it would be that of respect: he looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music.”

Hassell himself decried what he called “the banalisation of the exotic … the herd trampling through the campsites where I delicately and respectfully visited 15 or 20 years ago”.

He was born in Memphis and studied in Germany under Karlheinz Stockhausen, alongside classmates Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, who went on to found the band CAN. He recently described to Billboard magazine an experience taking acid at Schmidt’s house: “I remember being on the floor listening to gagaku Japanese music and watching the fibres of the rug sway with the music.”

When he returned to the USA, he met Terry Riley and performed on his signature work, In C. He later worked with another influential minimalist composer, La Monte Young, joining the Theatre of Eternal Music and studying under Young's mentor Pandit Pran Nath. Nath was an Indian classical singer and master of the Kirana gharana singing style, a process dedicated to just intonation. Hassell applied these vocal techniques to the trumpet. 

Hassell’s debut album Vernal Equinox was released in 1978 and was followed by a collaboration with Eno two years later, Possible Musics/Fourth World, Vol. 1. The recording was was named one of the year's ten best recordings by The New York Times and the Village Voice. 

He subsequently collaborated with a wide range of performers, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Stina Nordenstam (an under-rated Swedish singer whose work I discovered when Hassell played on her excellent second album And She Closed her Eyes), David Toop, Bjork, Flea, Howie B, former classmate Holger Czukay, the Kronos Quartet, artist Walter De Maria, Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, the Talking Heads, and countless others.

He was initially a third collaborator on Brian Eno and David Byrne's influential album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but quit the project early on, disappointed with the results of the early demos. He remained estranged from Byrne, though later became close again with Eno, who started a GoFundMe page for Hassell in April 2020, to help raise money when the composer's health first began to deteriorate. Over a hundred thousand dollars were raised. 

“After a little more than a year of fighting through health complications, Jon died peacefully in the early morning hours of natural causes,” his family wrote in the statement. “He cherished life and leaving this world was a struggle as there was much more he wished to share in music, philosophy, and writing.” 

His fans included filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Chris Marker), visual artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat), composers (Philip Glass: "I recommend all the works of Jon Hassell"), pop stars (Charlie Watts, Pete Townsend, Bono, Ani Di Franco), electronic musicians (808 State, Scanner, Howie B) and other performers.  

Ry Cooder called him "One of the three or four players of wind instruments in the world who can command your attention with one note". Brian Eno described his frequent collaborator as someone who "planted seeds whose fruits are still being gathered”. 

David Bryne, Brian Eno and (an already pulling away?) Jon Hassell