Jon Hassell - Aka / Darbari / Java - Magic Realism

Recorded at Grant Avenue Studios, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Drum recording: Polydor Paris. Mastered at Sterling Sound, New York. Cover painting from <i>Inscapes</i> - Real Estate Paintings by Mati Klarwein, Harmony Books, Crown Publishers, New York.
Assistance/Toronto: Bob Lanois, Michael Brook, John Forbes. Assistance/Paris: Michel Geiss, Oliver Bloch-Lainé, La Frette Studios.

<b>MAGIC REALISM • </b>Like the video technique of "keying in" where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. <b>•</b> A trumpet, branched into a chorus of trumpets by computer, traces the motifs of the Indian raga <b>DARBARI</b> over Senegalese drumming recorded in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950's [a sonic texture like a "Mona Lisa" which, in close up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal], while the ancient call of an <b>AKA</b> pygmy voice in the Central African Rainforest — transposed to move in sequences of chords unheard of until the 20th century — rises and falls among gamelan-like cascades, multiplications of a single "digital snapshot" of a traditional instrument played on the Indonesian island of <b>JAVA</b>, on the other side of the world. <b>•</b> Music which is to this degree self-referential, in which larger parts are related to and/or generated from smaller parts, shares certain qualities with "white" classical music of the past. <b>AKA/DARBARI/JAVA</b> is a proposal for a "coffee-colored" classical music of the future — both in terms of the adoption of entirely new modes of structural organisation [as might be suggested by the computer ability to re-arrange, dot-by-dot, a sound or video image] and in terms of the expansion of the "allowable" musical vocabulary in which one may speak this structure — leaving behind the ascetic face which Eurocentric tradition has come to associate with serious expression. <b>• JON HASSELL</b>

(P)1983 EG Records Ltd. (C)1983 EG Records Ltd.