New Music From Melody's Echo Chamber, Jon Hassell
Melody’s Echo Chamber
Bon Voyage
(Fat Possum)
One of the most gratifyingly replayable albums for this writer from the current decade has proven to be the 2012 debut album from Melody’s Echo Chamber—the outlet of French singer/musician Melody Prochet; it attained a sort of pop nirvana with playful, glittering melodies, psychedelic timbres and a pervasive strangeness—nothing ever sounded too normal on it.
In the intervening years between Prochet’s debut album and her new full-length, Bon Voyage, she essentially started over in several ways, abandoning a substantial amount of work made with former partner Kevin Parker (of Tame Impala), moving to Sweden and collaborating with members of the Swedish group Dungen.
After a six-year wait, especially after such an auspicious debut, Bon Voyage is more imaginative and bizarre than this critic had anticipated. Certain characteristic aspects are here—Prochet’s whispery voice, psych-influenced tones, rhythmic marches and grooves—but while rewarding, the album’s pop satisfaction doesn’t come as easy to the listener. Take the opener, the seven-minute “Cross My Heart,” which offers a wild ride, marked with disorienting cut-up transitions that unrepentantly disrupt any logical flow, offering lithe string and Mellotron parts jumping into modern soul beats and back again, among its ample curiosities.
“Breathe in, Breathe out” uses a rock stomp with a restless bass line; it plays with tempo and features a number of odd interjections and vocalizations, among its dozens of tiny details.
The songs on the second half of Bon Voyage have their own internal twists, but they typically aren’t as startling as on the first half; at times, the album offers infused international flavors—a Turkish passage here, a Brazilian vibe there—and Prochet sings in English, French and Swedish.
The journey ends strongly with “Visions of Someone Special, on a Wall of Reflections,” which uses a relaxed funk rhythm (circa 1968) with a Serge Gainsbourg-inspired riff (think “Initials B.B.”), and “Shirim” with its irresistible rhythm guitar jangle and sonic squiggles. This writer has literally and cosmically been waiting for this album for years, and sometimes, one doesn’t know he needs something until it’s in front of him.
Jon Hassell
Listening to Pictures
(Ndeya)
Trumpeter Jon Hassell’s new album Listening to Pictures—his first in nine years—is subtitled “Pentimento Volume One,” referring to the art term where a painter modifies a painting yet leaves visible traces of the original intention.
In the musical sense, Hassell is referring to a sort of sonic transparency, underscoring his highly layered sonic approach, where a single track in a mix must be heard in relation to the other tracks—imagine the aural equivalent of stacked stained glass windows.
There’s also a temporal meaning at play; Hassell, now at age 81, has created an impressive and influential body of work, and he considers his music to be malleable so that he could start with an idea from decades ago and mold it into something new.
That also ties in with Hassell’s concept of “Fourth World” music, which was most famously explored on collaborative albums with Brian Eno; this concept pulls together music from non-Western world traditions, minimalism and an embrace of new technology and electronic manipulation.
Listening to Pictures captures a rare, entrancing vibe; its turns are non-obvious yet inviting, merging touches of jazz, ambient music, vague international glimpses and stuttering, glitchy electronica. Hassell often runs his trumpet through a harmonizer, complementing serene keyboard notes, static sounds and ambient tones within the carefully arranged layers.
One key word that Hassell uses when discussing his music is “vertical”—while most listeners think of music as progressing along a timeline (or notes on a staff, reading from left to right), Hassell wants listeners to listen vertically: to perceive what is happening at a single moment, scanning that sliver up and down with the understanding that it is more than the sum of its parts.
With this in mind, Listening to Pictures can be simultaneously mentally stimulating and physically relaxing, fashioning timeless music from the primal and modern.