Jon Hassell's final Pentimento album arrives in October

A posthumous Jon Hassell album, Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three), is due out on October 2 via Ndeya, the record label the ambient composer founded, The Quietus and Pitchfork reported on August 12.

The four-track record captures Hassell's final live performance, at London's St John at Hackney Church on May 23, 2015, where he played as a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern; the recording was later edited and mixed by Jeff Rona.

It completes the Pentimento trilogy that began with 2018's Listening To Pictures and continued with 2020's Seeing Through Sound, and is the first release of new, previously unheard Hassell music since he died on June 26, 2021, at age 84, of natural causes following long-term health issues. Two archival compilations, The Living City and Psychogeography, followed in 2023, though those gathered demos, studio jams and alternate takes on material already released rather than new recordings.

Music Is Invisible runs four tracks: "Blue Ba-Ya," "Club Gris-Gris," "Broadway Boogie-Woogie" and "Electric Forest." A press release describes the album's title as borrowed from the painting term for "the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over," a method Hassell applied musically throughout his career, and says the record's themes and motifs echo the two albums that came before it in the trilogy.

Hassell was also known for inventing the "Fourth World" musical style, which he described as "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic technique."

Music Is Invisible is one of the releases tracked on the release calendar, part of a busy year of new electronic music from Jon Hassell's catalog.