Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume I)

The dance-inspired elements he throws in on Listening to Pictures don't suddenly mean his work's going to be on sale in the "electronic" racks of record stores. It's just another ingredient in a slow-simmering pot.

It is a music of sense and memory perceptions, a sonic projection equal to but different from the sources that inspired it. When all are assembled, they constitute a deep, mysterious, and occasionally disruptive journey into shade, texture, nuance, and seductive persuasion.

The eight tracks and 40 minutes here feel far more porous and open than a lot of contemporary electronic music allows itself to be--edited together by Hassell from various performances, its erratic, switch-backing progress sketches large structures but leaves them light and airy, rich and heady without crowding the mix. It demands to be played on a big system, to enter the air. [Jul 2018, p.50]

While I can’t help missing the volatile momentum of previous records, Listening to Pictures still animates its sonic space with the kind of detail few musicians have the vision or audacity to achieve.

Trying to follow these songs as they unfold is a bewildering experience. But if you take Hassell's advice, and "scan up and down the sonic spectrum," taking in the moments of beauty as they occur, the album's title makes a lot of sense.

Of course, it takes a certain degree of patience (or pretension) to unpick the record entirely, but once unravelled listeners are rewarded with a dystopian world best described as sci-fi sleaze.

Fans of Four Tet and Jon Hopkins are advised to check out this master at work. [Summer 2018, p.110]

The most striking thing about Listening To Pictures is how effortlessly contemporary it sounds. [Jul 2018, p.94]

On Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), it's a treat to find Jon Hassell still fascinated and engrossed in the style of music he helped create.

This is certainly dense, endlessly mutating music that rewards multiple listenings.