Jon Hassell – Music Is Invisible (Vinyl LP)

Music Is Invisible is the ambient and fourth world album Jon Hassell released posthumously through Ndeya on 2 October 2026, the closing volume of the Pentimento trilogy after Listening To Pictures in 2018 and Seeing Through Sound in 2020. It is the first release of new Hassell music since his death on 26 June 2021.

The multitrack recordings were made at St John at Hackney church in London on 23 May 2015, at what turned out to be Hassell's last ever live performance. He played trumpet and keyboards in a trio with Rick Cox on guitar, OP-1 and electronics, and John von Seggern on bass, drums and electronics. Jeff Rona handled the studio mix and co-production, shaping the material well beyond a conventional live album. Themes and riffs from the first two Pentimento records surface across these four semi-improvised pieces, which is the method the series is named for: pentimento describes the earlier images that show through a painting after they have been changed and painted over, and Hassell applied the same idea to sound for most of his career.

The LP includes a liner-note essay by Hassell that gave the album its title. The cover is Leh C'est Beau, a 1976 painting by Mati Klarwein, whose art ran through Hassell's records for forty years, from Dream Theory in Malaya and Aka/Darbari/Java to both earlier Pentimento volumes. Klarwein painted the covers of Miles Davis's Bitches Brew and Santana's Abraxas. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates and Mastering. Black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve.