Jon Hassell - Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (Vinyl LP)

Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) is an ambient and Fourth World album from trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, released on 8 June 2018. It was his first new album in nine years, and it launched Ndeya, the label he set up in partnership with Warp as a home for his music.

Hassell built the record from fragments of performance, sampled, looped, overdubbed and rearranged, borrowing the painter's idea of pentimento, where earlier layers show through later ones. His treated trumpet and keyboards sit among contributions from co-producer and guitarist Rick Cox, electric violinist Hugh Marsh, and Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset, who appears on the closing title track 'Ndeya'.

Hassell coined the term Fourth World decades earlier, and his 1980 collaboration with Brian Eno, Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics, set out the idea. Here he carries it into contemporary territory, with programmed beats and electronics alongside his trumpet.

The sleeve carries artwork by Mati Klarwein, the painter behind Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and several of Hassell's earlier covers.

Eight tracks run across a single LP, opening with 'Dreaming' and closing with 'Ndeya'.

Seeing Through Sound followed as the second volume in 2020, and the trilogy closed in 2026 with Music Is Invisible, drawn from Hassell's final live performance, where themes from this record resurface in new shapes.