JON HASSELL

The Living City captures a genuinely singular moment in ambient music history — the Jon Hassell Group performing live in September 1989 inside the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in New York, a striking ten-storey glass-vaulted atrium. Brian Eno had designed the audio-visual installation for the space, built from hunting, ceremony and weather field recordings of the Ba-Ya-Ka pygmy tribe of Cameroon, and personally mixed Hassell's live performance against it over three nights.

This release draws from the second night of that three-night run, cut across four vinyl sides by Stefan Betke — the dub techno artist known as Pole. The recording sat unreleased for over three decades, surfacing only as a bonus disc on the 2023 expanded reissue of Hassell's 1990 studio album City: Works of Fiction, before being pulled out as its own standalone release.

Musically, this period finds Hassell drawing on the era's hip-hop production innovations, treating dense sampling techniques as a natural extension of Teo Macero's tape-splicing work with Miles Davis, folded into loops of his own "Fourth World" trumpet playing. A genuine archival find for anyone serious about ambient, Fourth World, or the wider Eno/Hassell axis — captured live, in a building, at a moment that could never be repeated. 🎺🏙️

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