Losing Jon Hassell in 2021 was sad for many reasons, foremost among them that he was on the Matisse path, refining and improving his sound until the last minute. Brain Eno admitted that Hassell’s “fourth world” recordings of the 1970s were a huge influence, and nobody has ever created such a plausibly imagined place just from sound. Hassell smears his trumpet with digital chorus but the real achievement is how he manages to smear everything. The world he imagined is as much Senegal as England, and beyond that he saw that technology would abstract everything into another dimension.