The Pleasure Principle

"Peeling to the lethargic beat of tumescent music, she wore vivid makeup, glitter in her hair and crystalline clothes, all hooks, straps, sequins and secret snappers. The stripper's art needs special garments made to tear away like the husk of a pomegranate. So you do not notice the woman as she is, because you are looking for fulfilment of the mind's eye. You are examining an idea - depravity or pleasure, or their perilous symbiosis."

- David Thomson, Suspects (1985)

In 1985, in a creeping, convoluted trail suggestive of plant growth, the British film critic and author David Thomson constructed a novel, or a lattice of biographical sketches, from the imaginary web of lives as they might have been lived by cinematic characters outside the frame of the cinema screen. These characters - Walker from Point Blank, Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, Evelyn Mulwray and Noah Cross from Chinatown, and so on - and their previously unknown pasts and futures snag and pull at each other in this web, implying an invisible world occupied by the ragged stories of every fictional identity ever invented.

A similar process of dragging icons and overlaying them, sliced translucently thin, onto fictional histories, has been one of the key devices of technological music. Feasibly, you could extrapolate a novel from the interweaving stories buried within John Cage's Variations IV, but richer possibilities unfolded in the early 80s when the Memphis born trumpet player Jon Hassell began to capture, loop and laminate fragments of sampled sound on albums such as Aka-Darbari-Java.

Hassell has now formalised that process by naming his current band Bluescreen after the cinematic technique of filming foreground shots against a blue background and then superimposing them onto new landscapes and backdrops. Hassell says he is "adopting this metaphor in musical ways, creating magical textures in sound, making something familiar sound fresh and exotic by separating it from its background and combining it with something new and startling." Finding a review of David Thomson's Suspects in the LA Weekly, he hit on this as another metaphor connecting to his own search for a music which is almost psychotropic in its capacity to activate alien worlds in the imagination through strange juxtapositions.

Previous Hassell albums, particularly Earthquake Island (Tomato, 1978), Vemal Equinox (Lovely Music, 1977), Possible Musics (Editions EG, 1980) and Dream Theory In Malaya (Editions EG, 1981), along with his collaborations with Gnawa musicians from Morocco and the Farafina percussionists from Burkina Faso, were made in the spirit of creative anthropology exemplified earlier in this century by the Surrealist writer, traveller, critic and documenter of dreams, Michel Leiris. Writing on ethnographic Surrealism in The Predicament Of Culture, james Clifford offers an outline of the territory: "I am using the term Surrealism in an obviously expanded sense to circumscribe an aesthetic that values fragments, curious collections, unexpected juxtapositions - that work to provoke the manifestations of extraordinary realities drawn from the domains of the erotic, the exotic and the unconscious."