Flash of the spirit

"It deserves reappraisal. Hassell wasn't prepared to graft some ethnic percussion onto his work to create some cheesy, coffee table crossover muzak. Instead, he went out on a limb and tried to do something which is always unique and always intriguing. Few people would hold this album up as a ground-breaking recording, but in a small way, it is. It's a sincere attempt to marry the first world with the third world, and it deserves your attention".

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"Unusually for Hassell, Flash Of The Spirit is mainly acoustic. It features Farafina, an eight-piece drums and percussion ensemble from Burkina Faso in West Africa. Eno mixed five tracks, Daniel Lanois another five. Each makes post-production interventions, but most of the electronic content comes from Hassell's keyboard-activated sounds sourced from trumpet, strings and harp ... Despite its relatively minor status in Hassell's canon, Glitterbeat are to be thanked for reissuing the album".

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"Groundbreaking 1987 US/Burkina Faso fusion album: Jon Hassell is a contemporary classical minimalist musician who forged a deep engagement with music from India and West Africa. By the time of this recording in 1987 he had worked with the likes of Terry Riley and La Monte Young, Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel, he also studied under Pandit Pran Nath, eventually pursuing his 'Fourth World' concept. The collaboration with Burkina Faso's Farafina percussion troupe was a world music forced fusion of sorts (the director of Jazz in Sardinia festival put them together for a tour) and, apparently, Farafina were sceptical. Yet Hassell's deep engagement with non-Western music quickly won them over and with Daniel Lanois producing (and Brian Eno later mixing the master tapes), they recorded a stunning album. Flash of the Spirit (...) is a challenging listen, abstract and unconventional, Hassell's digitally processed trumpet and keyboards layered over percussion that Eno then worked on as a sonic sculpture ... [It] was hugely influential in the way it pointed to how traditional and electronic music forms could merge. I should also note Flash of the Spirit hasn't lost any of its sonic power".