The Breakdown
Keyboardist, producer, songwriter, vocalist and sonic explorer, Jesse Hackett is a name you think you’ve seen on some record sleeve before and most likely have. An illusive but prolific genre deconstructor, he may be best known as keys and synth player with Gorillaz but elsewhere his work in the nu-global beats arena is packed with cred. He’s musical director of Teeth agency, an audio-visual collab with visual artist Mariano Chavez and releases music as Metal Preyers for Uganda’s ultra-cool Nyege Nyege Tapes. He’s also been part of London’s much missed afro-fusionists Owiny Sigoma Band as well as short lived super trio Ennanga Vision which included the mighty vocalist Otim Alpha. Throw in the electro -sounds of his pseudonym Elmore Judd plus the Blludd Relations duo and you get the picture, Jesse Hackett’s soundscape spreads far.
Now comes ‘Nocturnes’ released on Hive Mind Records and in some ways a leap in a different direction. Centring around a simple sound palate of Hackett’s piano and his ‘Nocturnes’ collaborator Finn Peters on sax, it’s an album which delves into the emotive pangs of melody. As you would expect from Hackett though it’s not a straightforward, stripped back reveal but a collection which hovers around the post classical, jazz and experimental camps. There’s a hauntological playfulness shimmering around as well. Imagine maybe Chilly Gonzales making a record for Ghost Box.
The opening track Nocturne 1: Snow Dance is a piece of spine-tingling minimalism rather than your usual ambient float. Essentially a slow-moving flute and piano duet with Hackett and Peters taking unexpected trajectories away from an established pattern. There’s trills, sudden sprints and even snatches of Latin montuno criss-crossing in sound patterns which imagine the mingle of the snowfall. To add to the mystery the overall dynamic is low key and alive, a homely recording rather than pristine and clinical.
From here the twelve other succinct pieces introduce themselves gently, each title pre-fixed with “Nocturne” and a number in a nod to tradition, homage to Satie or to unify the vignettes within the context of stillness and endings. Hackett’s work whether in avant pop of Teeth Agency or the raw rhythms of Metal Preyers is often shadowed by darkness and that same broad brush applies to ‘Nocturnes’. Here though a more personal dimension seems to unify the pieces, giving the album a lived-in energy.
This means the cinematic spookiness of many of the tracks never sounds like pure pastiche. The chill can seem close by and touchable. On Lovely Cold Ruins, another low-key piano/flute duet, there may be more familiar major note resolutions and swells but the chinks of percussion, pauses and rustling movements, inject a ghosted presence into the track. Chainca Shadows adds more tension as Hackett and Peters strike up off kilter combinations to unsettle while Nosferatu goes full classic horror movie with demonic organ stabs, wonky chords and echoing sax skronks. It’s a loping beast of a tune. Amongst all the lo-fi drama Darkusosy sounds the most ethereal and mysterious as it creeps stealthily, the sombre flute and tip toeing piano almost teasing each other.
There’s a hint of early seventies Tippett/Bley compositions which filters through ‘Nocturnes’ as well as less oblique jazz referencing. Goodbye Pork Pie Gal nods to a slow Mingus blues in more than the title, a last dance noire ballad where Finn Peters’ gorgeous sax croons and flutters in the dim light. Larks feels similarly smoochy until it throws angular interpretive shapes while the sparse beauty of Rain Soaked Choker reveals more surprises with its chiming electronic mechanism and flashes of Ethio-jazz exotica.
What’s really impressive about Hackett’s suite of tunes is that switch between the cinematic, the minimal and the jazziness doesn’t sound random. ‘Nocturnes’ avoids the overtones of a Library music sampler, there’s an intention and purpose here. All the tracks seem connected to threads of memory and there’s a loving nostalgia which permeates through the grooves. The album artwork, a grainy sketch of his grand-parents from days long gone and the dedication “with love to the memory of Judy Hackett” signposts the motivation for this music. It’s heart-felt.
Tunes like Satalight Song highlight the emotional underpinning of ‘Nocturnes’, a sweetly sombre sax melody set within carefully tweaked electronic effects and the background crackle like an old radio. Then there’s Piano Man’s Pain where a collage of sounds merge together like flashbacks. Synth strings and accordion swells, disco pings and harmonica vamps, jutting piano patterns and distorted loops add to the secrets. These electro- acoustic tapestries place Hackett alongside others in the Hive Mind camp, like Yara Asmar and Nino Gvilia, in the making of arresting, emotionally literate experimental music.
Hackett also leans into more new age ambience on the album from the stripped back piano song of Meet Me In The Hills to the dead of night peacefulness of The Hissing Mist. Most warming perhaps is Pyjamas, which floats as delicately as Eno’s Another Green World with airy mellotron fills and sighing synths. As with the overall atmosphere on the album these tracks never drift far from the day to day. For all the smoke and mirrors mystery on ‘Nocturnes’, it’s a record that reaches out and touches something very real and ordinary.
Get your copy of ‘Nocturnes‘ by Jesse Hackett from your local record store or direct from Hive Mind HERE
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