At Punkt 08, Hassell was commissioned for an installation that utilized the church bells of a church in downtown Kristiansand. Every hour a new stacked chord would be played, the cumulative effect of which would gradually evoke more secular emotions than normally heard coming from a cathedral. “This Eventide H8000, that I use as a harmonizer and for some other things onstage, has this patch in which you can play a couple of notes and then a few second later—or actually 15 or 20 seconds later—out comes this chord,” says Hassell. “It’s made for accompanying yourself, so you make this sequence of chords that you can repeat and play over. I turn the dial a little bit and use a couple of notes that aren’t supposed to be used, or combine things in a certain way. And so it’s this big, beautiful, rich kind of gong sound.
“I started using it in a choral piece and on “Courtrais” [from Last night the moon came], which comes from a performance we did there,” Hassell continues. “These gong chords, although I still call them gongs, are happening all over the place on that one. Jan [Bang] and I were traveling, and I think it was in a car outside of Brussels someplace and he was talking about the next edition of Punkt and so I said, ‘Why don’t I harmonize the church bells there.’ And so he said yes and we did it. The last night before we left there, before the installation went down, actually Brian [Eno] was there and took a recording. He had this little pocket digital recorder he’d just bought and recorded the whole thing—so Arne [Bang, Jan's brother] went up in the belfry and played the whole sequence.
That was the last night of the festival, I think,” he continues. “I love it, I love the sounds, I love the idea. I just haven’t had time, because of the managerial problems we were talking about before and my having to be my own everything. I thought that would be a great thing to try and hawk to other European festivals, where there are always churches and there are always church bells. I thought it was a beautiful thing to hear; Jan still says it’s one of his favorite things from the whole Punkt 08 experience.”
One of the advantages of attending Punkt is hearing things that may never be heard again—whether it’s installations, combinations of musicians or specific musical projects created solely for the festival. Still, there’s always the possibility that some of these things will see the light of day for broader exposure. “Well, it could very well surface someplace,” says Hassell. “I have all of them here. In fact there were some that I liked—it’s not just one chord, you know, it’s this little sequence, sort of like the usual chiming of the hour, they have [sings] ‘bong-ding-bong-bong-ding,’ and then usually they play a little tune. So we had to go up and reprogram all of that and bring the H8000 up near the bells, which were beautiful, gigantic things, with overloading problems. But eventually, the experience of being outside and seeing people walking across the square and hearing these sexy chords was wonderful—I tried to make them a little sexier towards nighttime—the one that started at 8 [PM], it’s kind of up in the higher range, and then I tried a lot more groovier for the 10 o’clock chime.
Interview by John Kelman for All About Jazz.
Published : May 4, 2009.