Clark has long been an appreciator of fourth world music, an interest which led to his collaboration with JD Twitch in the first place. The label he and friends run in Glasgow, 12th Isle, came to be through a shared interest in sounds related to Hassell’s term, some more so than others. “There was never a clear plan to draw influence from Hassell’s concept”, he writes in an email” – but common appreciation for his music, and the disparate musical passions each of the founders had, lead them to “linking different kinds of music together and never sticking to one genre”. The label reflects this in its releases that span genres, appreciating a diaspora of styles and building them into a sound collage of global inspiration.
The visual identity of the label became incorporated with this through artworks created by Al, a friend of the label, reflecting the geographical nature of the 12th Isle. “When [the Isle] is not anywhere in the real world…it loses any kind of grounding and allows for this fantasy projection”, Clark notes, “so [Al] was able to construct a world through his sleeve and poster designs that tied in with this concept”. The Isle itself was “a nod to Scottish mythology and an awareness of where we are actually grounded”.
12th Isle’s roster spans the globe, and hints of Hassell are present in much of their music. It includes RAMZi (Phoebe Guillermot), a key proponent of Fourth World in modern dance music. Guillermot’s sound is recognisable in its weirdness. Human voices feature heavily but clamour against each other in gibberish, the listener left to grasp onto interspersed French and English words for some familiarity. She has, like Hassell, been entranced by the exotic since childhood and her rhythms are eclectically influenced by the drumming styles of Africa and Latin America. Intertwined with these are humid nature sounds, tropical birds and marshy field recordings. Each release – from her obscure cassettes to 2020’s cocon – feels like a travel diary from an absurd rainforest realm. Though she jokingly describes her adventures as “Fifth World” influence from Hassell, as well as so much other music, is clear in her sound.
Beyond artists like RAMZi, the escapist element of Fourth World features in many of the electronic albums most lauded recently; DJ Python’s deep reggaeton dream world Mas Amable, Yu Su’s blending of traditional Chinese timbres with dub and breakbeat in Yellow River Blue, Brighton-based K-Lone’s astronomically successful Cape Cira from early 2020. Cape Cira occupies a space where the natural and the electronic meet, a hazy and sun-soaked landscape unimaginable to us in the middle of a bleak British winter.
There are a multitude of reasons why young DJs may be turning to explorative music like this; not least among them the steady democratisation of access to music since Hassell’s day. It is difficult, now, to restrict your tastes to Western styles. Bleeding into dance music culture from the chillout rooms and sets of early ambient DJs, music like Hassell, or Eno and David Byrne, became more influential and the strange exotic sounds it sampled came with it. While DJs have experimented with eclectic mixes for decades, there has been a visible increase in this in the UK post-dubstep years, when the country’s scene was less and less defined by one sound. This rise in DJs crate digging for global rarities and pairing bizarre styles in live sets has coincided with the internet era. People no longer need the money or time to travel the world and comb through record stores; they can hear the niche styles popping up in Durban, Rio de Janeiro or Lisbon without leaving their room or spending a penny.