Judging Ben Chasny through the prism of his ever-mercurial guitar, shifting from slight folk movements to heavy-handed psych workouts is fruitless. And his latest album under the Six Organs of Admittance guise, Hexadic, doesnt make sussing it out any easier.
I really dont see anything as definitive, because everything sort of just moves along with [my] flow of interest, Chasny says about his wildly-varied catalog that stretches back to the late 90s. A project like Six Organs allows me to put [those] into motion, almost as a sort of praxis.
Chasny and a small ensemble are set to explore his new compositional system a sort of note randomizer, granting basic melodic scaffolding for the group to improvise around. The Hexadic System, while being plied within a pretty heavy rock context, Chasny said, is broadly applicable. Its only limitation at this point is having been devised for guitar.
All the songs existed as these acoustic demos, and it could have been an acoustic record. But I wanted, for personal reasons, to push that production, he says about the albums whirring mass of distortion. Im actually recording the record again Hexadic II at home with acoustic instruments. Therell eventually be an album using the same structures, but itll sound totally different.
Transferring the squalor shooting off the record Sphere Path Code C released earlier this year and its strangled guitar noise to an acoustic setting seems almost improbable. But Chasnys background, having recorded with scads of groups, including heavy-psych quartet Comets on Fire, folk-adjacent New Bums, as well as the quicksilver trio Rangda, almost makes it seem reasonable. And while some of those efforts come along with an all-encompassing, transcendent attitude, Chasnys compositional device doesnt.
I wasnt thinking about it in terms of, Thisll change the way musicians are gonna do stuff, he says. I was doing it for me.
Six Organs of Admittance plays at Zanzabar on Friday, May 8.
This article appears in May 6, 2015.