Six Organs of Admittance
Six Organs of Admittance is the primary musical project of guitarist Ben Chasny. Chasny's music is largely guitar-based and is often considered new folk, however it includes obvious influences, marked by the use of drones, chimes, and eclectic percussive elements. Chasny is also a member of the psychedelic band Comets on Fire, and has working relationships with Badgerlore, Current 93, Magik Markers, and many others. Six Organs of Admittance has also released a song exclusively on the new folk compilation record The Golden Apples of the Sun.
Maria Kapel
Originally released on Ben Chasny's own Pavilion imprint in 2011.
"I was invited by the Incubate Festival and the city of Tilburg to participate in an artist residency where I would explore the region’s unique chapels built for the Virgin Mary. After writing the music for about six months by drawing on memories of the encounters with the chapels and using techniques inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics Of Reverie, I flew back to Tilburg to perform the music at the Incubate Festival. We recorde…
Compathía
While the "acoustic based project[ions]" of Six Organs of Admittance have been pigeonholed by some as a chance-operated celestial jam unit, the group has always been about songs, and nowhere is this more apparent than on their fourth full length album, an eight-song cycle that mixes the strengths of Ben Chasny's acoustic and electric guitar with his knack for placing this on top of disparate and subtle atmospheric backgrounds. The live favorite (and rare single) "Somewhere Between" has been redo…
Companion Rises (Twig Harper Remix)
6OOA’s 2020 opus is reunmanaged by sound composer Twig Harper, whose remix goes places no other remix record could dare under his unlimited brief. In the process, it affords the wizard of Six Organs, Ben Chasny, the chance to re-present the record in a form as insane as the world into which the record was, and is headed. A soundtrack to California chaos, done two ways, sometimes at the same time! RIYL: Electronic, New Age, Modern Classical
Jinxed By Being
What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…
Parallelogram
Mutual influence is always fun to see in action, especially when it is between modern long-form guitar composition greats Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and William Tyler. This volume of Three Lobed Recording’s Parallelogram series allows both artists room to stretch out and breathe. Multi-movement suites have long been a skillful part of the Six Organs of Admittance lexicon. Chasny’s contribution, “Lsha,” expands upon this artistic legacy as it commandingly pulses and moves through its t…
Time is Glass
With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County -- a far country, to some, but still part of the world thro…
Sleep Tones
Six Organs of Admittance takes listeners through an extended narcoleptic journey on Sleep Tones, an all-electronic double album of new ambient work. Mastered by VDSQ labelmate Chuck Johnson, Sleep Tones was made with a specific effect in mind. These new sounds from the Six Organs universe represent an essential creative shift from one of the great guitarists of the 21st century, showcasing his ever-evolving palate. An antidote to modern overload, Sleep Tones provides a welcome stasis. In its phy…
The Veiled Sea
I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in so…
Companion Rises
Six Organs of Admittance is back after 3 years with a new record, new techniques in sound generation, and a new attitude. Companion Rises has a driving force only hinted at with previous releases. Manipulating the rhythmic DNA from songs such as the bass-dominated “Taken by Ascent” (on his last record, Burning the Threshold), Ben Chasny has grown a new sound creature in his lab that is as welcoming as it is terrifying and as fun to listen to as it provocative and intriguing.Methodologically, Com…
For Octavio Paz
Ben Chasny's last ultra-indie label release before moving onto greener pastures with Drag City is finally available once more on vinyl thanks to Hermit Hut. Originally released in 2003 on the fabulous Time Lag label, we are now safe to bask in it's psych-folk sunlight again and let me assure you it's worth it. Ditching the voice almost altogether (save for a few wails), For Octavio Paz sees Chasny focussing on his primary skill - the guitar. This is a collection of some of his best solo guitar w…
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Burning The Threshold
A salve for folk souls and whoever needs it; Ben Chasny makes acoustic folk-pop great again. “In preparing for the first album of non-Hexadic Six Organs of Admittance music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the first time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our list…
Dust and Chimes
Ben Chasny was on a holy roll when he laid down the eleven tracks on Dust and Chimes. It was 1998 and y'all were floating on that Bill Clinton peace-and-prosperity bubble. Meanwhile, Chasny had dropped his self-titled debut LP earlier that year, and the cognoscenti and illuminati were pricking up their ears. Dust and Chimes announced the arrival of a brow-furrowed troubadour whose complex, morosely beautiful guitar playing didn't Basho you over the head with Fahey-isms. The three solo guitar tra…
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Hexadic II
Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some…
Hexadic
" The only constant in Ben Chasny's longstanding Six Organs of Admittance project is change. Since 1998 he has engaged in composing, playing, improvising, and recording based on whatever aesthetic or philosophic principles appeal to him regardless of genre. More often than not, his records have existed between rather than within them, though there has always been a thread that marked a unique, if mercurial, signifier woven throughout to connect them. Hexadic is a different animal. Chasny spent s…
Maria Kapel
Ben ‘Six Organs’ Chasny has been a busy boy lately, largely in his plugged in psych-fuzz mode but also in his ultra-trio Rangda with Richard Bishop and Chris Corsano. For this one, however, he travelled to North Brabant, a place which the liner notes explain is full of some 400 chapels, and wrote new songs for the acoustic guitar which were performed live at the Incubate festival in September 2010.This performance makes for the bulk of this record, bookended by some spiritual studio-recorded har…
Parsons' Blues
Six Organs goes stomping wordlessly into the next phase with heavy gravity boots on. This is full-bore, petals-to-the-metals Six Organs, featuring Ben Chasny backed with his erstwhile bandmates known as Comets on Fire
Ascent
Six Organs mainstay Ben Chasny has become one of the high shamen of the US psychedelic underground, disseminating his hairy vision between at least three bands and a couple of genres over the past decade. His umpteenth album begins with a sonic white-out called Waswasa – a thrilling myocardial infarction of guitar more in keeping with another of his bands, Comets on Fire, who are, in fact, on board here. How Chasny tells his sprawling, incandescent guitar solos apart, we may never know; this is …
Asleep On The Floodplain
Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…
Empty The Sun
BOOK + CD: A novel by Joseph Mattson featuring music by SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. Available in First Trade Paperback Edition with CD soundtrack and as a limited edition vinyl LP soundtrack with Large Format Book. “Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles.” Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson’s Emp…
Sun Awakens
Ben Chasny has busied himself releasing a solid run of outsider folk records for some time now; ‘The Sun Awakens’ is his eighth full-length outing and thankfully it shows no signs of Chasny letting his quality control wane. As he explored on his last Drag City release ‘School of the Flower’, Chasny has again employed a handful of collaborators to fill-out his unique sound with percussion and odd instruments – yet this doesn’t distil the fact that the record is totally his own. "The Sun Awakens" …
Luminous Night
CD edition: Luminous Night is the first set of new Six Organs Of Admittance material to leap forth from Ben Chasnys' cerebral cortex in 18 months, and what a joy it is. With the release of odds-and-sods collection RTZ earlier in the year there to bridge the gap between 2007s Shelter From The Ash it doesn't seem like he's been away for long per se but for serious Chasny-heads a new album is something to get pretty excited about and with his other musical outlet Comets On Fire either on extended h…
Untitled
Stunning PSF vinyl-only release with Japanese obi-strip. Ben Chasny's prolific Six Organs Of Admittance wields a haunted, amorphous atmosphere of prickly acoustics and occasionally jarring electric guitar on side A's sidelong 'Furnace.' The flipside is a more structured affair, with the five songs by Usui Hiroyuki's Azul consisting of richly orchestrated psych folk, filled with violins, tabla, tambura and subdued vocals. Limited to 800 copies.
Six Organs Of Admittance
Rare 1998 LP reissued on CD with two rarer bonus tracks, all on CD for the first time. In 1998 Ben Chasny self-released an LP of his 'acoustic based project[ions]' under the name Six Organs of Admittance. The resulting five-song LP is a masterpiece of diverse elements using acoustic and electric guitars, a detuned violin, organ, electronics and koto. The material covers a lot of ground: there's an acid folk duet, an epic, three-part space suite, and two short concrète-like pieces that entice hid…
School Of The Flower
Ben Chasny (COMETS ON FIRE) might beat you if you call his solo work folk music. Hypnotic, mesmerizing, full of rough edges & elliptical turns round & round. First studio record from the highly prolific Chasny, joined by free-jazz sensation CHRIS CORSANO on drums & absolutely no computers. Chasny says "I see my music as being much more from the underground class of '92 than this folk scene...it has the same rock to folk quotient as Zep 3...Rock is the new folk & folk fucked rock without the reac…
Shelter From The Ash
This feat. a most fluid combination of electric & acoustic styles. Feat. Elisa Ambrogio (MAGIK MARKERS), Tim Green (FUCKING CHAMPS) & Noel Harmonson (COMETS ON FIRE) & Matt Sweeney. Seeking change & a fresh killing field at all costs, this fords fronts both dark & blustery, lucent & lithe, mining electricity, hydrogen & other elemental forces within.
The Manifestation
Released in '00, The Manifestation was a clear, one-sided vinyl 12Ó featuring a primitive etching of the sun on the B-side. The music is an extended raga of genre-defying madness, a dizzy melding of acoustic fingerstyle, shamanic chants, chimes, hand percussion, space jam & ghostly vocals that effectively blurs the cultural boundaries of eastern & western folk music. Completely remastered, the reissue is housed in a lovely 6-panel digipak foldout & includes 20+ minutes of music made exclusively …
Dark Noontide
Back in stock! Limited edition vinyl issue. The fourth album from Ben Chasny and one of his most complete, 'Dark Noontide' sees the guitarist exploring the Eastern themes approached in his earlier work and also delving further into the dark drone and unsettling ambience of his debut. Indeed, sidestepping some of the more upbeat solo-guitar moments of 'Dust & Chimes', Chasny manages to create an opium fuelled moonlit Middle Eastern haven in the comfort of your front room; you can almost smell the…
Dust & Chimes
A limited edition reissue of Dust & Chimes by Six Organs of Admittance, Ben Chasny's second amazing, underground folk-psych project from behind California's Redwood curtain. Heavy, acoustic guitar and mumbled vocalizations merge with out-there jamming in a style that has been compared to guys with LPs on Takoma, though Dust & Chimes is actually closer than anyone else is ever going to come to pantsing the first two Tyrannosaurus Rex albums. The sun is tanging, people.
RTZ
Triple LP gatefold of long out of print and limited 4-track bedroom psych from the early years of Six Organs Of Admittance.
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