Six Organs of Admittance Announce ‘Time is Glass’

Today, Six Organs of Admittance, the long-running moniker of Ben Chasny, announces his 21st album, Time is Glass, out April 26th via Drag City, and shares its lead single/video, “The Mission.”

In his review of Companion Rises (2020), Thomas Blake reminded us that “reinvention has become de rigueur for Ben Chasny, so much so that at one stage, he even attempted to reimagine the fundamental building blocks of music with a new type of composition – the hexadic system – that relied on mathematics and the chance drawing of playing cards.” In an earlier review, he recounts how Chasny emerged at the beginning of the freak-folk boom – “Even then, he was pushing boundaries, and his lengthy, modal trips and raga-soaked incantatory freakouts carried the genre to its logical extreme, finishing the job started by the Incredible String Band thirty years previously. Listened to today, they sound like the conclusion of a genre, rather than its beginnings.”

While there is the suggestion that “The Mission”, the first single of Time is Glass, nods to the past – the acid-folk of Current 93 and the cosmic pop of Chris Bell’s Big Star, Chasny’s unique music maintains that magnetic timeless quality. With a falsetto melody, the song is described as equal parts lullaby and prayer, a murmuring of feral truths sung so gently that all has got to be forgiven. There’s a melancholic edge to the music that’s laced with an inviting warmth, something that’s also captured in the stillness and calm of the music video, directed by Elisa Ambrogio, sewing together scenes from California and Portugal into a patchwork of texture and tone.

The press for the album shares that after two decades of shifting impermanence, Chasny had returned to Humboldt County, from whence Six Organs had long ago emerged; there, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, Time is Glass was conceived.

On writing “The Mission”, Chasny recalls: “A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine was falling in love in a new country, and the stories he told at the time were both beautiful and terrifying, sublime and on the edge. I wrote this song for him and his new partner after they had begun to figure out how to be together.”

Stream “The Mission” single – https://sixorgans.lnk.to/timeisglass