The one apparently simple thing that has always made Six Organs of Admittance stand out from the crowd is his ability to create cerebral music that’s brimful of soul, and ‘Time is Glass’ is a perfect example of that winning combination.
It’s over a quarter of a century since Six Organs of Admittance first emerged on the fringes of California’s fertile psych-folk/new weird America scene. In that time, there have been twenty albums and numerous reinventions, as sole Six Organs member Ben Chasny has indulged his penchant for heavy psych drones, delicate guitar vignettes, ambient synths and discordant, experimental noise. Now he’s back where it all started, geographically and also, in a sense, musically. Returning to his home in Humboldt County, wedged between the Pacific and the mountains, Chasny has embedded himself in a slower, more meditative way of life, creating music at his own pace and largely without distraction.
It’s not uncommon for experimental musicians to engage with deep time, creating a musical language that is capable of communicating between geological or cosmic eras, but Chasny’s technique here seems to be to immerse himself in the present, albeit a present that contains multitudes: wide time rather than deep time, perhaps. This idea is reflected (excuse the pun) in the album’s title: Time Is Glass implies all the glimmer and glint we come to expect from a Six Organs of Admittance album but also hints at a conversation with the unfathomable, a sense of serene mystery.
And this is exactly what the album delivers. Opening track The Mission is disarmingly simple: just a sparkling acoustic guitar and Chasny’s gnomic words. It sounds like a nod to those freak-folk days of yore, but closer inspection reveals something grounded in the present. It’s not that this music is necessarily more sure of itself than before, it’s just more accepting of its place in the natural order of those things. And that natural order, in Chasny’s worldview, is cyclical and self-nourishing: the gentle pulse of synths in Hephaestus shows that his experimental urges can coexist with his more traditional moments.
On Slip Away, he splices his trademark guitar with a background shimmer that provides a perfect foil for his vocals. More so than other recent albums, Time Is Glass pulls the focus of these songs towards the vocal melodies, but the guitar remains the primary instrument. The sound is essentially a kind of cosmic Americana, something like Robbie Basho reinterpreting Ry Cooder’s soundtrack for Paris, Texas. The gentle, twisty Pilar falls most squarely on the folkier side of the divide, and Theophany Song adds some subtle keys to the basic guitar and vocals recipe with wonderfully intimate results, but elsewhere, the effect is more widescreen. Spinning In A River tells a convoluted, whirling musical tale, with passages of crunching dissonance giving way to placid, gently rippling pools of acoustic guitar.
My Familiar uses acoustic and electric elements to create a sense of tension and strangeness. It builds up layer upon layer, evolving from pastoral folk to knotty prog. Summer’s Last Rays is all about the nimble guitar work: it’s here that the ever-present ghost of American Primitivism looms largest, but the way Chasny creates a hypnotic sense of progression by building up sound through repetition and instrumental overlay is all his own, and it makes for an experience that mesmerising, lulling and at times slightly eerie.
There is no such thing as ‘just another Six Organs Of Admittance album’. Ben Chasny’s career is one of constant progression (albeit a very cyclical progression, always aware of the growing importance of its own history, but wearing that importance lightly), and by the time we get to the sweetly psychedelic closing track, New Year’s Song, it’s clear that Time Is Glass is another perfectly shaped and uniquely coloured piece in the vast jigsaw puzzle of the Six Organs of Admittance back catalogue. The one apparently simple thing that has always made Chasny stand out from the crowd is his ability to create cerebral music that’s brimful of soul, and this album is a perfect example of that winning combination.
Order Six Organs of Admittance – Time is Glass
Time is Glass (26 April 2024) via Drag City
Order: Digital/CD/Vinyl: https://sixorgans.lnk.to/timeisglass