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 six organs of admittance session
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The path to enlightenment. Six Organs Of Admittance records appear to come shrouded in so much arcane symbolism that they make The Da Vinci Code look like a quick crossword. There’s the name for starters – a reference to the Buddhist belief that enlightenment is achieved through the union of the five senses with the soul. Then there’s the fact that 1999’s The Manifestation came with an etching of a solar pattern on one side of the vinyl. And their new album, The Sun Awakens (whose centrepiece is 25 minutes of chanting and feedback entitled River Of Transfiguration), again contains enough occult imagery to keep Sophie Neveu busy for hours. Unless, of course, there’s no code to crack at all; something on which Ben Chasny refuses to be drawn. “I’m not saying that there’s nothing in there to dissect,” says the Six Organs’ guitarist, vocalist and songwriter. “Get what you want out of it, but I’m not going to say, ‘I was studying this or that.’”  The thing is, you don’t get the impression that Chasny is trying to be “enigmatic” when he says this. Despite the image his music may convey, he isn’t some mysterious guru or acid-fried hippy but a sensibly-dressed, softly-spoken and slightly nervous guy from Oakland, California. Nor is he being disingenuous, for – unfailingly polite though he is – you can sense a definite frustration with those who read things into his music that may not be there. “I just don’t like people who over-describe what they’re doing,” he states. “New age music is a really good example of ‘Everything’s beautiful and we have all these concepts’, but new age musicians can take the Pythagorean concept of music and the heavens and then just whitewash it.” And, whatever you make of it, “whitewashed” is one thing The Sun Awakens certainly isn’t. It’s much darker than the last Six Organs album, School Of The Flower. Although beautifully bucolic guitars can still be heard in Bless The Blood, they’re offset by an atmosphere of almost supernatural menace in tracks like Attar, which bears the hallmarks of Chasny’s day job in psych-rockers Comets On Fire, and occasionally sounds like Ennio Morricone spun out on peyote.  Yet that’s nothing compared to what descends from the speakers when Six Organs play live at the Scala where, accompanied by free jazz drummer Chris Corsano and John Moloney of Sunburned Hand Of Man, Chasny engulfs the whole venue in a soupy, stygian sound. “It’s totally different live to on record,” Chasny elaborates. “Because on a really good night playing live is about trying to hit those absolute perfect moments. I wish I knew the secret of how to get there, but I’m still trying to figure it out.” It seems that sometimes he’s as much of a mystery to himself as he is to the rest of us.
Paul Clarke
Six Organs Of Admittance - The Sun Awakens, released 05 June 06 on Drag City.
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comment by steff_allan
Jun 6, 2006
looking forward to seeing this man at atp in december
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