Browse by Artist: SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	The Sun Awakens
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	DC 312CD

"Listening to The Sun Awakens back-to-back with its predecessor will provoke a different response. There's a few treats, sure. As a matter of fact, it's all treats to our ears. But it's not all happy beans, just so you know. As a matter of fact, it's the darkest Six Organs of Admittance yet. In addition to titling songs cheerless things like 'Black Wall,' and 'Torn by Wolves,' Ben's brought a bit more electric guitar into the mix to help bring out the darkness. Tim Green is behind the board making sure that everything sounds rock-solid, and the acoustics are brilliant, almost blinding. Side one is a six-song circle where waves of guitars build and beauty is betrayed by madness...in the prettiest possible way. Side two is a trip down the droning 'River of Transfiguration.' The inspiration here is Hermann Nitsch. You might hear Popul Vuh as an influence too, as well as Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. Overall though, Six Organs of Admittance doesn't believe in the critical myth that an artist who flirts with the obscure needs to consolidate their experimental tendencies into more and more listenable music in order to expand the envelope of what pop music can be. He don't believe in a linear aesthetic trajectory either."

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	Shelter From The Ash
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	DC 348CD

"Shelter From The Ash features a most fluid combination of electric and acoustic Six Organs of Admittance styles. Chasny went into the studio with the songs both in his mind and also demoed out, a different way of working than in previous sessions. Sure, improvisations were still a big part of the sound; within the song structures, they create dynamic sparks from the other side of the inspiration. Additionally (if you must know), standard tuning played a part for the first time in history -- but don't worry, this doesn't mean that Six Organs of Admittance has come in from the drone-storm -- far from it! The man who was once 'Torn By Wolves' in an unknown key is now 'Coming To Get You,' no matter what it takes -- with a tuning any man could play, but few would use as he does. The session was conducted in the glamorous confines of San Francisco's Louder Studios, where so many bands have had their hard and heavy essence redefined. Six Organs of Admittance was no exception. Additionally, the session featured such luminaries as The Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio, The Fucking Champs' Tim Green and Chasny's Comets On Fire bandmate Noel Harmonson and gadabout-to-the-stars Matt Sweeney pitching in. Six Organs of Admittance has been a collaborative ground in the past, and what happened here is what always happens: an organic oneness, a record very comfortable in its many skins."

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	RTZ
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	2CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	DC 383CD

"The double-CD epic called RTZ (named after the button on a Tascam 484 that 'returns to zero') fashions several lesser-known pieces from Six Organs of Admittance's early years into a massive prismatic arc, colossal and organic like some wonder of the ancient world. How could it be otherwise? Even when existing as only one half of a record, as many of these pieces once did (and still do, somewhere), Mr. 6OOA (Ben Chasny, y'all!) leans into the eternal -- letting the winds of Time scar his face and the light of All There Is burn his skin black. Grandmaster Chas has sacrificed the body for his music time and again over the years. RTZ is an iridescent chimera infull flight, viewed through stained glass. Cataloging these early non-album excursions requires a bit of leg-(and mind)work. RTZ travels back to the dawn of this century to locate 'Resurrection,' half of a Time-Lag split 12' with Charalambides. 'Warm Earth, Which I've Been Told' is half of a Mental Telemetry split CD with Vibracathedral Orchestra and Magic Carpithans from 2003. 'You Can Always See the Sun,' was part of Three Lobed Recordings.' 'Purposeful Availments' subscription CD series in 2002. And 'Nightly Trembling' was released way back in 1999 in an edition of 33 copies, all given away for free! That's some spiritual shit right there. Combined with a never-before-released extended piece called 'Punish the Chasm with Wings' from pre-millennial days and you've got yourself a deep, DEEP box set, crammed into a double CD. Rich with excursions to exotic musical climes and rhythmic with prayerful chants from the dark shadows of the earth, RTZ uses strings and bells, riffs both warm and icy, glowing lead guitars, massed voices and the pure, open air for its mantras and rituals. As the title alludes, these old sounds were forged in that bastion of personal expression, the four-track recorder. When a man can record a few feet from his bed, he becomes more inclined to render his nocturnal intuitions. And when that man is Ben Chasny, he can use those remastered (but still good and dusty) early recordings to attain the ultimate goal. We should all be so lucky. Oh wait, we are -- now that we've got RTZ forever, and more."

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	Luminous Night
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	DC 409CD

"Through dark days and glowing nights, Six Organs of Admittance continues to step to the far rim of the world with purposeful strides. Indeed, new horizons are visible throughout Luminous Night. Be it in the face of spiritual crisis or catharsis, Ben Chasny as Six Organs refuses to stagnate, or to evolve in predictable fashion; in response, he keeps moving on. This is the first Six Organs of Admittance albums with such a lengthy gap between it and its former number. In the past two years Chasny has kept busy writing this new epic, moving house to Seattle, composing soundtracks for novels and movies, and touring constantly in America and Europe (with bands like The Dead C and OM) as well as being invited by legendary post-metal group Neurosis to play their Beyond The Pale festival in Belgium. Six Organs of Admittance is such a singular experience that it is sometimes easy to forget that Ben was the lead guitarist in Comets On Fire, as well as a songwriter and guitarist for Current 93's Black Ships Ate The Sky album and half of the pan-Pacific psych-folk duo August Born. But clearly, Chasny knows heavy, having grown through times of heavy and times of light. And in answer to the question what's heavier, a pound of rock or a pound of feathers, Six Organs of Admittance has devised this for Luminous Night: a pound of rock covered with a pound of feathers -- twice as heavy, but feathery light to the human eye. With Luminous Night, Chasny's working with some heavy dudes, like producer Randall Dunn and Eyvind Kang, whose sound on viola shines with a guiding glow throughout the album (both Dunn and Kang contributed their talents to the outr� arrangements of the recent Sunn O))) album). The other invaluable contributors to the album are Hans Teuber on flute, Tor Dietrichson on tabla, Matt Chamberlin on drums, and Dave Abramson on percussion. Occupying their spots with care, they've collaborated to create something rich and vibrant, aching and new, in the world of Six Organs of Admittance. The arc of Luminous Night is wide as the sky, commencing with a stirring instrumental evocation of the Greek myth of poor Actaeon before flowing into the vocal, the vengeful, the ancient, the divine and celestial, scored with guitars, bass, viola, flute, tabla, electronics and synthesizer, as well as a buried-in-the-rain-soaked-earth-of- Seattle-then-exhumed four-track cassette that formed the basis of the instrumental 'Cover Your Wounds With the Sky.' For its blanketing sound, Luminous Night draws inspiration from such cinematic sources as Jodorowky's El Topo soundtrack and the scores of Kurosawa's samurai films, but is at the same time music that could only have come from the singular sound world of Six Organs of Admittance. What is it about the man that buries his sound in the ground? He has faith in the earth, for one. When we think of Six Organs of Admittance, we think of a man with six-string ambitions, a rambler with mystic beliefs and dark electric visions. It's a big universe and we're only human, which basically means that we've got spirit and that we're going to die. But until then, we live. Six Organs of Admittance has lived to tell about it on Luminous Night."

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	Asleep On The Floodplain
Label:	DRAG CITY
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	DC 453CD

"Comprised of ten blissful, primarily acoustic tunes, a delicacy wafts forth from Asleep On The Floodplain, the new album by Six Organs Of Admittance. After 2009's sonically dense Luminous Night, Chasny returned to the familiar environs of home recording to sculpt and assemble this batch of jams, freeing himself from the restrictions and deadlines studios might normally impose upon a song. Thus creating a living nest in which this material could grow and breathe, the album took longer to complete but sounds effortless -- and bright with light. Much of Asleep On The Floodplain draws on imagery from Chasny's youth, a time spent in Elk River. 'Dawn, Running Home' remembers sleep-overs in a friend's tree-fort and the subsequent morning return to Ben's own house. He wrote 'Above a Desert I've Never Seen' while bed-ridden for a week. 'Hold But Let Go' was meant for a film, but never used. Maintaining Six Organs' penchant for cameos, Elisa Ambrogio Magik-ally contributes to 'River of My Youth.' The theopoetics of Catherine Keller resonate on 'S/Word and Leviathan'; while Gaston Bachelard's poetics of reverie are felt throughout the record."

Artist:	SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE
Title:	The Manifestation
Label:	STRANGE ATTRACTORS AUDIO HOUSE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	SAAH 026CD

"If the pan-cultural acoustic/psych inventions of Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance could be defined by only one composition, that tune would certainly have to be The Manifestation. Released in the year 2000, The Manifestation was a clear, one-sided vinyl 12", a curiously primitive etching of the sun featured on the B-side. Originally sprawling across one side of vinyl, The Manifestation is an extended raga of genre-defying madness, a dizzy melding of acoustic fingerstyle, shamanic chants, chimes, hand percussion, space jam and ghostly vocals."

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