Six Organs Of Admittance: Luminous Night

I feel a lot of trepidation when a record arrives which I know deep down could be a massive disappointment or a confusing battle. I received a digital version of Luminous Night far sooner than I expected to. Nervous excitement took hold of me while I burnt a CDR, mingling with the strange, superficial mind chatter that I have come to accept over the nine months since I fell unexpectedly into writing about music. Phrases and ideas flicker in my mind, forced up by my desire to convey what something means to me, or sounds like, before I have even heard the music. It’s a crock of shit, to quote our American brethren.

It is especially the case with music made by a band which has been a great influence on my life. It makes me sad and angry sometimes, when I sense that the formation of my opinion in writing, which is influenced by the money I earn from it, is clouding the very channels through which music, like love, should be allowed to flow down unimpeded. But they are only opinions and words after all. Fortunately music still holds the power to smash through those obstacles I create, or even dissolve and absorb them in the case of this record.

This is the first time I have written a review without listening to the music it concerns at the same time. An hour ago I sat for forty two minutes, opening and closing my eyes, listening to the record once through with no screens in sight. I am still feeling shaken by it. Even as someone who has travelled many miles to watch Ben Chasny, and various others, play live as Six Organs, I did not expect him to produce a record this good. It’s a strange thing to say, but it was the record I had always hoped would appear.

The last two full length releases, The Sun Awakens and Shelter From the Ash were records I loved at times and in places, but I found them to be disjointed listens overall, I tried, and failed, to get them. Like those moments before sleep, re-visiting and re-constituting an awkward but promising conversation in my imagination, I awake with the true memory. 

This first listen to Luminous Night was one of the most colourful, emotional and visceral musical experiences I have ever had, it prompted me to write this review without making repeated listens. It would feel like doing an autopsy on a living being, killing it in the process. It’s going to take an effort to avoid sounding like a reverent cult member (too late…), or to write anything more than a thank you to everyone involved in making it.

The album takes the form of eight distinct songs which often intertwine seamlessly. Here his singing and lyricism is markedly confident compared with previous efforts, even while singing phrases which do not quite fit the meter. I’ve long noticed this characteristic of his approach to lyrics; it seems that once he has decided on a phrase it’s going to fit, whether a syllable needs drawing out to fill a gap or curtailing in a flurry of semi-archaic phrasing. Sometimes in the past he has sounded a little self-conscious at these moments, here he sails through and by his confidence draws attention to the words behind, finding richness in the assertiveness without ever sounding cold. On the song ‘Bar Nasha’ he resurrects a chant-like style I associate more with his early work, double tracked and warped by a stiff monastic restraint.

It disappeared sometime between Compathia (which was stacked to the rafters with it) and School of the Flower, only returning in hints on songs like ‘Take Shelter from the Ash’ and ‘Black Wall’. Here he goes hell for leather, and makes it work. Elsewhere his double tracked vocals blend the falsetto with the baritone, another repeating characteristic in his work. If I am remembering song titles correctly, ‘Ursa Minor’ is a song of escape and love, he describes someone taking hold of a constellation to wrench them from a place they know they have to leave and talks of never “[loving] anybody more”, and kissing “eyes at the edge of the tide”. It loosely reminded me of David Sylvain’s ‘The Waterfront’ but without the overwrought sentimentality which makes me queasy.

Listening to the array of instruments which feature throughout I often felt surprised and invigorated. Recent Six Organs records have given the impression that Chasny has written the music on his acoustic guitar, overlaid his parched vocals and electric guitar squalls and had the benefit of a good drummer to pick out the spine. Then a friend perhaps plays a guitar solo, someone picks out the melody with a flute, someone hit’s go on a drone box and spends twenty minutes turning a dial. They all sunk their roots in lonely compositions, the additions were welcomed in by a song which hoped for their arrival, but made provisions for being alone.

On this record, Chasny’s guitar playing sounds like it has found a home, despite all the references to transience, temporal and physical, in the lyrics. He doesn’t bridge all the spaces with fills, on ‘The River of Heaven’ he sticks to a sparse, sure-footed climbing pattern on a way-down-tuned guitar giving space for Eyvind Kang’s viola, Tor Dietrichson’s tabla playing and Hans Teuber’s alto flute. It’s much the same with ‘Bar Nasha’, both of these longer compositions face the same direction but stand apart, one runs from death and the other walks with it, both towards love, in my opinion. I can’t imagine someone writing this guitar part without a strong feeling of what will grow around it, and a confidence in those who will illustrate it. It is an inspiring and unexpected move forward from such a competent solo guitarist.

An admission: These last two hundred words began a week later, after a handful of intent and continually rewarding listens. I wanted to listen to it once then wait for the record to be released, so I could return to it when I had the vinyl in my hands. But I decided that was a pointless gesture, turning something away which was willing to offer me so much right now. But I stand by my wide-eyed faun in the wood responses, I can remember how I felt when I wrote them, and it felt true. It’s painful to go out on this limb, because it feels like a vulnerable position, but I feel that my reaction to this record was only possible because the people involved in this album are devoted, both to the music and in some sense to truth. It is a document of faith in the world, an aspiration to greater emotional and physical connectivity with the world and those that walk upon it.

The musicians involved are exceptionally talented; they weave those talents into the music with a disarming passion that links arms with the mortal urgency of Chasny’s playing. A cursory glance at their various biographies reveals an often similar history involving jazz, explorations into eclectic music traditions from across the world and recent forays into whatever territory you might consider Six Organs to roam. The crossroads involves Chasny’s relocation to the Pacific Northwest, and the production work of Randall Dunn at Seattle’s Aleph Studios, the same man who was pivotal in the sonic vibrancy of Sunn0)))’s Monoliths and Dimensions. It is of note that viola player Eyvind Kang played on and assisted in the composition of that decisive record, albeit contributing something far different.

On ‘The River of Heaven’ he slowly becomes the central player wielding a wild motif, once the strange tabla rhythm has established itself in the songs long, elusive meter. On ‘Ursa Minor’ he plays two parts, lending a respectfully subtle orchestral sweep to the fear embodied in the swaying delay of Chasny’s heavily picked chord changes. If that’s Kang turning in some haunting experimental scrapes in the midsection then I’d be moved to call him a genius. On ‘Actaeon’s Fall (Against the Hounds)’ he avoids falling clumsily upon the medieval / Brit-folk crutch that many would likely resort to, which would have in turn obscured the multiple worlds and the three part narrative conjured by the lightfooted instrumental composition (which takes it’s name from a Greek myth, one which those interested in the album would be wise to look out for).

‘Anesthesia’ was playing when my wife walked in the room, prompting her to ask if it was the music from Twin Peaks with a quizzical expression on her face. On the track Kang finds some iridescent, mirror like chords which reminded me of the synth line from Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’. On this track, as on most of the shorter, lyrical songs he shares space with Hans Teuber’s equally admirable flute playing. Teuber’s performances aren’t quite so virtuosic, he astonishes with his control and his characterful occupation of various nooks and crannies within the song.

‘Bar Nasha’ bears his most prominent mark; he begins by joining forces with the electric guitar, which tumbles down a vivid scale. It’s highly influenced by the scales I have heard in oriental music traditions from the plains of Mongolia, down through Tibet and China and out to Japan. As the song continues to build in strength he loosens himself from the binds and plots notes and bright trills all over the chart, his instrument soaring and weaving it’s way through the delay effect which so often seems like the natural companion of a flute (even when the player gives in to the temptation to over-indulge, as on Tenzin Choegyal’s ‘Journey to Tibet’).

If there were ever a time that I’ve hoped to hear Six Organs perform an album as it was recorded rather than stripped to electric guitars and drums or solo acoustic, it’s now. I hope someone hears that, I’ll put on a show, I’ll drive the van, whatever. Having said that I’ve always hoped he would team up with frequent live drummer John Moloney on drums and make a studio recording of the intense drive that the two can whip up. In the past eight years Chasny has always been fortunate in finding suitable percussionists, Chris Corsano’s brief storm on School of the Flower, the rigid chop and cymbal taps of Comets on Fire band-mate Noel Von Harmonson on The Sun Awakens. Though I don’t have a press release, I have read elsewhere that Matt Chamberlin is credited on drums with Dave Abramson on percussion, deft and subtle contributions compared to Tor Dietrichson’s prominent tabla drumming.

The two tracks which will likely close out either side of the vinyl release break the folk-song mould of what precedes them. ‘Cover Your Wounds With The Sky’ confirms Randall Dunn’s immense capability to render a dense drone and clear, spectral sounds in the same space, on ‘Enemies of the Light’ Chasny intones a grave symbology amidst a swirling roar and some of the most free-ranging electric guitar work in terms of style on the album (okay, I should just call it a freak-out and be done with it). Conversely it sounds like it is trying to free itself from the hypnotic loop, but all fades out with nothing resolved. I always find it irreconcilable that what is often referred to as “free playing” in experimental music frequently conveys a greater impression of imprisonment than music of rigid structures and scale.

If you’ve got this far, you must really like Six Organs and probably have many of your own observations, or else you’re seriously intrigued by how I could possibly go on this long. As I write this almost seven weeks before the August release date, others have already noted the depth of connections between the lyrics and the mythologies and histories of the song-titles. This is a layer I haven’t dealt with, mostly because I would prefer to extract my own meanings for the time being, but the possibility of delving into it is an intriguing prospect.

This music doesn’t need to be explored and mapped in the way that I have done in this review, but I hope it is at least a fraction as enjoyable to read as it has been to write. Luminous Night is riddled with a deep urgency, a fever which gets very close to despair, spiritual wrong-turns, love and death. It is also profoundly beautiful at the same time. It avoids a homogeneous approach in terms of production (the vocals, guitar and the viola are mixed differently from song to song), structure, lyrics and mood but feels like a single, emotional and spiritual entity. It seems that his Shelter from the Ash period obsession with repetitive interlocking riffs has finally meshed with the folk, psych and ‘soundtrack’ sensibilities, and at that same moment those qualities have also bloomed in and of themselves. He may well have already turned his back on this record, may already be facing a new direction. Perhaps he will focus his attention on some single nuance for the following few albums. Every Six Organs album has been worthwhile, regardless of its place in any clumsy chronology.

I remember hearing that same urgency on the solo guitar record For Octavio Paz. As Chasny made his way through the epic, intricate closing track he sounded like a man running along a precipice, slipping, scared and almost losing his footing, but never quite losing his calm determination to make it through to the end. This warm, full-blooded, human essence has always been a part of Six Organs of Admittance, along with dirt and sky. On Luminous Night it has been transfigured into an incredible manifestation, breathing all manner of colours.