Six Organs of Admittance - Biography
By Nick Castro
Six Organs of admittance began in Santa Cruz as a solo folk/drone/psychedelic/mantra project by Ben Chasny in 1998. He recorded his first album, Six Organs of Admittance (1998 - Holy Mountain), and released it alone in very limited numbers. He has managed to keep up a pace of about one album a year since and has enjoyed a growing success in the indie and avant garde music scenes.
His next album, Nightly Trembling (1999 - Time Lag), gave us more of the same. Droning buzzes, glimmering chimes and fine fingerpicking guitar work along with Chasny's falsetto and half mumbled lyrics create a mystical ambience in the sounds of the records. Stories loom notoriously about Chasny's depression and struggles with alcoholism alongside his fits of ecstatic revelry. He is a tortured artist with a rough laymen's perspective in the classic sense and he can often be crass, negative, nihilistic and contradictory in interviews. His brooding emotions are worn on his sleeve and are even more present on his third album, Dust and Chimes (2000 - Pavilion). 2002 saw Dark Noontide (2002 - Holy Mountain) and the next year Compathia (2003 - Holy Mountain) and For Octavio Paz (2003 - Holy Mountain), where Chasny continued to grow in the new freak folk, or sometimes called wyrd folk, underground. It was around this time that fellow Santa Cruz native, Devendra Banhart, included a song of Chasny's on his compilation The Golden Apples of the Sun (2004 - Bastet). Around this time Chasny completed work on The Manifestation (2004 - Ba Da Bing) which really started to garner him attention by the media and he began to play larger shows and tours.
His next album, School of the Flower (2005 - Drag City), saw a huge shift in not only his sound but his popularity as well as he signed to indie mainstay label Drag City. He began to do larger international tours and play more electric guitar than acoustic. This shift alienated many of his older fans and helped open him up to even more new ones. The next year he released The Sun Awakens (2006 - Drag City), which included the use of the Turkish ney, a traditional long flute, along with more droning and chanting. He then unveiled his newest recording Shelter From the Ash (2007 - Drag City) which is yet another continuation in the direction set by School of the Flower, yet much more based in feedback drenched guitar noise than in structure or melody.
He currently spends a considerable amount of time playing guitar in European avant goth group Current 93 as well as in his duo August Born with Japanese artist Hioryuki Usui. Both projects allow Chasny to concentrate more on his freer sides of expression than with the more formal leadership of Six Organs of Admittance. Chasny's music has managed to capture a certain something with fans from so many disparate genres such as goth, indie, folk, noise etc. that it has helped him to remain relevant as he changes. All the while Chasny has played with other groups such as Badgerlore, Comets on Fire and Magik Markers as well as working on one-off improvisational outings with extremely limited pressings of LPs. He has become quite a commodity on the vinyl collecting circuit as well as with typical music fans.
