The attempt to connect these places is quite apparent on Chasny’s newest and most forthcoming album to date, Asleep on the Floodplain. Like Thuja member Loren Chasse does with his field recordings, Six Organs of Admittance finds the beauty of California’s upper regions in the sprawling and bustling Bay Area, albeit in a different way. There has never been a doubt in my mind that his records come from Northern California, whether it’s the Elk River Valley near Eureka or the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now resides. He is playing music about his home with a passion, which is just as powerful. We can never get our youth back, but we can remember, and music works on the emotional components of memory in a way that a Polaroid can’t quite manage.īut Chasny isn’t trying to invoke all of our homes for us. It’s a simple and profound statement that also sums up why listeners are so passionate about their childhood bands. (It is a must-read for any Six Organs fan.) Around that time, he had just finished his brambly and experimental CD, Dust and Chimes, yet one can hear Chasny’s sentiments about home and nature in all the music he has made since then. I realized that my folk music comes from this place and the trees, smells and all the feelings that are locked up, and the only way back to them is through music.”īen Chasny, the hippie guitar luminary behind Six Organs of Admittance, said this to the British magazine Terrascope in 1999 as they were writing a comprehensive feature about him. Memories of childhood reveries flooded my senses and it was so powerful. My childhood was spent climbing trees and playing in the forest and exploring the woods… I recently went back to visit that place. We had a gigantic redwood tree in our yard and Elk River flowed through our backyard. Cute, and awesome.“I grew up in a tiny house at the end of a place called Elk River Valley. I suppose Sonic Youth have hit this sort of vibe occasionally, but it’s the intimacy of the pair which is so striking, the sense that you’re watching something very private but also something which has a keen understanding of primal rock theatre.įor an encore, they make a brackish avant-blues jam out of, of all things, Fleetwood Mac‘s “That’s Alright”, wryly positing themselves as the New Weird America’s Buckingham and Nicks. The whole thing is very charged and I’m struggling to think of anything I can adequately compare it with.
Headbanging in slow motion, shredding her strings one by one, she acts as a magnetic force, drawing Chasny towards her into a series of erotic guitar duels, until they’re facing off against each other, rocking backwards and forwards in perfect sync, finding a cacophonous and beautiful common ground in their playing. It makes for quite a spectacle, not least because Ambrogio rocks out in such an intense and passionate way.
Ambrogio’s performance fronting The Magik Markers on their new “Boss” album ( reviewed here) has been exciting us here in the office for the past few weeks.Īs half of the reconfigured Six Organs, she quietly harmonises with Chasny, then, while he carves labyrinthine folkish figures on his guitar, she lets fly these quite astonishing no-wave solos: great sustained clangs and skronks, punctuated by cavernous silences, that are at once free and fiercely controlled. Chasny’s incantatory singing has got stronger and while he’s still playing elaborate, opulent tunes, like an electrified Bert Jansch at times, it’s the way he intersects with Ambrogio that’s so radical and thrilling. Tonight’s support act, Hush Arbors, actually do a pretty good job of sounding like Chasny circa “Dust And Chimes” or “Dark Noontide”, though they’re also capable of some billowing white noise + effete melody hybrids like the one they close with. Chasny is too much of an adventurer and shit-stirrer to stick with the acid-folk formula which he’d perfected before most people had woken up to it. On this evidence, it’s going to be quite a departure. “They may even eat the horse that you’re riding,” they’re singing.Īs far as I know, I think this is a new song from the next Six Organs album due in November. Then the hushed, gentle duet becomes clearer.
I could be mistaken about this, but there’s a point in this really fine Six Organs Of Admittance show when Ben Chasny and his new foil, Elisa Ambrogio, appear to be whispering sweet nothings to each other.