Hey guys, I know I’ve been dropping the ball lately on the Featured Album Fridays, but hey, it’s been a busy holidays for me! Welp, I’m back this week with a rather strange entry, it’s an album that’s set to release this year and has been described to me as “Experimental/Psych-Folk” which just SOUNDS interesting.
Here it is, a short description of Six Organs of Admittance’s 2009 album – RTZ.
Six Organs Of Admittance is the primary musical project of guitarist Ben Chasny. Chasny’s music is largely guitar-based, however it includes eastern influences, marked by drones, chimes, and eclectic percussive elements. The band is associated with numerous current scenes, most notably the New Weird America movement. Acts ranging from folk artist Devendra Banhart to drone metal band Sunn O))) to the highly experimental Current 93 count Chasny among friends. Six Organs has always been a critical darling, and the past few years have seen their stature in the indie world substantially increase. Chasny is also a member of the psychedelic band Comets on Fire, and has working relationships with Badgerlore and Current 93. When you think of the way you used to live, the way you degraded the planet. You didn’t know all creatures are equal! Today, you look back and see yourself in a different light. To think that Six Organs was all that held you up to the divine. Six little organs of separation. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
The double-CD, triple-LP 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 an 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 in full 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 Loved 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 multi-faceted LP jacket.
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: a multifaceted triple-gatefold LP!
On first listen, it’s something I’ve never heard of before and it is definitely something worth checking out. The songs are a bit long, but hey, it’s a double album, what can you really say. As usual, the stream is below, comment if you like it! Enjoy.
Posted on January 2nd, 2009 by Jon Lim
Filed under: Featured Album Fridays, Music
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