Staff Reviews

Six Organs of Admittance - Hexadic

Review by Aidan Reynolds

It’s rare to find an artist so willing to stretch themselves that they create an entirely new way of writing music»

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Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny has devised his very own system of musical composition, The Hexadic System, which is the basis for new album, entitled 'Hexadic' released on Drag City. How The Hexadic System came to be...Ben Chasny's restless intellect has regularly guided the progress of his creation. A lyrical mastery of acoustic finger-picking would be enough to build a body of work for most musicians; this is just the stepping-off point for Ben. From the earliest days of private-press psych home recordings, Six Organs of Admittance has sought out alternative spaces in which to make music and challenge audiences to keep up with his rapid advances into new terrain. Over the last two years Ben assembled a comprehensive system of musical composition. Designed to free sound and language from rational order and replace calculation with indeterminacy, The Hexadic System is a catalyst to extinguish patterns and generate new means of chord progressions and choices. Though it was not his intention upon creating this unique system, the structures generated were so compelling, that they soon became the bones of the next Six Organs record. This is the longest time between Six Organs records since Ben started making them in 1998. This is also why Hexadic sounds unlike anything else made this year, and generally unlike most other things made ever. The System builds all of the tonal fields, chord changes, scales, and lyrics on Hexadic, creating the framework of the songs that the musicians engage with. Yet the System is open; within the framework, Chasny's own personal aesthetics - such as the production mode of loud guitars, the order of songs, the editing of length, were all conscious decisions made to communicate the pieces. The exact same combinatorial patterns used on this record would generate infinite results, depending on the choices of the individual. Ben's years of study have produced an operational agent that has not only built all the songs on Hexadic but is also a system anyone can use to restructure their ways of habit. With a desire to provoke the unconscious and spring past the strictures and limits of the conscious mind, this was the goal: to use the System to make heavy music with as few 'heavy' signifiers as possible. The ones that are left: Volume. Distortion. Impact! This is Hexadic: the sound of the System in the hands of Six Organs of Admittance.
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