CD: Six Organs of Admittance: Hexadic

While much of Hexadic is a blast, the first album from Six Organs of Admittance since 2012’s Ascent offers much that’s familiar: the snail’s pace heaviosity and shifts between bone-crushing density and desiccated sparseness of Dylan Carlson’s Earth, spaghetti-western guitar interludes (also favoured by Carlson), an approach to malformed riffing and guitar mangling blending Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, Harry Pussy and early Pussy Galore.

Six Organs of Admittance’s prolific constant presence Ben Chasny used to be tarred as freak-folk, but nowadays his various musical guises hop with ease between noise and stripped down, fractured intimacy. This, though, is a mainly a platform for his challenging, noise-enthralled side.

Hexadic is – being definitive is hard as there have been so many limited and obscure releases – around the 18th Six Organs of Admittance album. To freshen things up, Chasny has, to quote the press material, “devised his own form of musical composition, the Hexadic System. 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. This is why Hexadic sounds unlike anything this year and generally unlike most other things made, ever.” The approach has also spawned a set of Oblique Strategies-style playing cards.

Nonetheless, the album does sound like other things. By making his methodology known, Chasny has undermined the chance to take Hexadic straightforwardly on as the new album by a questing sonic adventurer. Ride the waves of the shimmering “Future Verbs”, be pummelled by the wild “Wax Chance”, bang the table to the powerful forward thrust of “Maximum Hexadic” and revel in the very Earth-like "Hollow River”. But try not to be disappointed when a new musical form fails to manifest itself.

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