Ben Chasny’s sprawling doom-folk project Six Organs of Admittance exists somewhere in the void between a deeply intimate— dare I say delicate—acoustic experience and a haunting, tribal-gothic nightmare.
Maybe you didn’t notice him on the last Comets On Fire record. Hear that squeal? No, not that squeal, the other one. Yeah, that’s him.
He brings that squeal to the Doug Fir this week, where I first saw him a year ago. Chasny is apparently finishing up a new record, and for someone whose approach seems to change constantly, I wondered if this year’s show would be any different.
“I think I am going to try some of the new songs live for the first time,” Chasny says via e-mail. “It’ll probably be less chaotic and more quiet.”
The chaos he’s referring to was the second act of his show, in which he and a bandmate discarded their acoustic instruments for overdriven electric ones, and shredded like lawnmowers. This was in direct contrast to the first half, which had Chasny gently cooing over his delicately plucked guitar.
It was at that point that the songs one might have recognized from some of his records were still discernible, but that recognition didn’t last long.
“The two are totally different beasts,” Chasny says about playing his albums onstage rather than in the studio. “I don’t even think they are related that much, except that they share songs.”
When it comes to his albums as presented on record, the dichotomy between Chasny as songbird and Chasny as noise machine has manifested itself by way of releases that tend to sprawl over the landscape of human emotions like an old blanket.
His best record to date, School of the Flower, had his finger-picked bliss spread evenly throughout his overdriven noise-dread to good results, where the shifts from ominous to serene played like the chapters in a well told story.
Compare it to his Manifestation EP, a brilliant, if not obscure experience in surreal noisemaking, and School feels like a walk through the Billboard charts.
His most recent full-length, Shelter From the Ash, was unfortunately a disappointment, with Chasny flirting with the accessible singer-songwriter thing like he was getting paid to do it (oh, wait…).
When it comes to the forthcoming Six Organs record, apparently to be released sometime this summer, it’s hard to know what to expect. Accessibility is a subject some songwriters have trouble addressing. When asked about what his new record might sound like, Chasny isn’t giving much in the way of clues.
“I guess I just don’t know what people like,” he says. “The new album is about as accessible as the average record I suppose … [it] is sort of glam … I think it just sort of happened.”
Whether Shelter From the Ash will mark a turning point in Chasny’s work, from the avant-noise singer to digestible-as-Tums folk singer, is yet to be seen. He’s created enough diverse music in 10 years of recording, however, to warrant a peak at his new material this Thursday night.