A contemporary master of midnight ragas, acoustic noise, and finger-picking polysyllables, Ben Chasny doesn't snag as many magazine covers as Devendra Banhart, but there's no doubt the Oakland guitarist is an equally compelling-- albeit more taciturn personality. For starters, Chasny overlaps his Six Organs of Admittance moniker's Buddhist origins with paganism, astral projections, prophetic dreams, surrealism, and a reverence for outsider folk masters. Then, of course, there's his day job as a psych monster in Comets on Fire, his craggy partnership with Deerhoof co-founder Rob Fisk in backwoods experimenters Badgerlore, a touring/recording relationship with Current 93's David Tibet, and a brief European tour with Joanna Newsom this April. As lazy as it is to pin Banhart to one specific scene or motif, Chasny proves even more difficult to jam within the confines of the "New Weird America" tag. It's like pigeonholing John Fahey's ghost.
Now add to all of that an obvious knowledge and love of Southern Lord metal/drone and early 1990s noise. Unlike those who list Vashti Bunyan and Harry Smith as forebears, Chasny cites Ghost, Dead C, Keiji Haino, the Japanese noise label PSF Records, and the vastly underrated contemporary avant guitarist Loren Conners. In the same breath, he talks about the importance of complimenting your Incredible String Band forays with Fushitsusha, Sunn 0))), the radio on white noise, and Skullflower. So while there's no doubt he works within a folk tradition on some level, instead of tagging Chasny with the full-on f-word, it makes more sense to link him with Supreme Dicks or Tower Recordings or other acoustic-minded experimenters.
Either way, Chasny's incredibly prolific by any standard. In 2004, his Six Organs ouput alone included For Octavio Paz-- a shadowy collection of mostly instrumental steel and nylon guitar pieces (with lovely bells and chimes)-- along with the reissues of 2000's Manifestation and 1999's Nightly Trembling. The year before he turned Nikki Sudden with Compathia and his self-titled 1998 debut received the reissue treatment. As Lou Barlow once taught by example, being so prolific can present a dud-heavy obstacle course, but thus far Chasny's yet to lay an overcooked egg. Better yet, his newest foray (the first for Drag City) is his strongest, most satisfying effort to date.
Though his past home-recorded output never felt thin, School of the Flower is his first recorded in a studio (gone is the borrowed cassette 4-track) and the result is a dense, more three-dimensional sound. It's also his most tightly composed effort, a Zen balance between Compathia's lullabies, For Octavio Paz's melancholy six-string intricacies, and Dark Noontide's drifting, fractured downer psych universe. If you haven't heard Six Organs yet, this is where to start.
The album begins with the raucous "Eighth Cognition", wherein Sunburned Hand of the Man/Cold Bleak Heat drummer Chris Corsano does what he does best, sluicing up an elegant dust storm part tornado/part precision rap. The churning, cymbal crash lasts for a little over a minute before suddenly dissipating and blending into the fragile "All You've Left", one of Chasny's gorgeous falsetto ballads.
Taking the whirlpool of "Eighth Cognition" whirlpool a bit further, the 13-and-a-half-minute title track is a guitar/drum meltdown Chasny says was inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley's seminal 1971 collaboration, Church of Anthrax. On it, Chasny's guitar turns into an infinite loop under which Corsano's free to blow to and fro. Inititating a different sense of motion, "Saint Cloud" drifts patiently along Chasny's soft chants and dense "Ohm"'s, some sort of droning, increasingly spiraled feedback, and crisp repetitious strings.
The spare "Words For Two" and "Home" (the later with a star-kiss, Loren Connors-style guitar launch) are Chasny's tightest, most affecting vocal-and-guitar pieces to come gliding 'round the holy mountain. There's also a thoughtful cover of Gary Higgins' folk classic, "Thicker Than a Smokey" from the 1973 album, Red Hash, which was recorded briefly before he went to prison on a two-year, nine-month sentence for possession of marijuana. Chasny's take perhaps lacks the distant small-town melancholia of the original, but when he sings its haunting opening-- "What do you intend to do young man? Where do you intend to go?"-- there are still chills. Chasny has often covered it live and decided to "throw it on the record to put the word out so we could find Gary Higgins." In fact, Zach Cowie at Drag City started writing all the Gary Higgins' he could find and eventually located the red-haired folkie, who just signed a contract with Drag City to reissue his lost 1973 masterpiece. (Like the best records, School of the Flower's legacy extends beyond just its songs.)
As intimated earlier, School of the Flower blooms and dies rather quickly. Put more prosaically, the whole thing runs its course in just under 40 minutes. This might seem like a minimalist shame for amped-up drone junkies, but really it's a tasteful (and very very welcome) gesture. More practically speaking, when Chasny reaches the final jangling sustain of the guitar coda lullaby "Lisbon," he still hasn't made a misstep or tapped a wrong note, so who can blame him for achieving something so sublime and not wanting to fuck it up? Whatever its duration, School of the Flower is one of those rare, understated but compulsive collections you'll want to listen to on repeat until it's time to blow out the incense, dump the wine in the sink, and step fuzzy-headed into the imperfect sunlight of the prosaic, but suddenly potentially transcendent world.
