Despite his career tenure in the reductive order of “freak-folk,” Ben Chasny has never been easy to track. For nearly a quarter-century as Six Organs of Admittance, Chasny—perhaps the most consistently exploratory figure in what was once dubbed New Weird America—has moved in fits, starts, and left turns. He has been a high-flying guitarist and a hypnotic singer-songwriter, a curdled noise enthusiast and an aspiring poet. And just when he seemed to settle, Chasny developed his own system of speculative music, Hexadic, in which a deck of cards prompted the notes he played for a pair of challenging 2015 albums. And then, of course, he pivoted to his most serene music ever.
Companion Rises offers a few more unforeseen forks in this riverine path. Chasny has earned a reputation as an ardent collaborator, but he wrote, recorded, and played everything here alone. What’s more, he generated many of these rhythms—and there are lots of them, layered like intricate strata of ancient stones—with computer programs he designed. That sounds complicated, but Six Organs have actually never made an album that maintains such momentum or delivers so many compulsive hooks at once. “I don’t know what kind of music it is,” Chasny wrote while mixing Companion Rises last summer. After all this time, it’s music that suggests wholesale new frontiers for what Six Organs might become.
A keen melody or stunning detail anchors every song on Companion Rises. The title track—a tender astrological ballad, where synthesizer rays suggest the rising or setting sun—is one of the most beautiful, disarming songs Chasny’s ever recorded. “The 101,” meanwhile, reimagines the Six Organs aesthetic of muttered vocals and byzantine guitars as garage rock, as though Chasny suddenly stepped into the Fun House. Electrifying and jarring, the song and its jagged solo drag Chasny back toward the psych-rock roar of Comets on Fire, a band he left a dozen years ago. It’s thrilling to witness.
Whenever Chasny burrows inside some particularly contemplative tune, he eventually claws back toward the light. When his cooing voice finally lifts over the fluorescent electronic washes of “Black Tea,” it’s like watching clouds break. “Haunted and Known” drifts through three minutes of acoustic guitar and fragile falsetto before squelching electronics start to roar, ultimately overpowering everything.
What’s most remarkable about Companion Rises, though, is a trio of songs—“Two Forms Moving,” “The Scout Is Here,” and “Mark Yourself”—that suggest a new future for Six Organs. Chasny has often favored meticulous arrangements, where each sound gets its own distinct space; these songs could get tedious, mazelike. But on these songs, Chasny wedges the flotsam of brittle guitars and the jetsam of distorted electronics closely together, shaping a warped sort of composite folk-pop. It recalls the most essential work of Califone, a band at their best when building something new by mining the junkyard of American folk. Chasny has rarely sounded so tuneful or focused.
In recent years, following Chasny has meant diving with him into esoterica, where the animating ideas for a piece of music, from the Tarot to the desert, could feel more important than the songs themselves. The results were fascinating, if vexing. Based on theories about aliens, astronomy, and the occult, the writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart.
Buy: Rough Trade
