Send "Six Organs of Admittance " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 As selfish as it seems, I sometimes wish that Ben Chasny-- for more than a decade now, the architect of one of America's best-ever psychedelic syndicates, Six Organs of Admittance-- would sit still. Across more than a dozen albums and even more collaborations, Chasny has proven the restless sort who bounces between sounds, structures, and ideas with the curiosity of a precocious teenager. Scrappy meditations for acoustic guitar, epic drone escapades for ensembles, breezy folk-rock ruminations for a full band: Chasny has played it all, sometimes on the same album and oftentimes with mixed results. Some of his most riveting work brushes against some of his most rote, with some of his most inspired pieces settling alongside his most insipid. The discography of the unquestionably talented Chasny, then, has been a fascinating if frustrating listen, where the attempt has always seemed more important than the execution.Asleep on the Floodplain, Chasny's fifth for Drag City since 2005, again finds the Six Organs mastermind eager to roam. "S/word and Leviathan", for instance, builds for 10 minutes through layers of dulcimer melodies, electronic rumbles, and harmonium sustains before arriving, in its final three minutes, at a mantra inspired by theology pioneer Catherine Keller. The tunes around it, though, don't even cross the three-minute mark. "Poppies" is a kinetic 61-second adventure for acoustic guitar, built on a theme that lends itself to repetition and long variations that come to a sudden stop. The marathon's other bookend, "A New Name on an Old Cement Bridge", is another instrumental, but this one's a concentric beauty, where the acoustic melody moves with graceful deliberation over a harmonium drone....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Ben Chasny, the hippie guitar luminary behind Six Organs of Admittance, said this to the British magazine Terrascope in 1999 as they were writing a comprehensive feature about him. (It is a must-read for any Six Organs fan.) Around that time, he had just finished his brambly and experimental CD, Dust and Chimes, yet one can hear Chasny’s sentiments about home and nature in all the music he has made since then. It’s a simple and profound statement that also sums up why listeners are so passionate about their childhood bands. We can never get our youth back, but we can remember, and music works on the emotional components of memory in a way that a Polaroid can’t quite manage. But Chasny isn’t trying to invoke all of our homes for us. He is playing music about his home with a passion, which is just as powerful. There has never been a doubt in my mind that his records come from Northern California, whether it’s the Elk River Valley near Eureka or the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now resides. Like Thuja member Loren Chasse does with his field recordings, Six Organs of Admittance finds the beauty of California’s upper regions in the sprawling and bustling Bay Area, albeit in a different way. The attempt to connect these places is quite apparent on Chasny’s newest and most forthcoming album to date, Asleep on the Floodplain. Here, “home” means two things: his childhood home a stone’s throw away from Oregon, which forms the record’s theme, and his current home 270 miles southward, where Asleep on the Floodplain was conceived and recorded. Sounding like it was made outdoors in a valley between brushy mountains (without the rustling or squawking), Asleep is earthy and raw where 2009’s Luminous Night was polished and strained, a mostly acoustic affair that still retains much of Six Organs’ rumbling density. Its kindred record would be 2005’s School of the Flower, also acoustic, and those who passed over Shelter from the Ash (2007) and Luminous Night may wonder if anything’s changed. Of course, Asleep on the Floodplain is a step back in the best sense. Chasny relies not on a Renaissance Fair’s assemblage of strings and woodwinds, but on his awe-inspiring mastery of the guitar that won him a following. Few in the 21st century wield as much power over their instrument as he does, and he plays as if everything from a simple pluck to the most advanced techniques might unlock a treasured memory....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| While San Francisco guitarist Ben “Six Organs of Admittance” Chasny has put out records consistently since the mid-’90s, he changed the game, hard, with the ‘05 release School of the Flower, A full studio setup served to “elevate his rusty drones and Robbie Basho-inspired folk figures to completely different realms.” Following that ‘un, he created a series of increasingly complex and stylish neo-psych long-players (making use of the LP format to create projects best heard within it, front-to-back), culminating in 2009’s gloriously weird and diverse Luminous Night. Long-haulers may regard this new joint, Asleep on the Floodplain as a bit of a throwback to earlier records such as Dark Noontide and particularly Compathia — the music Chasny recorded in his living room — and that will not be wholly inaccurate. While Asleep On the Floodplain (his sixth project with Chicago’s Drag City label in as many years) retains the professional studio clarity, it bothers less with the cerebral experimentation, hewing closer to the simple acoustic meditations of simpler days. At least, Floodplain is ultimately simple. “Dawn, Running Home” rests on several layers of noisy musique concrete, but still drives in its charming embedded melody. The entrancing 12-minute “S/word and Leviathan” begins with some of Chasny’s most sophisticated acoustic guitar work and blends in layers of noise until it pins the meters, but it’s still more about the mood than the composition, and neither is really anything too fancy. Even the disc’s weirdest track, the reverb-and-drone bath “River of My Youth,” sounds, in context, much gentler and more grounded than the sum of its arbitrary parts....full text |
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