For more than 15 years, guitarist Ben Chasny's Six Organs of Admittance has created hypnotic acoustic soundscapes fleshed out by eclectic percussion. But he's turned his amp way past 11 for the warped interstellar full-length Ascent, an album filled with mystical thinking.
"This record has a pretty heavy gnostic sci-fi element," Chasny told Wired of the latest Six Organs of Admittance release, which hits stores Aug. 21. One example: The track "One Thousand Birds," which you can hear below, bows to 12th-century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds and its phoenix fable of lost atoms and eternal mirrors.
"It's an old song, but it was inspired by a tale of gnosis, so it seemed to fit right in," said Chasny, who played in psych-rock band Comets on Fire from 2004's transformative Sub Pop stunner Blue Cathedral to the group's indefinite hiatus in 2008.
The Comets on Fire musicians play on the new Six Organs of Admittance album, and Chasny probably couldn't have found a more powerful backing band for his spiritual journey through the universe. (You can check them out on the upcoming Six Organs of Admittance tour, which starts Sept. 20 in San Diego.)
If you're looking for cultural analogues right now, the spiraling electricity of Ascent slots in nicely as an unofficial soundtrack for other gnostic sci-fi standouts like Grant Morrison's The Invisibles comics or The Matrix film trilogy.
Yet Chasny is quick to cite Ascent's spiritual element.
"Modern science might snicker at the religious for what they consider to be fairy tales or whatever," he said. "But they're merely changing the sign, not the story: Escape from Earth. Find life elsewhere. Leave the planet and the material plane behind."
