Six Organs Of Admittance

Today, Six Organs of Admittance, the long-running moniker of Ben Chasny, has announced his 21st album, Time is Glass, out April 26th via Drag City, and shares its lead single/video, “The Mission.” For the past 25 years, Chasny has written music as Six Organs of Admittance while living in different places out on the road for most of that time. After two decades of shifting impermanence, the Six Organs shingle has returned to Humboldt County, from whence Chasny had long ago emerged; there, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, Time is Glass was conceived.

“The Mission”, the first single and lead track off Time is Glass, nods to the acid-folk of Current 93 and the cosmic pop of Chris Bell’s Big Star. It’s a cut that highlights the acoustic technique that has distinguished Chasny’s transformative songwriting over the past several decades, while calling forth a falsetto melody equal parts lullaby and prayer, a murmuring of feral truths sung so gently that all has got to be forgiven. For the music video, director Elisa Ambrogio sews together scenes from California and Portugal into a patchwork of texture and tone.

On writing “The Mission”, Chasny recalls: “A couple of years ago a good friend of mine was falling in love in a new country and the stories he told at the time were both beautiful and terrifying, sublime and on the edge. I wrote this song for him and his new partner after they had begun to figure out how to be together.”

Recorded in the visceral environs of home, Time is Glass is sharply focused, even as misty impressionist mountains float through the background. Sweet and spiny, “The Mission” sings itself-as-opening-treatise, before turning abruptly to through events of rural industrial psychedelia/ecosystem goth, synth-tinged acoustic folk, fingerstyle mastery… and soon the time of the record becomes clear, moving fluidly, relaxed, but aware, to help lift our helplessly earthbound community into the firmament above. The acoustic sounds ringing, layered suddenly, then clear again. Explosions of a new kind of distortion. Ecstatic melodies. Communing. The space of a day. The space of a season. Time is Glass is time made precious: a record produced by patience that marinates all things Six Organs, past and present, into nine new songs.

With Time is Glass, Chasny is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, threading backward through the time of Six Organs of Admittance to form an intimate cosmic expression. The record arrives on LP, CD and digital on April 26th and can be purchased below.