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Ben Chasny
- acoustic guitar, autoharp, turntable If the pan-cultural acoustic/psych inventions of Ben Chasny and his Six Organs of Admittance could be defined by only one composition, that tune would certainly have to be The Manifestation. Released in the year 2000, The Manifestation was a clear, one-sided vinyl 12", a curiously primitive etching of the sun featured on the B-side. A one-time pressing of 500, The Manifestation evaporated just as quickly as it came. As an artifact, it is an underground psychedelic collector's treasure, worthy of display space on the mantle. But it also happens to be a dangerously potent dose of the Six Organs of Admittance experience, a divinely concentrated blend of every aspect of Chasny's mystical sound. Music of this caliber simply cannot remain unavailable. Announcing the reissue of The Manifestation on compact disc, entirely remastered and featuring nearly 20 minutes of conceptual bonus music based on the ancient idea of the "music of the spheres" and the harmonics between the visible planets. Originally sprawling across one side of vinyl, The Manifestation is an extended raga of genre-defying madness, a dizzy melding of acoustic fingerstyle, shamanic chants, chimes, hand percussion, space jam and ghostly vocals that effectively blurs the cultural boundaries of eastern and western folk music. It is an ode to the sun, as represented by the original vinyl B-side etching. Ruminating on the sun and the galaxy, Chasny was inspired to incorporate the original artifact into a musical experiment for the reissue, one that adopts the ideas of alchemical astronomers of yore and incorporates them - quite literally. Chasny placed the original record on his turntable, B-side up, laid his stylus down on the sun etching and recorded the results. He then placed the needle down again in a different spot, and then a different one again all the way to the end. Chasny was appropriating the concept of Bode's Law, a rough rule that predicts the spacing of the planets in the solar system in relation to the perceived distance of each planet from the sun. While the stylus clicked and popped as it "played" the sun, Chasny composed music using the ancient Egyptian mode for each of the "naked eye" planets. From Mercury through Saturn, acoustic modals dance, drone and chime in its own particular key as the sun etching crackles, sounding eerily like an old pre-war 78 RPM unearthed from some alien land. As for Earth…the "center of the universe" in the Milky Way has no mode at all, no musical key to speak of. All Earth has is the human voice, and lending his most unique set of pipes for the planet Earth is David Tibet of Current 93. As the sun sizzles statically behind him, Tibet recites a spoken word piece of terrestrial imagery, lending a very haunting, cryptic feel to the otherworldly affair. The result is akin to a musical journey outward from the sun, blending shimmering acoustic guitar and the original B-side's own dissonance for an absolutely surreal listening experience. Six Organs
of Admittance takes the time-expanding dynamics of Robbie Basho
and distorts it through the deepest corridors of cult-laden psychedelic
music. This new version of The Manifestation weds pagan
worship with spiritual cosmology to create music as ambitious as it is
beautiful. We are proud to reincarnate The Manifestation,
a crucial entry in the Six Organs of Admittance body of work. |
Six
Organs of Admittance