Six Organs Of Admittance - The Veiled Sea (Black Vinyl)

I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in some way dimly understood, might still partake of the magical. In both music and conversation, Chasny relentlessly pursues connection, the way this is related to that, the way that recapitulates something else. For a man who has made such singularly original music for the past twenty years, Chasny seems to love mapping the circuits of influence and inspiration that traverse his body of work. (The song titles on Six Organs records often function like a faded card catalog to the library of his mind.) As if the beauty of his music resided in its uniqueness, but the wisdom of if it was to be found in its correspondence with a vast world of visionary discernment down the ages.