Six Organs Of Admittance – Hexadic

I was shocked by this record when I first listened to it, but had read a bit about the unusual way in which these pieces were composed, and they are composed, which you don't get on first listen. This album has some of the most unrelenting blasts of guitar noise, needle in the red, disorienting bits of vocal, rhythm section finding a way of functioning that sounds nothing like rhythm in the usual sense. It has taken several times listening to this for my mind to begin to make sense of it, hear it as music - still talking about the loud pieces, and now I play it and play it loudly and enjoy it very much. The quieter pieces remind me a bit of the Sun City Girls, in their more abstract, less playful, vibe. As an album of songs based on a system to be used to break habits in playing and writing, to dodge being derivative of anything, it seems odd to be making comparisons... you can't really even compare this to other Six Organs albums. It's like Ben and friends have delivered unto us a new Trout Mask Replica, by way of Sun City Girls and Jandek, of, in it's "chance" fashion, carefully composed pieces meant to shatter habits and expectations in both listener and performer. I know it will grow on me more and more. Nothing on this album bores me, and I find the quieter pieces to be quite lovely, the notes falling unpredictably into a somewhat Near-Eastern sort of sound, working, if from any scale at all, from something more Oriental than Occidental. Chasny seems committed to playing this out, as Hexadic II has already been released by Drag City (supposed to be a quieter affair, and I have already purchased it but haven't listened to it yet... still working on this one) and there is apparently a very scarce CDr Hexadic Live 2015 (bootleg? Self-released?) floating about in the universal hexagram. Recommended for people who are sick to death of "the familiar," and enjoy guitar based music that is by turns painful and beautiful and always moving in unexpected directions... experimental music that really is experimental, conceptual, but in the sense that the concept is to draw a card and play that note, so a concept based on chance rather than intention or even intuition.