Six Organs Of Admittance’s Ben Chasny has a restless intellect which has regularly guided the progress of his creation. A lyrical mastery of acoustic finger-picking would be enough to build a body of work for most musicians; this is just the stepping-off point for Ben. From the earliest days of private press psych home recordings, Six Organs Of Admittance has sought out alternative spaces in which to make music and has challenged his audience to keep up with his rapid advances into new terrain.

Over the last two years, Ben has assembled a comprehensive system of musical composition. Designed to free sound and language from rational order and replace calculation with indeterminacy, ‘The Hexadic System’ is a catalyst to extinguish patterns and generate new means of chord progressions and choices.

Although it was not his intention upon creating ‘The System’, the structures it generated were so compelling that it soon became the bones of the next Six Organs record. This is the longest time between Six Organs records since Ben started making them in 1998. This is also why the Hexadic album sounds unlike anything else made this year and generally unlike most other things made ever.

The system builds all of the tonal fields, chord changes, scales and lyrics on this record, creating the framework for the songs with which the musicians engage. Yet the system is open; within the framework, Chasny’s own personal aesthetics – the production mode of loud guitars, the order of songs, the editing of length – were all conscious decisions made to communicate the pieces. The exact same combinatorial patterns used on this record can create infinite results, depending on the choices of the individual. Ben’s years of study have produced an operational agent that has not only built all the songs on ‘Hexadic’ but is also a system anyone can use to restructure their ways of habit.

The first thing one notices when listening to ‘Hexadic’ is how unhinged it all sounds. The album brews and boils with an ominously dark tone in a desolate space, somehow dense with energy, guitar overdriven past the point of sanity, slamming drum accents, vocals cutting through in what seems to be comprised of another, as yet unheard, language. Yet, inside the apparent wild abandon and destruction is a strict internal logic of construction that unveils itself upon listening. This is the majestic dialectic of ‘Hexadic’.

Recording with Ben on ‘Hexadic’ as Six Organs Of Admittance is his old compatriot from Comets On Fire, Noel Von Harmonson, on drums, as well as his partner in Badgerlore, Rob Fisk, on bass. San Francisco psych legend Charlie Saufley takes on bass duties as well. Recorded at Eric Bauer’s Bauer Mansion in SF.