FOLK METAL?: “I know metal guys who listen to [John] Fahey now,” says Six Organs of Admittance leader Ben Chasny. |
The story goes that during a Lungfish show in New York City in 2001 an audience member was so transported by the Baltimore band’s Flipper-gone-to-Heaven mantra rock that he cried out, “Time is melting!” Lungfish head man Daniel Higgs, standing as usual on one foot, his arms extended like wings, stopped the song. “Time is melting? Time is melting?!” Higgs, a poet and tattoo artist and frequent wearer of two pairs of trousers at the same time, is bearded like a great Victorian — some titan of consciousness, a Melville or a Darwin. “Do you realize what that implies?” he demanded, his mind ascending monkey-like into high wobbling bowers of astonishment. “That implies that time was at one point a solid!”This is the sort of story that Ben Chasny, 31 years old, resident of Oakland, California, and purveyor of shivering metallo-folk with Six Organs of Admittance, particularly appreciates. Lungfish are his kind of band — rugged, visionary, nonconformist — and the varying properties of time are of great interest to him. “Solid, huh?” he says before the Six Organs show at the Middle East on July 7. “That’s beautiful. Higgs is a genius. When Noel [Von Harmonson] was laying down the drum track for ‘River of Transfiguration,’ I kept telling him to mess up the beat. I was like, ‘Stagger it, stagger it!’ I’m not into rhythm, the straight hit — I like music to miss the beat because it produces that sense of time expanding. All the drummers that I love, their timing is slightly off — it just fucks with you.”
“River of Transfiguration,” the 24-minute track that concludes Six Organs’ new The Sun Awakens (Drag City), is the sound of a man being chased through a Tibetan monastery by heavy-metal demons. Down wind tunnels of the spirit he goes, an album by the Incredible String Band under his arm, greasy Cthulhu wuffling flat-footed on his trail as he runs a bronze gantlet of gongs. A spectral, insinuating flute from Iran called the ney is featured, as are some ritual chimes and groans: the atmosphere here is pure entranced Easternness, but Chasny describes himself as “not at all” a practicing Buddhist, or a practicing anything else. His church, if he has one, is the Arcanum of noise and imagination that he finds in musicians like Japanese guitarist and din master Keiji Haino and mystically inclined authors like Henry Corbin and Gaston Bachelard. In their name he will evangelize, glad and animated.
“If you hear something and you get it immediately, that’s kind of the end,” he begins one of his riffs. “But if you hear something and it sounds good but you don’t get it . . . like Current 93 or Nurse with Wound, the music is so beautiful but at the same time you’re like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ So you have to keep going back to it, back to it — and if you keep doing that, you’re being taken into the future. Nobody was talking about Keiji Haino three years ago. He used to be seen as extremely avant-garde and crazy, and now kids are like, ‘I love that Keiji Haino guy!’ My music is more pop than a lot of the stuff that I listen to, but at the same time, if I can turn some people on by mentioning these artists, I’ll do it.”
