The Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, paraphrasing Aristotle (or maybe Aquinas), suggested that “the whole is something else than the sum of its parts” and here we are: two artists that I’ve followed and respected, both of them arch innovators with collaboration in their bones, joining their heads together in a new beast and it’s set me into a flutter in several ways.
Firstly, I was perhaps a little overexcited because when the collaboration was announced, my brain was hearing the ‘something else’ that would surely occur; they seemed like they were perfect for each other, like best friends in an ’80s teen movie, doomed to be separated by the vagaries of the Hero’s journey and emotional arc until the very end, when everyone finally realised that they were destined to be together forever.
Secondly, these expectations were met; and with that came with a slight sense of disappointment. There was, indeed, a rightful melding of musical souls and there was a sense that these two minds perfectly entwined but … it did sound exactly as I might have imagined and, this is almost seems pathetic to say, I guess the ‘something else’ I really wanted was something I couldn’t have imagined.I realise this is incredibly unfair, so I’ll get a few things straight before I go on: this is a wonderful release. They slide over one another, so that it feels like neither the electronics or the acoustics are in overall control. Just in itself this is remarkable. Is that a real flute? Those arpeggios are surely synthesised except … is that a cosmic guitar twang or an echoplexed hum? Is that electronic wind or just … wind? That feels almost as annoying to write as it must be to read, but these are questions that creep up on first listen and it takes a few passes to stop the nagging.
So I’ve taken a while to do this review. I’ve listened right the way through five times now. In the car, in the garden, walking, lying down and then, finally, just pottering around the house to see how it creeps into the everyday hustle. I like the fact that the Shackleton bass doesn’t try too hard to exert its authority (this has always been a wonder with Shackleton, the restraint). I like the fact that Six Organs Of Admittance doesn’t try to drag things into finger-picking lines (this has always been a wonder with Ben Chasny, the ability to curl around his collaborators).
Chasny’s voice floats in and out, whispering and cajoling and gently pushing us towards something in the distance. It’s clearly not as strident a presence as the Shackleton collaborations with, say, Heather Leigh or Ernesto Tomassini, but then that’s not what you want from Six Organs. What you get is gently swirling and psychedelic, purple-flame campfire music, often slow but never funereal, sometimes almost gamelan. It often sounds a little like the New Weird Americans playing with the Kosmische boys in a roofless church. I’ve played this album a lot. It’s made the walls gently glow. It’s what I thought I wanted.
But we hold artists we love to impossibly high standards. I remember reading interviews with Coil and Swans and Throbbing Gristle and The fucking Wedding Present (no shade implied; I love those guys) where they were clearly feeling the fan-crush of expectation and buckling under it, or dissolving, like Aphex Twin or Global Communications, into numerous diversions and side-projects.There was a part of me that wanted this release to be more perplexing. I wanted to be listening and thinking, WTF is this? I wanted them to conjoin and distend and distort. I wanted the two parts to not quite fit. I realise this is personal and dumb, but lots of music I really love (as opposed to really play – but that’s a whole other essay) is music that doesn’t quite work, that doesn’t quite gel, that almost does. I like the dislocation and the dissonance and this is perhaps why I really like lots of things but only love a few. People, places, music; it’s all the same. This is definitely ‘something else’ and I’ll definitely keep playing it.
I think it’ll do well in the end of year lists; it should do. I’ll recommend it to other people and I won’t tell them what I’ve told you in this whisper: I wanted things I couldn’t imagine; I wanted something else.-Loki-
