For more than 15 years, guitarist Ben Chasny’s Six Organs of Admittance has created hypnotic acoustic soundscapes fleshed out by eclectic percussion. But he’s turned his amp way past 11 for the warped interstellar full-length Ascent, an album filled with mystical thinking.
“This record has a pretty heavy gnostic sci-fi element,” Chasny told Wired of the latest Six Organs of Admittance release, which hits stores Aug. 21. One example: The track “One Thousand Birds,” which you can hear below, bows to 12th-century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds and its phoenix fable of lost atoms and eternal mirrors.