Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny on Scenes, Folk vs. Noise, Sun City Girls, Arthur Mag, and Comets on Fire

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Long time fan of Ben Chasny's work across the sphere of experimental music, he's a true journeyman in what he does and has one of the most accomplished CVs around. His latest Six Organs of Admittance album, Time Is Glass, is out next week and it's excellent; I got a chance to talk with him a few months ago about his incredible career and perspective on the ever-changing landscape of experimental music.

How's Northern California treating you?
I grew up here and moved away in 2000. I was living everywhere—Bay Area, Seattle, Connecticut, Massachusetts—for about 20 years, and then I moved back in October of 2019.

Right before the pandemic.
Exactly. It was crazy. I moved back because my mother and father are getting older, and I wanted to be back and help them out with some stuff. I can't believe how much we lucked out to move back so soon before that happened.

Spending so much time kind of living in a variety of places and then putting down stakes again—what was that like for you?
I never thought I would move back. When my partner and I would come up to visit, she'd fall in love with the place, which allowed me to see it through new eyes, instead of when you're younger and you just want to get out of your small town—not necessarily because it's small, but you just want to go do stuff. Moving back was strange because all my friends were in other cities, but within a few years a bunch of my friends moved up here, so we're now able to have a cool group of friends. Ethan Miller from Comets on Fire moved up, and so did my friend Donovan Quinn, who's in New Bums with me. Meg Baird, who was from Philadelphia originally and was living in the Bay Area, she moved up. So now it's a nice group of folks.

What do you think you took away from living in a variety of places for so long?
One of the things that allowed me to move back so easily is that I realized every place has its bad parts. I kept moving because once I discovered a place's bad parts, I was like, "I'm out of here." It was easy. Instead of trying to appreciate the good parts more, I lived in four different states across 15 years, which made me realize that every place is kind of good and kind of bad.That allowed me to come back and realize that maybe the parts I didn't like so much about the area weren't so bad after all. It allowed me to appreciate the really good parts.

Tell me about this new Six Organs of Admittance record, and how you arrived at this style this time around.
There's a core sound, I suppose, to Six Organs in the first place—and by that, I don't mean so much what I feel is the essence of Six Organs, but more what other people feel is the essence of Six Organs. A certain type of acoustic sound. I do like to do records like that. I didn't realize until this record came out, but I calculated it and I realized, "Jesus, every six years I go back to this particular sound." I have to go out and explore other things, then I come back—and that's what happened.

This particular record is maybe even more sparse than previous acoustic records. I was also thinking about older records I did before Drag City, like Dark Noontide. That record was recorded actually in the same town I'm in right now. I was revisiting some ideas, but I never go backwards. It's more of a concentric circle—in the same area, but out a little bit more from from everything.

Tell me about what lit the fires from under you as a listener when it comes to this type of music.
In the very early days, when I was doing the first Six Organs stuff, I was a really big fan of Ghost, from Japan. They were a very big influence on early Six Organs. When I got to tour with them in 2005 across the U.S., that was a dream—to meet Batoh and stuff. I was also into a few of the bands on P.S.F., too. It's weird—the P.S.F. label is constantly used as a descriptor for over-the-top rock music because of High Rise and Musica Transonic. But someone who really gets into the P.S.F. label knows that that there's a lot of variation than those bands that got more popular.

I was into Kan Mikami and Kazuki Tomokawa, the two folk guys that were on there a lot. Toho Sara were another band on there. I was into all of the music on there, not just the rock stuff, so P.S.F. was a pretty big influence. Going over to the English side, there were Comus and Bert Jansch. Bert was probably the biggest influence on my actual guitar playing.

You had a bit of a bump in public exposure with Devendra Banhart's Golden Apples of the Sun compilation, which is a moment in time that's interesting to revisit.
Devendra started to get more popular, and he's never been shy about being very supportive of other musicians, so he was supportive of Six Organs of Admittance. He played a show in my living room on his first tour across the U.S. That's how we met. Later, I just got a message from him on the answering machine saying, "I'm putting out a comp. Do you want to do a song?" I was like, "Ah, whatever, that sounds very nice." I didn't think of it as a comp that would do anything, you know what I mean? I didn't think anything more of it.

Not to toot my own horn here too much, but Arthur Magazine did a few comps. Ethan did a comp. So I've been on more Arthur comps because Ethan had me—of course, he's a friend—but also Al Cisneros from OM also had me on his comp. Although, you know, Arthur never asked me to do a comp, so I don't know what's going on right now. I don't know if Arthur would want to ask me. "I'm going to get a bunch of stuff no one wants to listen to."

As far as a scene is concerned, I have a lot of thoughts on it. For one, you have the problem of people confusing the idea of genre with the idea of a scene. That was a big problem because genre is just the horizon of expectations, whereas a scene is connected, generally, physically—but, you know, it could be virtually nowadays, obviously. But there's a connection with people, so that's why you had people trying to figure out what things were called.

When the New Weird America article came out in The Wire, that was a scene. The music was extremely varied, but those people all knew each other—they were all connected. When people started applying that tag as a genre name to other things where people weren't as connected, it got very confusing, and it was a little bit frustrating at the time. For everybody from that scene, I think it felt like shining a flashlight on a bunch of cockroaches underneath a can. They all scattered and were like, "No, don't, don't, don't look at me." 

Tell me about how you think things have changed since when it comes to how independent and experimental music is made and disseminated, especially in terms of communities.
I've always optimistically imagined great numbers of strange folks gathering together in person that I don't know anything about, because they actually are very underground. In my mind, that's happening.

One thing about that period is that I do think there was a bit of a division that happened, in that there used to just be an underground scene where you'd have people playing acoustic guitar with a noise band and nobody thought twice about it. Then, everybody knew each other, and it was an underground scene, and it started to get a little divided.

It wasn't exactly because of this, but Arthur Magazine started to take on the more acoustic-oriented stuff, and then you had No Fun Fest in New York that started to take on more of the noise stuff. Whether they were conscious of it or not, people started to drift one side or the other. I always just considered it one big underground thing, but things did get kind of divided up at that time.

Nowadays, it's hard to say. When I'm on tour and promoters ask about what sort of local bands to play with, I always hope for a noise band, or a black metal band, or somebody to just mix it up a bit. I don't know how many people want to hear more than one acoustic guitar person, you know what I mean?

You're one of a few artists that's worked on both ends of the spectrum—folk and noise. I think about Sun City Girls as an obvious example there, too. The point of convergence between folk and more experimental sounds is very satisfying, too.
When I was getting into those genres, they were separate for a while. I didn't realize that the stuff that I was listening to—Bert Jansch, Leo Kottke, John Fahey—and now this sounds ridiculous, because everybody thinks of Fahey as this godfather of the underground—but for me, that was folk music. I'd go into the local record store, and the guy who owned it was like, "Oh, you like Nick Drake? You should check out a John Martyn record." On the other side, I was listening to Melvins and Steel Pole Bathtub. In the underground catalogues coming out, like Forced Exposure, they would query both. I was from a very small town, so I wasn't getting shows like that—but with these catalogues that were coming out where you could order music, you would have a folk record right beside a noise or experimental record. That was the beginning of the merging in my mind, but before that, I hadn't really thought about it.

One other thing that got me to realize that was the first record I ever did with Plague Lounge, which was put out by Holy Mountain and New World of Sound. John Allen of New World of Sound had also put out some No-Neck Blues Band records, and I remember him saying, "I was playing the Plague Lounge record for the No-neck Blues Band guys and they said, 'We can tell this guy probably listens to a lot of folk music.'" There was nothing folky about that record at all.

There were so many things going on there for me. First of all, What's this? No-Neck Blues Band know folk music? It makes sense now, but I was like, "What does that mean? How could they tell?" For the first Six Organs record, John was also very encouraging. I sent him the tape, and John said, "You should put this out yourself, like, now." John saw the future. He was like, "I think a lot of people are going to be doing folk records in the future, you need to put it out now so you can get out before everybody." So that's how the first Six Organs record came out.

I mentioned Sun City Girls before—tell me about your collaborations with Richard Bishop. You've worked with so many massive names in experimental music, really.
It's good to talk about Richard as a jumping off point, because he's always the one that I use as an example of why people should play with as many other people as possible. When I started playing with Rick, I had to really learn new things—not just technical and athletic things, but even the way I thought about how music should be put together.

Of course, there were technical things—he does a lot of alternate picking, and I used to do a lot of legato where i would do a lot of pull-offs and hammer-ons. Learning how to pick every note precisely was a huge thing, and trying to keep up with him forced me to become a better a better guitar player. He's got a great sense of humor, and we just really get along as people.

I'd love to hear you talk about Sun City Girls as a listener. I feel like they're a band where you hear them and it really opens your mind up as far as how music can sound.
They definitely were an influence as far as "You can do anything," and when Six Organs records are sometimes acoustic and sometimes noisier. The first record I heard was Torch of the Mystic, so immediately I was like. "I've heard the classic record." Then I got Valentines From Matahari and Bright Surroundings Dark Beginnings, and right off the bat they had everything. I was just a huge fan, I liked everything they did.

I started getting into them when they released Jack's Creek, which was the record where pretty much the whole first side's just them doing this skit where they pretend there's a weird sound and an octopoidal monster. I used to turn off the lights and listen to it. Then they released the Cloaven Theater video and I got to see what they look like. They just opened up tons of worlds for me.

I know that your former bandmates in Comets on Fire have stayed in your personal and creative orbit throughout the years. Has there ever been an urge to get that band back together, or is it in the past for you at this point?
Anything's always open. I just saw Ethan yesterday—we had a surprise birthday party for him. I see him, like, twice a week. We hang out, and we're friends with everybody in Comets on an individual level. It's just about really strong personalities. It's not even a democracy—everybody has the power to veto, so not a lot of things happen. If four of the guys are into something and one person says I don't want to do it, then we didn't do it. With those dynamics, it's pretty tough, because then you also get in the psychological aspects of hating the one person who didn't want to do something—and a lot of times that was me. I will admit, a lot of times I say, "No, I'm not doing that."

 I don't know, I definitely could see us playing music in the future. It was never official that we were over. I don't know what that would be like. Everybody gets along with everybody on an individual level, but there's something when all five of us get together that's just very intense. It could happen if there was no pressure and we just played some music. But I think all of those guys are great musicians, and I'm happy to still be friends with them.

It's also a thing where I think, by now, maybe the stories of Comets are a little bit bigger than how popular we ever really were in the first place. You know, we didn't have very large shows. We had very nice, cool, compact shows where everyone would have a good time. But even if we got back together...it's always interesting, because we never got the impression that we were anything more than just playing music where a few people came to the show.