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(2018) VA - Hexadic III
Review:
A few years ago, Ben Chasny reckoned his guitar playing needed a break or a breakthrough. Over the last two decades, recording as the superb Six Organs of Admittance and in a messy web of collaborations, Chasny had become one of the instrument’s most exploratory new masters. He had woven dizzying acoustic fantasies through psychedelic fever dreams, summoned stately solo meditations on poets and landscapes, and led full bands with cutting electric leads. But after a quarter-century, he detected a complacency that stemmed from endless cycles of recording, rehearsing, and touring. So he made the obvious choice: Combining his interests in chance, games, mysticism, and number theory, he invented an entire personalized system for composing that relied on a deck of cards to determine the notes he’d play on the guitar and, hopefully, force him out of old habits. He called it Hexadic. Three years have passed since Chasny unveiled his Hexadic system with two records, both released in 2015. The first, Hexadic, is a scabrous, powerful noise rock statement, its arching distortion proclaiming that Chasny hadn’t somehow lost his edge in his new role as a theorist. Hexadic II, however, is cocoon-soft, its fluttering acoustic notes and nearly hummed words stretched like strands across each song. The LPs serve as testaments to Hexadic’s intrigue and versatility. Elsewhere, Chasny has sometimes struggled to explain the system, even as he’s led classes on it, written a book about its order of operation, and designed a deck of playing cards for interested musicians. He’s often had to talk about what it is and isn’t or who influenced it and who didn’t. For Hexadic III, he’s finally asked his friends for help with the demonstration. Curated by Chasny, the new album collects seven diverse interpretations of the system from his inspirations and collaborators. Heron Oblivion’s Meg Baird and Charlie Saufley float through a gauze of gentle piano and guitar, while Richard Youngs wrestles the system into a surrealist collage of acidic distortion and vocals that flip between chants and rants. It all ends with the gorgeous and haunting “Zoa Pastorale,” a wordless keyboard hymn written by one of Hexadic’s earliest champions, British composer and theorist Phil Legard. Stuck somewhere between the fugues of Bach and the psychedelic extremes of Terry Riley, it’s a stunning little piece and an unexpected application for the guitar-centric Hexadic. Indeed, for the neophyte or the casually curious, Hexadic III illustrates the potential and promise of Chasny’s obscure method in a way that a dozen blog posts or even an instructional manual cannot. Hexadic’s use of chance means that the relationship between notes likely isn’t what you’re used to hearing in familiar Western scales—it was created, after all, to disrupt those thought patterns. The system’s best results, then, suggest a maze of music, a stream of sound that the players simply seemed to have slipped inside. Moon Duo’s “Square of the Sun,” the smoldering krautrock jam that opens the album, epitomizes this feeling. The notes hang together loosely, conjuring recognizable guitar chords but never quite landing on them. The sensation is that of an ellipsis, suggesting this music might go on forever in search of resolution. It’s so perfect that perhaps it should. Likewise, a trio led by Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley seems set to drift forever toward the horizon; they eke out distorted chords and squeeze and stretch the rhythm, as if examining the output of Chasny’s system in real time, with genuine shared surprise. You can feel them searching for some end or climax, all the while knowing it doesn’t truly exist. Tashi Dorji condenses the quest into two tidy minutes of prepared acoustic guitar, a welcome proof of economy for a system that doesn’t favor it. The most remarkable track here is the one that most fully rescues Hexadic from the realm of esoterica. On “The Hanging Man,” Jenks Miller begins with a riff that sounds like a sun-warped version of something he might play in his country-rock band, Mount Moriah—a crackling electric lead, all moaning and elegant. There’s a demented calliope organ line and distant vocals that seem to arrive on the wind. These threads gather across four minutes, then coil into a tight, delightful passage, with both the riff and the rhythm reflecting off of Miller’s singsong melody. It may be the first Hexadic song with a legitimate hook, a rarity in Miller’s slanted oeuvre, too. If Chasny’s goal was to help himself and others snap their habits, this is indisputable evidence he’s done it.
Tracklist:
01 - Square Of The Sun - Moon Duo
02 - The Hanging Man - Jenks Miller
03 - Protection Hex - Meg Baird
04 - KO - Tashi Dorji
05 - Abandoned Problems - Richard Youngs
06 - Solastalgia - Stephen O'Malley
07 - Zoa Pastorale - Phil Legard
Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: alternative folk, indie-rock
Media Report:
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Bit rate: ~ 653-1009 Kbps
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits |
