Ben Chasny

The core of Comets on Fire are all present on Ascent, and together they help old bandmate Ben Chasny pummel some new tracks and reconfigure several from his vast back catalog.

Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk.

Acoustic resonance returns to our ears; the new Hexadic chords fitted to the wider neck of the acoustic, evoking dark spirits, greek choir, distance cousins, the desert and the sea.

We shade our ambient in sound colors light and dark. Signals in and out of the calm and stillness of what is left unsaid. Treasured roadmaps. Coded experiments. We retouch the mindset of the past and turn to the future. We 360, deeply in space. We craft, and we flow onward. Here are new stories for each rhythm of sun and moon to earth and back. This is where the weave of light is one world, the weave of dark another. Together, they form a voice of contrast. Illumination. Connectivity. Immersion. Clarity. This is the music that forever drifts in our soul. This is our silent renaissance.

Sparsely appointed and gently played, Burning the Threshold marks a return to the pastoral folk and American Primitive styles for Ben Chasny and his long-tenured Six Organs of Admittance project. Since the early part of the decade, much of Chasny's attention has been devoted to the development and implementation of the hexadic system, a chance-based compositional method involving a set of playing cards which dictates the tonal, rhythmic, chordal, and even lyrical approach of the music. The two albums he released using this method, 2015's Hexadic and Hexadic, Vol. 2, were aesthetic wildcards whose dissonant clamor was at times thrilling, but ultimately difficult to absorb.