Crumhorn Labs Hauptwerk Organs

The Veiled Sea is easily one the most viscerally satisfying records in the Six Organs of Admittance discography. As always, Chasny finds the invisible threads between incongruous sound worlds. Here it’s American (electric) guitar heroics and galactic postpunk, Popol Vuh-ish pastoralism and heavy psych. But these disparate musical regions are here rendered so fully and tangibly, one is struck by the sheer mass of them. It is an improbable universe, but somehow it all connects. This is a record a little outside of the standard Six Organs catalog but no less a perfect part of it - one where big, beefy extended electric guitar solos stand proudly on one track and extraterrestrial-seeming rock on the next. Chasny is always one to boldly follow his own muse and the audience has always had the privilege of following. The Veiled Sea is no exception and a grand addition to the 6Ø catalog.

This project began from my own insomnia. Though I have mostly beaten my bouts of insomnia, in 2019 I began to have a new kind where I would wake up at 4am and not be able to go back to sleep. Sometimes I would just get up and start my day, but sometimes I had hardly had any sleep after going to sleep late and desperately wanted to drift off again. I went to youtube to look up music to fall asleep too and become disappointed with the music that was available. Most of it had abrupt chord changes or extraneous playing, as If the musician couldn’t help but add their own ego. What I needed was something more of a drone, with cyclical playing that didn’t really go anywhere. I needed music that didn’t develop at all, because then the mind followed the development. In this way I think music to fall asleep to veers away from ambient music. For music to fall asleep to to be a success, it really must “go nowhere.”