(2019) Six Organs of Admittance - For Octavio Paz (2003, Remastered) [FLAC,Tracks]

(2019) Six Organs of Admittance - For Octavio Paz (2003, Remastered)





Review:

American Primitive guitar isn’t just about guitar playing. It’s also about stories, and there’s a story that applies to this record. Glenn Jones tells it well, so if you want to hear it done right, catch his next concert and ask him to tell it. It goes like this: he and Jack Rose were chatting about For Octavio Paz. They talked about how much they liked it, and how much they wished that he would make another record like it. But they didn’t think it was going to happen, since Chasny was on record saying that he didn’t want to be locked into American Primitive guitar; Rose rejoined that that’s exactly where he wanted to be. Time-Lag Records released the original 500-copy pressing of For Octavio Paz in 2003. It sold out in 24 hours, and while Holy Mountain subsequently reissued it on CD, it has taken until 2019 for Ben Chasny, the man behind the myriad manifestations of Six Organs of Admittance, to arrange a repressing of the record in its original format. It is not an exact reissue. The Time-Lag edition’s cover had a white on white design that was a nice idea, but kind of hard to make out. This edition opts for visibility by magnifying and colorizing the OG’s elemental images. And Chasny has remixed and remastered the music. Since aside from a few percussion and wordless vocal overdubs, this is record of acoustic guitar solos, the differences come out in the qualities of the sounds rather than the relationships between them. Chasny’s main concerns were removing the dubious influence of a guitar pedal he used as a reverb unit, which caused some phasing problems, and eliminating needlessly applied noise reduction.  It’s a chancy thing to compare an LP to some advance WAV files, but an A-B listening session reveals that the new edition has a broader frequency range that’s especially friendly to the resonance of Chasny’s low-end forays. You won’t walk away from the new edition thinking you’ve heard a new record, but you might feel like its handshake is firmer than you remembered. As for the music itself, this album is an outlier in the Six Organs of Admittance discography. While it concentrated implications made by earlier recordings, Chasny has made good on his plan not to invest in the American Primitive neighborhood; even when he has played solo acoustic music in subsequent years, he has not drawn on America folk forms or mysticism. Even then, the relationship was a tenuous one. There’s certainly none of Fahey’s black-hearted humor or unstoppable, syncopated bass, or much of Basho’s feverish imagination. There’s a bit of Peter Walker’s abstracted flamenco, but it’s further removed from that music’s cultural roots.  This record is more of a statement of what makes Chasny’s music his own. The brief percussive introductions to each side of the record assert the user-friendliness of his cosmic side; he may give you a glimpse of the beyond, but it’s there to bring you into the moment, not to get you lost on some spiritual quest. The rise-from-the-depths pitch trajectory of “Memory Memory Memory” and the melodic arc that the overdubbed guitars trace on “The Night Knows Nothing” both sound like things that he might have sung before he played them. And while “The Acceptance of Absolute Negation,” which takes up most of side B, twists and winds, the ways that Chasny finds to bring himself back shows that commitment to cohesion that has made his most ambitious music make sense.









Tracklist:

01 - Fire On Rain

02 - When You Finally Return

03 - Memory, Memory, Memory

04 - The Night Knows Nothing at All

05 - Elk River

06 - They Fixed the Broken Windmill Today

07 - Rain On Fire

08 - The Acceptance of Absolute Negation





Media Report:

Genre: alternative folk

Source: CD

Format: FLAC

Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM

Bit rate mode: Variable

Channel(s): 2 channels

Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz

Bit depth: 16 bits