What is That Noise? Come on, Feel the Noise! Make Some Noise! Words that ought to rhyme with noise (Boise), but don't.

Six Organs of Admittance play Portland, February 16th, 2008

It was an uncharacteristically dry President's Day weekend in Portland, Oregon, and I was hosting a crew of friends who had come to visit from LA, the Bay area, and my former home of Salt Lake City. It had been a while since we had all been in the same town together, and we were appropriately wasted off of a hefty amount of inappropriate booze (Goldschlager and Hamm's). It wasn't hard to convince my guests, light and impressionable as 17 year old prom dates, to forgo the usual Portland fare—giant bookstores, strip clubs, rose gardens—for the blistering ear assault that is Six Organs of Admittance.


Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance

They played The Doug Fir, a trendy bar in south east Portland that feels like it was built by a gang of hipster lumberjacks trying to recreate The Shining's Overlook Hotel. Ben Chasny, the noisemaker behind such acts as Comets on Fire and the mastermind behind SOA, took the stage before a quietly filled house. If there was a whisper in the room, within seconds of Chasny's first song it was hushed.

Chasny is, amongst other things, a masterful musician. His delicate acoustic finger picking flows and explores the whole neck of the guitar, thundering rapidly in a Devendra Banhart-style finger-fuck, only to gently retreat into tricky yet eloquent riffs that sound as effortless as those of Nick Drake. Without having seen them live, one could listen to one of their better albums, let's say School of the Flower, and wonder how much of the sound is studio manipulated, or at least edited for narrative effect. Listen to a studio recording of SOA and notice the abrupt tempo changes, or the ease and immediacy with which songs transition. In the cases of other bands, these details would seem arbitrary, the results of an engineer who is at least half awake and a band that is at least half-practiced. In the case of SOA, however, the live performance displays the subtleties of song that are not only intentional, but necessary. At one point, playing solo, Chasny finished a song, abruptly detuned his E string, and began the next song with literally one beat since the last. At another point, his acoustic guitar had created a gentle ambient noise flowing over the melody, perhaps subtle enough for some not to have noticed. The fact that it was intentional became clear when his disarming voice chimed in, harmonized not with the chords his fingers were plucking but with the swelling overtones from his amplifier. These connections—the chaos of noise to the sturdiness of musicianship, the charged and passionate to the controlled and eloquent—are what make an SOA show such an impossibly unique experience.

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