At the Edge of the Fall 

One sleight of hand I've maintained over the years of writing about records is I don't quantify them, I qualify my feelings about them. You won't see a grade assigned here; that's not the point of listening to music, as far as I'm concerned. My habit is to showcase a record more than review it. I've been able to maintain this practice because record reviews are not my usual output, so I am allowed the privilege of only discussing albums I enjoy, or at least that affect me somehow. My life is small in scale in many ways, but I do have better things to do than write about music I don't like hearing. This record affected me, because — as I told its creator right after the first listen — it is something that I didn't know I was missing. Way out of my recent tastes, it was such a revelation on the speakers that halfway through the first song I said, "Fuck this," and immediately switched to headphones. I didn't just want the tunes, I needed to hear the mix. You should really hear this mix.

A quick note on the artist before I get to his sounds. Six Organs of Admittance is the longtime project of guitarist, singer, producer and musical visionary Ben Chasny. Chasny's one of those rare domestic mystics who is able to casually mesh with the Babel-cacophony of human culture at large and respond with something both of and above its influences. He's nominally a sort of folk artist, but in the best lineage of folk artists in that he creates brand new patterns where others are happy to hone their imitations. He makes innovation seem easy through novel expression, because with music, he is of his own kind. He is also a Humboldtshevik who has escaped containment and found an audience around the world.

This is a late summer record. I clocked that much before confirming it with Chasny. Late summer is the time when the idyll starts to end, when the noble rot starts creeping into the overripe days and spilling out secrets of darkness to come. All of us living in a seasonal flux feel that change. We sublimate it, and it transposes itself across our senses like a drifting fog before resting in the seat of our consciousness and informing the climate of our psyche. It is the channel fader to the fall. And that's where this album's mix lives. It's tough enough to capture a good acoustic guitar sound, a lot comes down to the abilities of the player (which are excellent here). Add to that layered vocals, balancing the line between clarity and dominance, and beds of sound — full of dynamic shifts, undertones, bass suggestions — and things can get crowded quickly. Not so here, where over the course of nine songs of new folk configurations, the mix serves as a color wheel palette, holding the plain secret of brilliant composition like Van Gogh's wheatfields. This album is art. It will give you dreams.

I have deliberately omitted mentioning song titles. Even the title of the record is, as I also told its maker, not parallel with the music, but oblique, slanting away from direct meaning like that earlier drifting fog. The record follows a narrative flow in the same way nature forces movement from its subjects, and it should be enjoyed as one piece, no singles. You are here, it is now, tomorrow will be the same, but also different. There isn't a larger scheme than that, no specific human drama, but contained in that shift is the venue for all our changes, growths and disintegrations.

I'm not trying to be vague or enigmatic. The album is called Time is Glass by Six Organs of Admittance. Listen to it, with the immersion of headphones if you can. Try it out in some familiar places, in the wilds and beyond. With the right ears, you'll see I am writing as plain as day about something running through all of our days, from now until the fall.

Collin Yeo (he/him) sometimes forgets to listen. He lives in Arcata.