25
Jinxed by Being, the new collaboration from Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance, is as uneasy as it is beautiful, teetering at times on the stark edges between genres that shouldn’t work together but somehow do. Collaborations of this quality are vanishingly rare.
Sam Shackleton has been making some of the most delightfully unclassifiable music in the world for twenty years. The early days saw him splicing dancefloor-ready dubstep with psychedelic, pulsating trance and occasional forays into a minimal, repetitive brand of disco. More recently, he has fully embraced the avant-garde, egged on by a series of like-minded collaborators: in the last eighteen months alone, he has recorded with Wacław Zimpel, Heather Leigh and Scotch Rolex, as well as releasing a solo album – The Scandal of Time – which owes a debt to hauntology, German folk song, and the bass-heavy sound systems of his early days. It seems like a natural step to work with Ben Chasny, aka Six Organs of Admittance.
Chasny himself has been at the forefront of folk-adjacent experimentation since the end of last century, peddling a mind-expanding concoction of drone, psych-folk guitar and his very own Hexadic approach to composition. Back in April, he released Time is Glass, the latest in a long line of extraordinary solo albums, which nodded back to his freak-folk beginnings and acknowledged the influence of American primitivism while still hitting all the right cerebral buttons.
While Chasny and Shackleton are two very different artists, their collaboration seems, in retrospect at least, inevitable. They share certain preoccupations – pulse, repetition, the extension or exhaustion of a theme – which they come at from different angles, sometimes meeting in the middle, glancing off each other and sending up sparks. The first track on Jinxed by Life, The Voice and the Pulse, is a perfect example of this fertile dance of ideas: scratchy, dubby electronica, spooked, heavily treated vocals and foreboding rhythms are backed by a kind of occult chant, a constant ambient whoosh and strange monastic chimes. Like all of these songs, it takes its time, stretching out, insinuating constant evolution rather than throwing up obvious moments of sharp change. The end is completely different from the start, but it’s not easy to work out how that happened.
The thick scent of ritual hangs over the whole album. Open Your Heart straddles the line between meditation and drug-induced trance for nine blissful minutes, Chasny’s guitar taking its cue from the minimal compositions of Steve Reich while the backing progresses like a dark raga. The title track grows from a warped, downbeat folk guitar workout, through a passage of strange, gnomic lyricism and the gentle splash of flowing water and distant cymbals to a place of cavernous bass and electronic effects. The song’s final third is a dense, brooding slab of dark folk. These pieces can be as punishing as they are enlightening.
The vocal parts on Jinxed by Life seem like they were recorded on a different planet, maybe on some Lovecraftian dimension. This means that any sense of levity often comes from other sources: on Stages of Capitulation, this pretty, far eastern-sounding melodic filigree hides in the song’s darker shadows. The Sign of the Dove is full of imaginative, choppy percussion and staccato electronics, and Electrical Storm tingles with a frisson of pent energy, while closing track, Spring Will Return/Oliver’s Letter, moves through various phases of pastoral-apocalyptic Current 93-style neofolk, arriving at a kind of strange, uneasy rapture that is all the more powerful for its comparative quietness.
Each of Jinxed by Beings‘ seven tracks is a kind of shared journey, a moving conversation between two hugely original musical voices. The language they use is constantly shifting, resulting in an album that is as uneasy as it is beautiful, teetering at times on the stark edges between genres that shouldn’t work together but somehow do. Collaborations of this quality are vanishingly rare: we can only hope this isn’t the last we hear from Chasny and Shackleton as a duo.
Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance – Jinxed by Being (28 June 2024) Drag City Records
Bandcamp: https://sixorgansofadmittance.bandcamp.com/album/jinxed-by-being
