Six Organs of Admittance / Tashi Dorji, Tyler Damon / Health&Beauty

In preparing for the first album of non-Hexadic SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the first time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our listening ears is the sound of communion. Burning the Threshold brings a wealth of SIX ORGANS-styled lightness into one of his sweetest musical meditations yet. With this new music, Ben Chasny has created a potent tonic for our times. The gentleness found here, balanced on top of his classical asceticism, provides much of what we need in 2017 and beyond: love, forgiveness, reality and an ever-wider view, with the understanding of our circular path in this lifetime. Looking at the world through clear eyes beneath a knitted brow, but with a laugh rising up from its heart, Burning the Threshold brings us a powerful draught of essence.

Both Will Escape is the debut full-length between electric guitarist TASHI DORJI and percussionist TYLER DAMON. In the long tradition of string/drum duets — from Bailey & Bennink to Haino & Yoshida — these two cleave out their own unmapped continent of sound. Across four pieces they connect lashes of ecstatic intensity and outer reaches of texture and timbre. At times Dorji’s brutal electric torrents meld into Damon’s metal and tonal abstractions. HEALTH&BEAUTY provide that tender vulnerability we’ve all come to love, especially in these trying times.