Ben Chasny, guitarist and leader of the band Six Organs of Admittance. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
Ben Chasny is sitting across the table from me, sorting a deck of playing cards by suit. He’s not prepping a magic trick, and he’s not trying to psych me out before a poker game. I’m certainly not dipping into my wallet for an ante.
What Chasny wants to show me is something he calls the Hexadic system, a compositional tool he’s developed for writing music using random selections of playing cards.
All of the songs on the new album by his band Six Organs of Admittance were written using this system, which is applied by laying out playing cards in geometric patterns on a table. The resulting record—Hexadic, which dropped last week—is a challenging, chaotic bit of music. Some songs revolve around just two chords or one repeated musical figure, with Chasny’s electric guitar blasting through complex scales on top. It’s all quite removed from the hushed, contemplative acoustic music Six Organs of Admittance is known for. It’s a pretty radical shift, but it’s also what happens when you start conceiving your songs mathematically.
“The system is a way of applying algorithmic thinking to creating art,” Chasny says. He got the idea after digesting historical and philosophical texts by the likes of Gaston Bachelard, Frances Yeats, and Morton Feldman. One of his primary sources of inspiration was Ramon Llull, a 14th-century monk who laid some of the earliest groundwork in computation theory and is considered one of the forefathers of computer science. Over the last two and a half years, Chasny has developed, refined, and documented his system. He’s written a book, to be published in April, that explains his methods in depth and also lays out some variations musicians can apply to make their own compositions.
How to Make Music with the Hexadic System
After giving me the backstory, it’s demo time.
The first thing Chasny does is “align the cards,” assigning six cards to the first six notes on the lowest string of the guitar, his primary instrument. He lays the cards next to each other, building a virtual guitar neck across the table. He names each note as he goes: “This is a G,” he says, pointing to the three of hearts. The four of hearts is a G-sharp. He continues until he’s mapped 36 cards across the first three octaves of the guitar neck. Then, he scoops up the 36 cards, shuffles them, and lays them out on the table again in a six-armed geometric pattern. He winds up with six clusters of cards, each of them a six-note musical scale.
Another card (the four of spades, chosen randomly) is laid in the center, and some math is applied to determine the timing and the order of the notes.
At this point, there are so many rules it’s becoming fairly hard to grok. But the end result is clear: Just by laying out cards on a table, we’ve assigned a tonal center, a musical scale, and some basic timing structures for a song. If one were to pick up a guitar and play through this fresh composition, it would sound totally alien—certainly unlike anything most songwriters would whip up while plucking chords on their porch swing.
“With an exercise like this, you end up moving your fingers in ways you’re not used to,” Chasny says.
Breaking Bad Habits With Math
Musicians will tell you that when they sit down to write songs, or even just to doodle around, they’ll quickly fall into old patterns, habitual ways of approaching their instrument. Breaking away from these familiar patterns can be near impossible. Using a construct, a machine, or an algorithmic device is an effective way to defeat those habits. This is not new thinking. Brian Eno has his generative music software, John Zorn has his game pieces, and as Chasny notes on his website, “even Mozart was throwing dice around in 1787.”
A few times during the demonstration, which Chasny delivers with a Rasputinic fervor, he has to move his iPhone to make room for the cards. This prompts me to ask: Why not just make an app?
“Right! People ask me that. But I think it’s important to make it tactile. It becomes a contemplative exercise,” he says. “You’re thinking about it, and you’re taking the time to write out musical charts with a pen. You’ll end up thinking about the composition in new ways as you go.”
Even after applying the system, building songs, and writing out the sheet music for the guys in the band, Chasny says much of the sound of Hexadic wasn’t finalized until they got into the recording studio. Specific production choices were made in the moment to get different emotional textures, evoke different moods.
“None of this really tells you exactly what this is going to sound like,” he says, waving his hand over the clusters of cards. “It just creates a projection.”
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