File under: the collaboration when never knew we needed.

Although all music is connected in a universal way, our favorite artists create singular worlds of sound so immediately identifiable that they’re the Gods of those realms. Like planets with weird atmospheres, the environments conjured by artists as varied as Pauline Anna Strom, Funkadelic, the Shaggs, Burial, Sun Ra, My Bloody Valentine, Drexciya, Haruomi Hosono, and hundreds of others thrive because their bodies of work could only be made by them.

Ben Chasney and his project Six Organs of Admittance exist on a planet that mixes slow, patient guitar patterns with layers of ethereal, oft woozy noise and distortion. Running analog feedback through a ridiculous array of effects pedals, the Northern California artist has drawn legions of admirers transfixed by his extended psych-driven explorations.

Chasny grew up in Humboldt County, California, where there were only a few TV channels but billions of stars in the sky. “I had a backyard telescope,” he told the Quietus in 2020. “It was really cheap and I couldn’t see a lot of stuff, but I could spot the moons of Jupiter, or at least I thought they were the moons of Jupiter… I could always find Orion’s nebula too, it looked like a kind of smudgy star.”

Noting that he had a subscription to an astronomy magazine that explained upcoming cosmic events, Chasny said, “It’s an interesting thing, stargazing, because any time they talk about something that’s going on in the sky, there’s always a relational aspect, something that’s moving with something else that’s moving, or not moving. We imagine these celestial bodies meeting in the sky.”

Since the mid-‘00s, Sam Shackleton has constructed deep electronic tracks that feature what can only be called Shackletonian rhythms, the kind that draw on dub’s spaciousness, the menace of (very slow) drum & bass and post-trip-hop sonic accents.

Here’s how British producer Sam Shackleton describes his aim: “I like to do my own thing and, as much as possible, I hope to create my own musical cosmos.”

A few days ago, Drag City Records dropped a bomb: Chasney and Shackleton have recorded a collaborative album together called Jinxed by Being, and it comes out at the end of June. Drag City explained the news in a typically curious release that “both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been unafraid to pursue their muse into any and all encroaching depth of darkness or outer boundary of potential dissonance.”

The news release continues:

They also share that ol’ maverick psychedelic ritual transcendental music vibe, don’t they? And a fascination with repetition and cycles. And a mutual inspiration drawn from alternative tunings and literature… all this considered, it’s been basically inevitable that Ben Chasny and Sam Shackleton would work together. Jinxed by Being finds Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance delighting in this synthesis, reveling in unique sonic textures, esoteric deliveries, and new reinventions. Sam’s vocals — a rare occurrence — find melody with Ben’s on several tracks; elsewhere on the record, drum samples by Chasny (recorded in Six Organs’ embryonic stage) are re-sequenced anew by Shackleton.

Six Organs and Shackleton have released the first track and video from the album. Called “Stages of Capitulation,” the song and video find the two “meeting in a marvelously organic playground of world beats, with acid guitar and deep bass oozing throughout. As they chant an arcane ritual, a widescreen stereo image of their exotic environs expands into a mix alive with details, flashing from left to right and back again. Chasny’s music video provides a potent incense to burn through the track’s seven-minute runtime.”