Indie rocker Ben Chasny settles into Seattle's pastoral scene

Not only is Seattle the epicenter of indie rock's current obsession with all things pastoral, but we're a destination for like-minded musicians. Meet 34-year-old Ben Chasny, a recent transplant from San Francisco best known for his work as Six Organs of Admittance.

Over the last 10 years, Chasny has taken Six Organs into shamanic, shambolic realms. He's a guitarist's guitarist, ruminating via acoustic on timeless melodies, dark and beautiful, or unleashing torrential electric squalls. Some songs extend into the 20-minute range, explorations tethered by eerie drones and rustic percussion, rock 'n' ritual jams for postmodern pagans, feedback-folk from the future.

Un-pigeonhole-able, Chasny also contributed blistering electric guitar on the last two Sub Pop albums by psychedelic metalmeisters Comets on Fire. Past tense because the band is currently on hiatus while its members pursue other projects. For Chasny, that means relocating to Seattle (he arrived in November) and focusing on Six Organs, whose new album, "Luminous Night," comes out Tuesday, coinciding with a release party at the Crocodile that night.

Though it's his 11th album as Six Organs, "Luminous Night" is a first for Chasny. It's his initial collaboration with celebrated local producer/bassist Randall Dunn, who recorded the album in West Seattle in March and enlisted a Who's Who of Northwest avant-gardists to flesh it out: drummer Matt Chamberlain (Tori Amos, Pearl Jam), flautist Hans Teuber (Skerik's Syncopated Taint Septet) and violist Eyvind Kang (Secret Chiefs 3, Animal Collective, John Zorn).

"I've never had anybody that pro on a record," Chasny says, sipping a hot chai at Mr. Spot's Chai House, a few blocks from the new digs in Ballard he shares with his girlfriend. "It was cool not having people I'm super-good bros with on the record. Everyone I'm really close with might try to do too much what they thought was in my mind, and these people were doing more what was in their musical mind. So I think it made the record a little bit different, doing stuff I wouldn't normally do, other people's musical ideas that are far more advanced than mine."

Not that Chasny's ideas are regressive. "Luminous" fits with the sylvan transcendence of Seattle heroes Tiny Vipers, the Cave Singers and Fleet Foxes. Songs play out with name-checks to historic figures, fictional and otherwise. "The Ballad of Charlie Harper," ostensibly about its midcentury artist namesake, repeats, mantralike, "An atom is an atom/to the great and the small." "Actaeon's Fall (Against the Hounds)" is an instrumental epic, a nod to Greek mythology reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's heaviest acoustic moments. "Bar-Nasha" descends into tabla-and-sitar trance, meditating on the "son of man," a subtle goof by Chasny.

"It's very easy to have an agnostic reflex nowadays, to push away religion or the church," he says. "I'm not Christian, but this was just purely to be mischievous, to make a song be really sensualistic about Christ, but never say 'Jesus' or 'Christ.' That's why it's very repetitive and cultlike. It is a little ambiguous, but I kinda cracked up about people jamming it."

Jonathan Zwickel: zwickelicious@gmail.com