This Guy Composed an Entire Album Using Playing Cards — wired.com

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.

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