If you do something for long enough, you’re going to want to switch it up. If you’re a comedian, it might be taking on a juicy dramatic roll. If you’re Liam Neeson, you may decide to reboot as a tough guy action hero. And if you’re a musician, there is a variety of ways to keep it fresh. It may be by taking on a new genre or working with a new crew of collaborators. Another method, far less used, is to institute a variety of rules. In the fashion of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies or John Zorn’s Cobra, Six Organs of Admittance leader Ben Chasny has devised his own system called Hexadic. Designed to break him of predictable habits, it forces a change of hand positions and tones while playing guitar. Earlier this year, the first results of the game hit the world as the appropriately titled Hexadic. Now, 10 months later, Chesney and company are back with the second volume, Hexadic II (Drag City Records).

Hexadic II is the direct sequel to the earlier record. But where the first record applied the system to raucous rock music, the second takes a barebones approach, reworking the songs acoustically in exactly the same order, albeit it with different song titles. It begs the question of whether or not you need to hear the predecessor to get what’s going on. Both albums stand alone ultimately, but it helps to have some context going in as it’s fairly obvious something’s going on even if you don’t know what it is. Musically, Hexadic II is a mix of a fractured madrigal, an otherworldly soundscape, and a David Lynchian score. For the majority of the record, Chasny sings in broken phonetics or obscures his vocals so much it’s a strain to make things out. While it may seem cliche to describe the technique as using vocals like another instrument, in this case it’s true. The vocals have no more prominence than any other element in the mix. As such, it’s very easy to let the songs roll past without much resonance, and in this way, it would be easy to write off Hexadic II as sounding all the same. But that’s not really true. There are some gorgeous moments and interesting things at work, and taken on their own, there’s certainly a lot to chew on. But at just under 40 minutes, Hexadic II is an arduous listen. If nothing else, you can’t say that Chasny is playing it safe, but it will be interesting (or not) to see how far he goes with the Hexadic system.