As the first wash of flute and gentle acoustic guitar pours in on "Actaeon's Fall," the intro track on Six Organs of Admittance's Luminous Night, one feels a hook of nostalgia - either for the kind of airy beauty fleshed out on albums like Bert Jansch's Nicola, or the more ancient Celtic folk that Jansch himself often paid homage to.

But it doesn't take long before the modern-rock buzz of an electric guitar slices into those wistful environs, the repeated notes signaling the darker explorations to come. Even then, the opener is a thoroughly gorgeous, soothing piece of instrumental music that seems to float innocently into the storm that awaits in the following seven songs.

Six Organs of Admittance is the long-running solo incarnation of Ben Chasny - perhaps one of the most seasoned figures in the present-day interpretation of folk ethos.

Released in September by Drag City, Luminous Night is Chasny's second release of the year; his earlier RTZ came in the form of a triple LP that doses listeners with a heavy shot of long-form raga experiments that date to the late 1990s and early '00s. The distance between the archive album and his latest work is palpable, with the elder Chasny clearly emerging as terser and more in tune with the concept of songwriting.

Nonetheless, the renowned artist has brought plenty of his old obsessions and ghosts with him, a fact evident on this newest batch of sound-rich songs.

Directly on the heels of "Actaeon's Fall" comes "Anesthesia," a dreamy, slow creeper pushed along by acoustic guitar, electric hum and Chasny's rich, off-kilter vocals, which combine to paint a gloomy landscape atop the pulsating background of swirling sound.

His next track - "Bar-Nasha" - leaps toward the sinister, with Eastern influences merging into finger-picked guitar, foreboding percussion and lyrics that make it feel like an occult ritual performed beneath the desert skies.

With the refrain "the son of man" rolling out of Chasny's baritone, the song devolves into a maelstrom of sitar, wind instruments, hand-percussion and guitar before being enveloped by a fog of hissing drone, one that fades directly to the next song - a four-minute-plus squall of throbbing sound topped by soothing piano keys before evaporating.

Borne from that abstract cosmic swirl is "Ursa Minor," a more traditional folk number in some sense, but one that is smattered with touches of electronic distortion and what sounds like gulls swarming above the cliffs of Hades. And with lines like these: "Love can't keep death at bay/ good people dying everywhere . . . ask if God is even there" - it's an unsparingly heavy-hearted affair.

Despite that gravity (or perhaps because of it), "Ursa Minor" is a rocking slice of music. It's a bit of alchemy that Chasny has perfected over the years, splicing together traditional folk elements, experimental electronic noise and drone, and his own dark but spiritual outlook.

Those elements come into a splendid marriage on what might be the album's standout track, "The Ballad of Charley Harper."

Although perhaps hard to understand as a tribute to the recently deceased Harper - a painter known for his "minimal realism" and focus on natural subjects - the song's sweeping, celestial vibe creates a mind-expanding composition.

Amid the guitar and prickly, static noise (something that evokes the sound of stardust being sucked into a black hole), Chasny repeatedly chants the phrase "An atom is an atom / To the great and the small." It's the kind of thought that creeps into your skull after you've stared up at a star-filled, rural sky - a "luminous night," if you will - for a few hours, and the album gives you the feeling that Chasny has swooped down to act as a sort of shaman for that experience.

That he can invade your mind space with such grace and still come off making songs that are just damn pretty shows Six Organs is maturing to a point where all the elements that made their sound work on the past 11 albums are combining into a distilled science.

Six Organs, likely appearing as a scaled-down band featuring Chasny and SOOA cohort Andrew Mitchell, will play before San Francisco's Om at Johnny Brenda's on Oct. 16. Where Chasny shows a penchant for drone and shadowy imagery, Om takes it a few steps further, also relying on components of metal and Eastern influences that can give their songs a doom-riddled medieval edge.

Early opener Lichens is a project of Robert Lowe, and features field recordings with droning electronic noise and guitar.

The bill should make for an interesting night of shadowy experimentation, and all three outfits have a reputation for heroic improvisation during live sets.

Check it out . . .

Who: Lichens, Six Organs of Admittance, and Om

When: Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 9 p.m.

Where: Johnny Brenda's, Frankford and Girard avenues