Agriculture Get Ecstatic on Debut, Self-Titled Record (Interview)
When Agriculture released last year’s The Circle Chant EP, your timeline got real weird for a moment; many who’d never seen or heard of the LA black metal four -piece were thrown by the scruff of their necks straight into their brief, diverse, and intense burst of exultant energy, based on pure word of mouth.
It was the start of something big for the band, who in the intervening months have signed with The Flenser and recorded their first album, titled Agriculture and set for release on July 21. Ahead of the release of the album’s second single “The Glory of the Ocean,” we caught up with the entire band for an extended discussion about the band’s rise to prominence, how their classical backgrounds feed into Agriculture’s music, and terrible screamo lyrics. Sometimes, very occasionally, the timeline does you a favour.
Agriculture are Daniel Meyer-O’Keeffe (DMO), Richard Chowenhill (RC), Kern Haug (KH), and Leah B. Levinson (LBL).
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I’d like to begin with a world exclusive request, because the people need to know: Why was Agriculture digging a big hole?
DMO: Oh, great question.
RC: You’re so close to finding out actually. Um, I don’t think we’re going to tell you (laughs).
Go into why you’re not going to tell us; deepen the mystery further.
DMO: First of all, wow, what a great question. All of our interviews start by asking in some way why we’re called Agriculture, and I think we’re okay at answering it now—but the big hole question I think is more profound. You’re gonna find out in a couple of days. I feel like we’re building this up too much. It’s… We’re going to be releasing a music video along with our second single.
Knew it! While we’re on the visual side of things, I wanted to ask about the practicalities of the photo shoot you did for your upcoming, self-titled album: There’s this great body of water, and members of the band are swimming in it, and on the merch, you’re all in there. It looks like it was at night, and it looks like it was super cold! What was going on?
KH: Wetsuits.
RC: Yeah, wetsuits, luckily. We have wetsuits underneath the robes that we were wearing.
KH: Our initial visual concept was of the beach at night, and we took a lot of pictures, and then at some point we ditched the robes, but we still liked the imagery from the shoot, and one of the songs is called “The Glory Of The Ocean,” which fits. So it naturally became a theme for us, for this album at least.
RC: It’s a great place to shoot; it’s shot at Venice Beach, so it’s close for us—We just drive across town and it’s there, it’s a really deep and long beach, so it’s kind of perfect for photoshoots, and yeah, we’d go there at night and that shoot, it was in November so it was definitely chilly. We had wetsuits on, but it was still cold, but I mean, cold is true kvlt, right? (laughing) That was definitely a joke. And Dan’s reaction was, I think, telling in that way (laughter.)
LBL: For the initial photo shoot that the cover photo came out of, and the photo of Dan that we used for the first single, we also had Richard’s brother who’s a lifeguard with us, because we were going into the water and Dan was climbing up on rocks at night. We’re not using them, but there are some great photos of the waves crashing behind Dan while he’s standing on these rocks at night. But there’s a lot of logistics that go into bringing film cameras to the beach at night, to try to capture subjects, and for the video we’re about to release, which is also on the beach and is also done at night, we had a friend bring a 16 millimetre camera. And to make that work, we needed two lighting systems, and we basically had to cover her with a blanket while she changed out her film roll so that they wouldn’t get sand in them. She was doing this in the dark on the beach: switching out film rolls trying desperately not to get everything fucked up by the sand and stuff. So that video is coming out soon, featuring heroic camera work from her, we gave her a nightmare shoot, and that’s even before you consider the moisture.
DMO: There’s something really compelling to me about the ocean at night. It’s got this bizarre thing where on the one hand for people who grow up on the coast, and I’m sure you can relate to this growing up on an island (Invisible Oranges is U.K.-based today), there’s this constant engagement with something that’s so big and vast and feels kind of infinite, which sometimes can’t help but feel really overwhelming and profound. But then also it’s this place where you go to build sand castles and do whatever. So there is this kind of playful mix of play and silliness with the sublime you get at the sea that I don’t think you really find anywhere else. You don’t go to the Grand Canyon and play exactly, the sense of awe is similar but it’s not lived in. And at the beach that feeling of awe is extended even more at night. Whenever I go to the beach at night, assuming you’re not at the boardwalk or something like that, it’s a fucking brutal place. The sound of it all of a sudden becomes much more present. And there’s this real sense of frontier that I don’t feel like you can really get anywhere else, the night time seems to reinvigorate the ocean with a sense of like, mystery and danger in a fun way, it’s exciting to me to be there, and it’s just fucking weird. It’s weird to be at the beach at night; it feels like you’re doing something wrong. It’s almost like that feeling where your parents have gone to sleep, and you sneak downstairs to eat the piece of cake or whatever it is.
That cold, almost indifference of the sea and the shore to you being there at night.
DMO: Totally. I’m getting married, and in a few months, (Invisible Oranges: congratulations!) thank you, and I’m excited about it, and we’re gonna do a little beach vacation afterwards, which I’m very excited about. You go on these romantic walks on the beach, and it’s super nice at sunset, and then the minute the sun is actually set, it’s not so nice anymore; it’s reinvested with this kind of primordial energy. It’s not even illuminated; it’s just this flat frontier of nothingness. It’s very powerful and really fun.
‘Being cold is true kvlt’ is definitely going to be the sub-header for the interview by the way. With the release of The Circle Chant, you cemented this phrase ‘ecstatic black metal’ in everybody’s minds. you’ve touched upon the multifaceted nature of the term ecstasy before; is the ambiguity of the concept deliberate? Is it used to push audiences into coming up with their own interpretation?
RC: For me, the answer is yes.
DMO: Not for me (laughs.)
KH: I remember Dan once describing it, you were comparing it to the term transcendental, and you were saying you liked the idea of transcendental black metal, but wanted a less pretentious word, something that’s less self aggrandizing and more inclusive and malleable. And I really relate to that, I like the lofty ideal of something being transcendental, but for me that’s encompassed in ecstasy, it’s just a little less self aggrandizing.
RC: Well, it’s more visceral too, for me at least. Maybe we’ll talk on this, and then Dan will give you the true ur-text on what it actually is. But for me, it feels more visceral, and I have to say that in general that I like there being elements of ambiguity that serve as an opportunity and invitation for the audience to engage with co-authorship of experience, which is really important to me. Something I was talking to Kern the other day about was programme notes, and how within concert music circles, generally, I don’t like programme notes, and I generally don’t write extensive programme notes because I don’t like how prescriptive they’ve become in contemporary classical culture.
You’ll go to a premiere of a few new pieces, and you open up the program, and it says so-and-so wrote this piece, and you’ll notice in the first three bars, such and such figures establish, and then you’ll notice it’s transposed several times, and I think well… will I notice that? And also is that the point? Maybe just let the notes wash over me, and I’ll make my own decision. I respect that’s not how everybody feels, and we’re not necessarily pushing forward an intellectual agenda, but rather I see it as an invitation. Ultimately our live performances are really exciting, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’m always just really, really stoked to play music with these people.
I really like our music, and I really love playing with these folks and like being on stage with them. Whether it’s a familiar audience or new audience, it’s just such a thrill and so much fun that like, I myself feel overcome with a new sense of ecstasy each time, it’s so great, and part of playing is wanting to welcome everybody else into it, because it wouldn’t be a performance were it not for the audience per se. That’s my take on it.
DMO: For me, if you’re gonna throw a label on something that you’re doing, it should be useful in one way or another: describing how something is meant to be used, or how it’s different from other things. So for me, it was really an invitation for people to listen to the music without some of the particular baggage that comes with other heavy music. There is an association between heavier, more extreme music and things that are dark. But for us, in a very basic way, the goal of this band is not to increase suffering.
I remember reading this article about some European black metal band who were playing in Germany, and they got arrested because they had swastikas on stage. Then when someone asked the band about it, they were like, oh, we’re not Nazis, we just wanted to represent the ultimate shame of our audience and to make them feel bad because our music is about suffering. I was like, that’s so stupid! I want to do the exact opposite of that, you know what I mean? The goal is about inviting people to have a good time! Within a musical framework that I think acknowledges how intense it is to be alive, if you will, and I think that’s where the ecstatic element comes from. I think that ecstasy is a nice word, because it’s a complicated one. It’s very multivalent: it’s embodied, but it’s also out of your mind; there’s not a lot of thinking involved in ecstasy. But it’s also not specific in the way that other fully physical experiences are, like exhaustion or orgasm, there’s a lot of ambivalence to it, which is interesting to me. And I also think it’s something that’s pretty universally experienced by people who like music, right? An ecstatic response is pretty common.
Sorry, to get over the top with this, but there’s tradition in different religious musics of seeking to invoke something akin to ecstasy, whether it’s chanting, or the sort of Christian mystical tradition and stuff like that, that can create this feeling where you can kind of rest your mind for a little bit and just have a good time. So that, to me, is where this was coming from, sort of like in the way that Diet Coke establishes that it’s going to taste like Coca Cola, but it’s not going to add calories to your diet. This is black metal that includes the things that make black metal what it is, musically speaking, but it’s not gonna augment your suffering you know (laughs); perhaps it’s gonna alleviate it or even transform it.
Emphasising the importance of fun and inclusivity within the framework of the music that you make, are there any other black metal pitfalls that you’re trying to consciously avoid?
DMO: I remember Richard and I went to see Mayhem when they were in LA last year, and it was awesome; that band is so good live, it was a really great show. I remember as we were leaving, Richard and I were talking about how it’s kind of funny when you go to black metal shows because if you go see a death metal show or grindcore, or whatever, everybody kind of knows what they’re there for; people are there to have a good time. Nobody really thinks that fucking Corpsegrinder is actually grinding corpses, but there is this different element in black metal where it’s a little bit more ambiguous in what people are… doing there (laughs,) you feel there are some people who are like: no no no I think the devil is real and I’m here to worship Him. And so for us again, it’s just about clarifying what we’re making: something that hopefully is a little bit more impactful than just entertainment, and obviously there is a spiritual part to it, but ultimately we’re having a good time and making music. It’s less about trying to avoid things and more about offering clarity on our purpose.
Pretending to be evil must be exhausting—like are you having persistent evil thoughts whilst you make your morning coffee? (laughs). I want to touch on specific parts of your new album. Starting with the song “The Well,” it shows Agriculture reaching beyond a straight definition of black metal. With that example in mind, are there any limits to what an Agriculture song can be?
KH: Oh, we’re just always trying to expand, as we write new material, and there’s a lot of new material to come that we really haven’t even gotten into. And the more particular it is, the more exciting it is, to us. And it’s probably going to get less and less traditional as time goes on.
RC: I guess if there were a limit, it would be like insincerity. I think that in general, we’re just pretty sincere. And that’s not necessarily to say, serious all the time, one can be sincerely tongue in cheek, or at least I like to think I can be. And apropos of the notion of sincerity, something like “The Well” is obviously just really sincere, it’s a presentation of these ideas and a very clear presentation of the lyrics, so you can actually understand what’s being said, Dan and Leah can definitely speak more on the songwriting and lyrical content, but overall, if there were one all encompassing thing regarding the way I see the music or approach my parts or my life within the band, it’s sincerity, being really true and really honest about what we’re presenting and just kind of just kind of doing it.
LBL: I know with “The Well,” Dan had originally written the song that way with the melody like that, and everything, and singing it clearly. But I don’t think we heard that until he was teaching me the lyrics, and he put it in a voice memo just to teach me the phrasing, so I could listen back to the memo and learn it that way. And I remember I was listening to it at home, trying to get that phrasing in my head and my partner heard it, hearing those lyrics and the melody, which is super clear in the context of the other version of that song where the melody is kind of buried in the density of it a bit, it’s hard to pick out everything that’s going on. And my partner overheard the sung version and said oh, it’s really cool to hear it in that context, you guys should do that. I think there was a similar idea in Dan’s head at the time maybe, and so I suggested maybe we should do this. I think that’s part of the welcoming thing of this, we want people to know what’s going on here, we want that depth to be accessible, and to share everything that’s there. I guess it’s clear if you’re looking at the lyric sheet and stuff, but some people might miss the fact that “The Well” is also the following track. But it’s an acoustic version of it, it’s “Look, Pt. 1.”
KH: People mostly don’t realise, when we’ve played that live, we’ll do “The Well” and then do “Look, Pt. 1” one right after. And after the show I’ll ask people if they noticed that it’s the same song. And I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed, at least that I’ve talked to. It kind of just helps to keep the melody in your head, and then you’re ready to hear it loud and fast and it’ll hopefully be a little clearer to you.
DMO: One of the things I really like about music where you yell, or shriek or whatever is that it gives you a little bit of agency, as a listener: You can choose how you want to engage with the lyrics. If you want to read them you can, as long as the band has put them out, which obviously some bands don’t, but most of the time you can, and take on the verbal element of what the musicians are trying to get across or whatever. But you also can not, which I think is the way, in a negative sense, you can ultimately stomach people who are really bad writers, but write really good music—Have you ever looked up like screamo lyrics? (laughs) and it’s just like aghhh, this seems like something I wrote in seventh grade. For us, with “The Well” I think Leah’s partner made a really good point, it is helpful to have a statement of intent, that is clearly expressed verbally, on this record, which is why it’s intentionally in a very central place in the record, it’s almost like a statement of purpose for what the record is doing. When we decided to start including that sung part in the live set it felt like a turning point for us as a band, we stopped thinking about ourselves as mysterious, it was a moment maybe just for me personally, where I felt oh,I can just bring myself in a pretty honest and less theatrical way into what we’re doing. People seem to have responded to that nicely. We don’t have to couch what we’re doing in traditional theatrics, we can just be open.
I want to talk about structure in your recorded work. On the self-titled album, we have this three part, three song centrepiece in “Look,” and “The Circle Chant” was also broken into parts. You utilize a certain creativity and attention to detail when it comes to sequencing and structure, where does that come from?
RC: Everything is composition, for me, through and through gesamtkunstwerk the whole way. It’s all composition, it’s all a completely holistic experience should one choose to engage in that way. The other thing that I’ll say, in terms of making things in multiple parts, most of us in the group have some level of experience within classical and concert music, and training in that, so to us having three attacca movements in like a string quartet or something like that, is an extremely common thing, and the attacca movement is something really cool too: one fades into the next kind of like what you do on a record, but it also has a sort of traditional movement structure, we’re allowed to get away with maybe three different ideas, or you’re allowed to explore the depths of some of those ideas a little bit more and indulge and engage with that. But then there’s also this sort of larger scale narrative. So we’re, at least at this point, pretty interested in long form, larger scale narratives. It’s kind of a cool way of having your cake and eating it too, recognizing that not everybody necessarily wants to sit and listen to a 20 minute piece, but maybe there’s a way to lean into opportunities with sequencing and track selection and things like that so people can be like, oh, I just happen to really like this middle section. And then also compositionally lean into that to create, almost vignettes within this larger story. So the “Look” suite, three parts with “The Well” being the prelude is this whole thing, it starts with the invocation, and then it ends with this huge sort of ecstatic thing. And it’s very production-y at the very end of “Look, Pt. 3,” there’s all this stuff going on. But then within that, there are all these little avenues that we go down. So everything, at least for me, is composition, all the elements of production, and leveraging that to work in a certain way.
LBL: To add on to that, Dan and Richard have a big background in composition. There’s something that we’re all interested in, which is the music we’re playing as a popular medium, popular music, so rock music, essentially. And I think within popular media there’s the potential that people are looking for something a little bit more long form and with a little bit more substance, and not just offering the shortest bite size thing, but something of a longer form that can also break down into more digestible parts. And I think it’s historically interesting that rock was the music that pushed the album as an artistic form. It really has a history of allowing for that, and created the space where the album is no longer a collection of 15 pop songs by an artist, instead you start to get the concept album, which didn’t come from rock music, but which rock music really pushed and normalised, and made people consider what is this as an album? How does this all go together? There’s a lot of playing with that in what we’re doing, trying to fit these smaller pieces into a larger whole that works, and gives more potential for that sort of deeper engagement.
Not only does that give you a chance to do a bunch of interesting things musically but also, if it prompts a bunch of people to get searching and develop their understanding of what a suite is, that’s a really positive side effect as well.
RC: Absolutely.
DMO: Breaking it up is super important. All of “Look” was written as one thing, but there’s no way I wanted to present it that way. Because it’s just not really how I listen to music. Maybe other people do. I like to listen to an album from start to finish, and I think there’s something to be said for that. But especially with heavier music, I’m not very often going to have the ear space to listen to more than 35 minutes of something that’s really intense. I was thinking about the first few Slayer records a lot, Reign In Blood is 27 minutes, and it’s so perfect at that length, it feels like a full statement. You can present a lot of really complicated things, or really dense things, if you break it up in a way that’s a little bit more digestible. It’s like, you can’t eat a big steak in one bite. I’m using all these culinary analogies (laughs.)
You’ve gone from releasing The Circle Chant, this 10 minutes of recorded music that everyone is super excited about, to signing with The Flenser, touring with peers from the label and doing the Oblivion Access showcase. It feels like it’s gotten really big. How has that transition felt within the band?
RC: Awesome.
KH: Yeah, I feel like our band group chat is just us texting, high fiving each other all the time. Being like, whoa, did you see this cool tweet, oh, we just got this opportunity. And just being excited about all the things that are happening just amongst each other.
RC: I will say that, in a way, we were lucky, we’ve been lucky that the city we live in has generally, among our friends, or our scene, or whatever, has been extremely kind, welcoming and enthusiastic to us. In other places, we’re just really happy that this sort of support we have in our hometown is transposing nicely to other places. And it just feels really nice. When we’re here in LA it’s really cool and everybody’s really nice and the shows are fun and packed, playing in LA we see a ton of friendly faces and friends and other bands and old friends new friends, and now it just feels like we have more friends in more places and as cheesy as that sounds it’s like more places feel like home now.
DMO: Yeah, it’s awesome.
RC: I mean, yeah, it’s awesome (laughs.)
DMO: Jonathan at The Flenser has done such an amazing job of interpreting what a record label, especially an independent once, can be in contemporary music. The music landscape in so many ways is pretty bleak. I don’t mean in terms of the quality of music, necessarily, but just in terms of: no musicians don’t have day jobs right now, you know? Who is doing most of the curation that happens musically, it’s not even journalists anymore, I don’t even know if there are real people editing the playlists on Spotify. So it’s just so worth shouting out what certain small labels have done not just curating a group of artists that among who there’s a lot of mutual respect; we’ve had, most of the artists on The Flenser reach out to us in one way or another, but also that there is like a community of people who seems excited about this kind of thing. I think it’s really awesome to be on a label that has a built in fan base, it’s sort of a thing you’d see more in the past, where there were people who were fans of Sub Pop in the 90s, or whatever. I think that’s what an independent record label should be like, it should be creating a community of listeners and artists, and generating support. I need to send Jonathan a mean text when this interview comes out so he doesn’t think that we’re just being nice to him.
So flaming swords! We’ve got flaming swords in the Agriculture logo; we’ve got promo pics with band members wielding flaming swords. Let’s get into that a little bit.
KH: That’s actually really a Dan question. Dan loves Lord of the Rings.
DMO: (laughs) This is like even worse than the true kvlt thing.
KH: I mean, he was given a sword for his birthday. But someone called him out at a comic book store in Oklahoma. When we took our promo photo, this bystander was like, that’s clearly just a copy from the Lord of the Rings and not a real battle blade. And Dan’s been feeling self conscious about the sword since then.
DMO: It hasn’t been in any of our photos since then. I’m really embarrassed by it.
It’s not for the club anymore.
DMO: Yeah. It’s so silly. At a certain point, my fiance and I were arguing about the house that we live in together. And you know the way that relationships are, it takes a while sometimes to voice things, but it’s so important. And at a certain point, it just became clear to me, I was like, this house is so beautifully set up, but it’s all your shit. I need to put a sword on the wall. I need that; it’s important to me. I need a room where I can put this stupid sword I’ve wanted since I was 9 years old, and of course then we burst out laughing, but to me it’s become this nice reminder of playfulness and also a sense of compromise. Sometimes I think, alright, what would 9-year-old Dan think of what 29 year old Dan is doing? And you know, I think it’s important to cater to those thoughts and let me tell you, me as a 9-year-old would have been so fucking excited to see that picture of the flaming sword; are you kidding me? I just think it’s awesome.
LBL: It’s really useful because in the metal world, we’re not a particularly threatening looking band. So it’s great to have a picture or two of us with a flaming sword so if we need to be we can be like okay, back the fuck off.
We can spread the word that Agriculture is the band that flexes flaming swords by day, and hangs out at sea in the pitch black by night. (laughs). Given that you guys are testing the boundaries of black metal somewhat, does Agriculture continue to appear on heavy and extreme music bills, or do you take your ideas and share them elsewhere?
KH: Oh, for me, it’s been in other worlds from the beginning, our experiences didn’t necessarily start with heavy bills.
LBL: We’re excited about both possibilities, doing a little bit of everything like. Some of our favourite bands we’ve played with have just been really killer death metal bands, and we’ve left those gigs super excited, but then other times it’s been across the board, or we’re playing with noise acts. We’re putting together our second annual festival, we’re doing it in LA, and there are probably seven or eight acts on the bill, which is a fun curation thing for us. I expect we’re going to cover a mix of genres like we did last year. I think being in both worlds is important to us.
KH: Yeah, I’m not someone with a huge metal background, I’m like, the least metal familiar person in the band. So I really like that it expands beyond that.
DMO: I just want to make sure that we can do a show; I want to play for as many people as we can, in a way that makes sense and is fun. Of the people seeing us, people who don’t care for metal seem to like the music, which is really great. Maybe we will get really, really, famous. Maybe we’ll get to do an arena tour, kind of a Taylor Swift thing where we have some costume changes; this is not gonna happen, obviously. But wouldn’t it be sick? To have the budget to do that kind of big theatrical production. I remember reading an interview with Surfjan Stevens one time where he was talking about how he always went to see the pop acts when they came to town, because he wanted to see what you get if you spend a quarter of a million dollars on show production. Obviously, none of that’s going into the music, but I would love to do something where Richard’s playing a guitar solo on a platform that’s floating above the ground, or get five other members like Slipknot and have people in cool masks drumming on drums that clearly aren’t mic’d, or Leah gets a flamethrower for her bass, that would be cool.
RC: I think the all encompassing thing for me is that I want to play for anybody who wants to listen. So regardless of how that gets billed, it’s less about preaching the gospel of a particular genre or anything like that, and more just going back to the thing about what it means to us to play live and to play ecstatic black metal: anybody who wants to share this with us, I’m more than happy for them to, and in any venue in which that can happen. I’m assuming that it’s not, like a Trump rally or like a Nazi convention or something but, you know, within reason. Anybody who wants to share with us like, I’m there, totally.
The last question here is basically for me because this is the level of my chat at the moment: is anyone playing Zelda?
LBL: I’m not, I just haven’t had the time for it; I was watching my friend play it last night. I’m big into Souls, so the last time I got really stuck into a game was Elden Ring, but generally open worlds are no good because I don’t really have enough time to wander around like that. So I need a game that really tells me like go do this or that.
DMO: If you know anybody who works at Nintendo, I would love to score a Zelda game at some point. I would love to get into that.
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Agriculture releases July 21 via the Flenser, you can pre order it and listen to the first two singles from the album here.
