The Spiritual Sound: In Conversation with Agriculture’s Dan Meyer & Richard Chowenhill

As Bob Dylan’s Mississippi whines from the speakers inside The White Hotel in Salford, the story of Agriculture’s excellent second album, The Spiritual Sound, starts to make sense. The likes of Dan’s Love Song and Hallelujah, presented through the cracked lens of folk, somewhat removed from ecstatic walls of sound the band are perhaps better known for. Talking to band co-founder, Dan Meyer and guitarist, Richard Chowenhill, via Zoom shortly after Agriculture’s recent U.K. and European tour, and Dylan is never far from our conversation.

The Agriculture live experience is vastly different from the one on record. Alongside guitarist / vocalist Meyer and Chowenhill, the Los Angeles-based act is rounded out by co-founder, Kern Haug, on drums, and Leah Levinson on bass / vocals. The band’s performance is like an electric dream. Brimming with friction that moves between transcendence and malevolence, Levinson hammers home each of her songs with fire in her eyes. Every word and note parted, meant like it’s her last.

Trading vocal barbs with Meyer, thematically Agriculture’s story is bound together by their two distinctive voices, and backed by Chowenhill’s expansive, lightening fingered fret work and Haug’s jazz-inspired eruptions, the band straddles the most extreme orbits in a set that boasts old and new. Relier, The Well, Look, Pt. 1 and Living Is Easy, following new songs, The Weight and Bodhidharma.

The latter two are The Spiritual Sound’s vital pillars where Agriculture take their greatest strides yet, intersecting the dynamism of sludge and black metal as Meyer and Levinson explore themes of history, Buddhism, and queer/ AIDS literature before illuminating every day living as if it were something euphoric. There’s no better example than the beginning of Bodhidharma, as Levinson glowers, “You look like you’re dying / What do you need?” It’s The Spiritual Sound clinical moment.

Flea is another that possesses a plethora of hairpin turns. Songs within a song where – like The Weight and Bodhidharma – the quiet / loud dynamics of ’90s post-hardcore touchstones, Slint, and June of 44 shine through. It’s where Agriculture nestle between chaos and catharsis, and it continues on Michah (5.15am), which again sees the band stretching aesthetics – this time into the realms of punk, led by Haug’s blistering drums.

The glorious shift on Agriculture’s second full-length begins with My Garden. A siege of Meyer’s overlord shrieks, Chowenhill’s towering riffs, and Levinson’s bass chug. Haug’s performance behind the kit is chameleon-like, and it rubs off on his bandmates for the rest of The Spiritual Sound. Dan’s Love Song, the most captivating piece Agriculture has written, as tremolo-infused slowcore is like pink static spiralling up to the sky. Alongside the equally tender Hallelujah, both songs showcase Agriculture’s creative restlessness that will never abate.

So too their capacity to close strong. The cataclysmic rush of The Reply, shoulder-to-shoulder with Dan’s Love Song as The Spiritual Sound’s defining moments, as Agriculture oscillate between the menace and tranquility that underlines the contrasts that make The Spiritual Sound just that.

Meyer and Chowenhill discuss a range of topics, including listening culture, Agriculture’s formative years and their fascinating writing process. Like remnants being scraped from one song to eventually form another (on three separate occasions on The Spiritual Sound, one song runs seamlessly into the next), it encompasses the band’s borderless nature, which begs the ultimate question: where will they go to next?

Sun 13: Seeing Agriculture live puts the band in a different context. You all have unique and singular roles that go into the performance. Do you see yourselves as a black metal band?

Dan Meyer: “It depends on what song we’re playing. [We’re] certainly not a black metal band. I think that description is not as relevant now as it was when we started out. I think what we’re doing is pretty heavy; there’s a freedom to metal that you can do whatever you want in a way that you don’t have quite as much freedom in certain other genres. You can scream; you can sing; you can be really heavy; you can be really quiet. You can play with extremes a lot, and so I think what we’re doing is more informed by that tradition than anything else. I think we’re a metal band.”

Richard Chowenhill: “I think so, too. It’s a great point that Dan makes – it makes me think about a question that we’ve been getting recently… our collective background, or individual backgrounds rather, in experimental and noise music. I really feel what Dan’s saying in terms of the idea that in metal, you can kind of do anything. For me, that’s something that I’ve always appreciated about the metal umbrella in the same way as experimental music.

“As somebody who’s composed a lot of experimental music, that world is also interesting in that way. Yes, there’s an argument that it exists in the classical tradition, but at the same time, so much of what’s happening there is really quite experimental and pretty divorced from 19th century European tradition of composition. I think metal – especially as a contemporary name, not even genre – the umbrella term has a similar thing. We’re a band of four people that generally plays pretty heavy music, and therefore we’re probably a metal band, and we definitely love black metal and are very influenced by [that] and other types of metal. But I think we use the sounds that are interesting to us to try and convey the ideas that we have.”

S13: Metal is interesting, because you see a lot of genres come in and out of vogue over a 20-year cycle. Metal has always been entrenched in artistic culture… I don’t think there is any other genre that you can really say that about…

DM: “Also to your point, like Richard and I were saying, there’s a lot of freedom in it, but also you don’t have to do anything new, and that’s part of the freedom. No one’s like, ‘I’m so bummed that the sixteenth Cannibal Corpse record doesn’t explore new territory’. (laughs) Nobody wants that. That’s a place where we’re a little bit divergent. It’s not that anybody wants us to do anything else, it’s just that I think our ears, and my ears in particular, are really restless. It’s a genre that’s like an action movie or a horror film; you go because there’s a certain kind of thing you like to experience. If you want to see cars blow up, you go see the action movie, and the rest of it is kind of nice…. you know, ‘How well did you set up that car explosion?’ It’s the same with art and metal… not so much for us, but if you like black metal and want to go hear someone shrieking and blast beats, it’s just about how well you can do that.”

S13: The Spiritual Sound is a good way of encapsulating Agriculture, because it feels like the spirit of life experiences transcends the band’s artistic inspirations…

RC: “It’s good to know that that comes across.”

DM: “I think that’s the goal for us, to make something that, like you said, is about daily life. We’re looking for spirit as it manifests in quotidian life. We’re not interested so much in fantasy or big gestures. A lot of what we’re looking for is inspired by the normal stuff that we go through in our daily lives and our spiritual practices. Just writing about those things is also really intense. To put it in a pithy way, real life is really metal. It’s really metal to go to work every day because it sucks! Or it’s really metal to have to deal with really complicated relationships with your aging parent. That’s normal, but also really intense. A lot of what I wrote about is how metal it is to sit on a cushion and stare at a wall for hours!

“That’s kind of the thing where we’re not just looking for the fantasy but regular life, and I think that’s the same at our shows. We’re talking about one of the most intense moments in the live shows when we play Bodhidharma: the lyric, ‘What do you need?’ That’s what we’re going for.”

S13: The Spiritual Sound feels very different from the self-titled, and I would say that the Living Is Easy EP feels like a bridge towards it. This time, was the recording process and approach any different?

RC: “The recording process was a lot different, and you’re right. When we were recording Living Is Easy and In the House of Angel Flesh, when we were producing it, I was thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure this is a bridge to where things are going’. I was really chomping at the bit, because Living Is Easy was already recorded by the time the self-titled record came out. I was happy for the self-titled record to finally come out after working for years, but I was ready for that record cycle to finish. I already felt like we had moved beyond.”

“What we do generally, we’ll record when we have the songs ready. We track everything live initially to get really good takes, especially the interaction with the drums. After that, in my studio, we’ll do the vocals, overdubs, and then all the production in my studio, I mix it, the whole thing.

“This time going in, I think all four of us really had a much clearer sense of what we wanted the end product to be. With the self-titled record, it changed. One of the reasons it took so long was that we were still figuring things out. Leah joined a month before we recorded it, so we were still dealing with what sound we wanted to project and how we wanted to present the music. There are so many ways in doing that. We did so many different versions of the self-titled just in interior to listen back and think, ‘Is this how we sound?’

S13: Right…

RC: “Going in with The Spiritual Sound, I think we all had a much clearer idea, having done a lot more recordings together, but also having played together and the band having solidified its musical identity more. Right off the bat, on a technical level, I had a very clear sense of how I wanted everything to be recorded and captured. Generally overseeing the production, I can’t play and roll tape for the initial capture, so we always pick the studio and the recording engineer for the initial tracking. I always give them a big rundown and have a chat with them on the phone of how I want it set up.

“This time I feel like we really hit the ground running, because we all had communicated a sense of what we wanted, and then I think I was able to translate that pretty quickly into the technical details. Even to the point that there are a handful of studios around here that I like for various reasons – some live rooms I like more than others. Drums, for instance… about half of the songs were recorded in one place, and the other half were recorded in the other in terms of the drums, because I wanted that specific drum sound for that specific song.”

S13: Talking again about the bridge from Living Is Easy, My Garden is an interesting opening song. Was it one of the earlier ones written?

DM: “That was maybe the last one I wrote. But it all kind of happens at the same time. Because of the way that we write, the germinal idea for a song may end up actually being another song. The genealogy of My Garden… in 2022 I wrote two riffs that were going to be part of one song. The first is the one that you hear at the beginning, and the second one was the more melodic that you end up hearing in The Reply. Originally, those were two parts of the same song. We wrote that whole song, which was the first song on the record, and it didn’t work. I didn’t think it was good enough.

“So the first riff I took home, and [thought], ‘I like this idea, but it’s not working in this more normal, thrashy context that the first song had’. And then I started listening to Slipknot, thinking, ‘What can I do? This is a really intense and dissonant idea’. But I wanted this song to do something that banged and was more straightforward. Slipknot has all these on this first record (not Iowa – great record, by the way) that I’d never seriously spent time with before, because their image is kind of silly. They take these incredibly dissonant ideas and make them pop! It’s a weird thing that they’re able to do, so I listened to a lot of that and then had a sense that ended up inspiring the direction I took. I don’t think it really sounds like a Slipknot song, but that’s where that went.”

S13: Interesting…

DM: “And then the other half of the riff is actually just its own idea. The melody was too pretty for screaming, I needed to sing. Then we spent a lot of time in the studio trying out different ways to make it work, and eventually we got it. That whole process started with this one song I wrote and finished early this year. It was a three-year process of a voice memo recording, eventually becoming the bookend songs on the record.”

S13: It’s interesting that two songs came out of that, because when you listen to something like Flea, thematically, it starts off as one thing and then ends up in a totally different space. Similar with The Reply, where you’re singing about the ocean, then World War I. Are juxtapositions something that you think of in your music?

DM: “The Reply is actually the most autobiographical song we wrote. It’s very normal for me to be at the beach and be like, ‘I wonder, why World War I…’, you know what I mean? (laughs) I spend a lot of time reading history and thinking about it and talking about it. Obviously, there is the juxtaposition there… it is a little bit of a joke to be at the beach and say, ‘Why did World War I happen?’ I’m aware that that’s a funny part of my personality.”

RC: “But it’s also sincere… for you talking about the quotidian.”

DM: “I know, but that’s why that song is a little bit funny, because yes, the juxtaposition works differently for people. For my friends, it’s almost like an inside joke. Playing that song for my wife for the first time, and it’s obvious, because that’s an experience she’s had with me many times. But it’s a serious thing in terms of juxtaposition… it’s more like formal logic that we work with. Especially on this record, I don’t think we’re very interested in connecting things. It’s like, ‘Here’s this and here’s this’, your job as a listener is to make sense of that, and I think we’re asking for trust when we talk about how it’s a demanding record. If you’re going to get something out of it, I think you have to trust that we know what we’re doing, and that there is substance there. It’s not just a bunch of random noise. Like you said with Flea, there are five songs in that song. Leah wrote that one, and it took me a really long time to get what she’s going for.”

S13: What you were saying about Slipknot. Is that an approach that you often use when you’re struggling to reach a through-line?

DM: “A million percent. I teach music, too, and I tell this to all of my students who are interested in songwriting. The job of a musician is to steal. It’s the way that music gets written, especially when you’re starting out. Whether it’s a career as a songwriter or on a particular song, I think it’s very helpful to start out by trying to find the sound that you’re looking for. You don’t have to invent it from scratch… you can look at people who have worked with similar material and then try to do your own thing without copying what someone else is doing. It’s not going to end up really sounding like them.

“Richard had a great quote about that when we were working on Dan’s Love Song, and I was fretting a little bit, like, ‘Man, does this just sound too much like My Bloody Valentine?’ And he said, ‘How dare you suggest that you can make something that sounds like My Bloody Valentine.’ (laughs) You can try your best to sound like this band, but it’s just going to sound like your thing. It’s not to say that sometimes music doesn’t sound like you’re ripping someone else off; of course it does, it’s just that you can’t do what another artist has done, so it’s not worth worrying about whether or not you’re ripping them off. Just do the best thing that you know but look for inspiration and then do your own thing with it.

“Right now, I’m starting to work on the third record, and figuring out how it sounds in my head. I have this idea that I want to write some black metal, so I’m listening to Watain and Mayhem. I know that music pretty well, but how does it work? That’s a fun thing to really immerse yourself in. Usually when I’m listening to something that’s not Bob Dylan, it’s because I’m trying to learn something from it and steal something from it.”

RC: “Dan and I share that kind of perspective in terms of stealing, or learning. One time in a group seminar, somebody was expressing concern, saying, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to a lot of this lately, does my music sound too much like this?’ The composition professor said, ‘Your music is really a combination of everything that you’ve heard filtered through your current perspective, so you don’t worry about it’. I remember when I was about 15 years younger early in grad school, writing music. I was so sure that certain musical gestures were going to come across a certain way, and nobody got any of it! (laughs) People were like, ‘This piece sounds like really abstract’. I thought, ‘Abstract, this is the most concrete thing I’ve ever written’ (laughs).

“It’s almost like a coming of age, learning experience. Once it gets through the filter whatever your current ethic and practice is, it’s probably going to be its own thing, most of the time. This is something that I used to say also when I taught composition and also production and engineering at college. Especially the first-year students, some would want to make a mix that sounded like Skrillex. And then there’d be others that would say, ‘Oh my gosh, does all my stuff sound the same?’ It was one of those things whether we’re talking about composition or production or playing styles, if you follow the lineage of any tradition, you’ll find that one borrows from the other, so there’s a continuous through-line that just places you within a tradition, but you’re still an individual voice.

“I’ve known a lot of people, both students and colleagues, who get really hung up on that, and I think it holds them back in terms of their output. I’m not judging the quality of their work, just the quantity. [They] get so far on their own head, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I was listening to this Beethoven piano and I’ll just never write something that sounds as idiomatic as that’. It’s like, ‘You’re not him, so get over it, be yourself’. (laughs) It comes back to that cliché but very relevant thing of always being the best possible version of you. Nobody can ever be a better version of you than you are. Lean into that and accept your voice as it is and develop that voice.”

S13: Dan’s Love Song feels like one of those organic moments where a song just falls into everybody’s lap…

DM: “Definitely not. That one is just me and Richard. That was one of the very rare songs where… my wife was on vacation and when she does that, I’ll usually keep an electric guitar in my bedroom, because I go to bed a lot later than her. Often before bed, I’ll play a little bit, and I just started writing it. I [thought], ‘This is a really good song’. It was one of those songs that just happens sometimes. But then I was intending for it to be the original. The idea was that it was going to be this acoustic black metal song played on a clean electric guitar with a blast beat behind it, and I was going to tremolo pick it. I don’t remember why… there was some logistics in the studio, and we couldn’t do it.

“Our friend Aaron [Tackett], who plays in Chat Pile works at the pedal company, Keeley, and he had shipped us a bunch of pedals, including this fuzz pedal called the Loomer. I took these over to Richard’s house, and I brought over my Blues Junior and built that song in the studio. It took a week and ended up just being that way.”

RC: “It was very organic. It was a special thing over the course of the solstice or Christmas or something. We did all these layers, tracked all these things and figured out how we wanted to dial in the vocals and set them up with a couple different mics.”

S13: Some artists believe when they are in creative process that certain aspects are taken out of their hands. Given the transcendental nature in Agriculture’s music, is that something you believe in?

RC: “Definitely. Whether it’s just a kernel of an idea at that point or an almost fully formed song, if you listen to the music, it will tell you what it means. I think about this when it comes to writing guitar melodies or counter parts or solos to whatever Dan has brought in. I certainly think about it in terms of production and mixing the record. If you listen closely enough, a record will tell you how it needs to be mixed. A song will tell you what it needs. If I’m in the studio and I hear Dan saying something, I’m like, ‘This is the right mic for that. Or maybe we’ll change this mic, how about that phrasing? Take a breath here instead’. These things just reveal themselves to you. I guess that’s the sort of intuitive approach. Somebody asked us in a recent interview about our training and if and how we avoid being too technical. If there’s one thing my training has given me other than exposure to vast repertoire and vocabulary, it’s that it makes it easier to communicate with other musicians. It’s the perspective to know that the music will speak to you if you just listen.”

DM: “As an artist, I think the only thing you can control is showing up to work. You don’t write songs if you don’t pick up the guitar or whatever your instrument is. I can’t sit down and write a good song. It just doesn’t work that way. Sometimes that happens and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s why the idea of a muse, like from Greek mythology, is something that’s stuck with us forever. There’s this famous Bob Dylan interview on 60 Minutes, where he said there were seven years where he could write the best songs ever, and he said he didn’t know why he couldn’t do that anymore. I would argue that he’s still writing really good music, but this was a few years ago, so I think in that sense, it’s taken out of your hands. You can’t get frustrated if you can’t write a good song.

“I think it changes once you get into the studio. I trust all the technical stuff completely to Richard, and whoever he is directing. I no longer try to have opinions about that. What he just said, I think makes a lot of sense, but I do think that I have a more hands on approach. It has to be right. Obviously, there’s no objective criteria for it, but I have to feel that it’s right, and that takes as long as it takes. But that feels like it has more to do with me than the actual writing of material.”

S13: What you and Richard were saying about teaching, there’s a lot of cross-pollination of genres with younger artists who don’t seem so hemmed in by one specific thing like past generations where there was far more stylistic tribalism. Do you see this level of openness as a positive thing in music?

RC: “I think so overall. My experience when I was teaching college for about 10 years – especially the first and second years in my class – was that it was interesting over that period how that shifted, and it became more of what you’re saying. I remember when I started grad school in 2011, and the term that we would use was polystylism. It’d be so silly to say that now.(laughs)

“I don’t share all their anxiety, so maybe [this] is too optimistic and naive, but my take on it is that it seems like they’re benefiting from having been born into a world where a lot of those barriers kind of don’t exist. These barriers are almost physical. To give you an example of what I mean, it’s like with streaming. There are pros and cons, and I feel both ways. But streaming didn’t become a thing until I was an adult. YouTube didn’t even come out until my last year of high school!

“I grew up in the Bay Area, and just about every weekend when I was a teenager, I would spend either a Saturday or Sunday on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley at Amoeba Records and Rasputin Records and would just crate dig; that was just a thing. Eventually they got that CD reader where you could scan the barcode and listen to 15 second snippet of a song. There was a great place in in North Berkeley, called Hear Music that’s since closed, and they had a listening bar with four or five turntables with headphones, and they would open anything for you so you could listen. I remember the CD was between 12 and 15 dollars and that crushing anxiety as a teenager of being like, ‘Man, I’ve only got 15 dollars, I have to make the right choice!’ (laughs) Burning CDs made that a little bit easier, but you’re still trading with a friend. You remember that?”

S13: (Laughs) Yes, great times. 

RC: “We all remember this. That created community and was really awesome. I look back fondly on those years on the one hand, but on the other, there were lines drawn everywhere. Systemically, even if they were relatively benign and easily looked over, you just think about going into a record store and they’re divided by genre by style.”

S13: It was like a culture war.

RC: “You’re absolutely right. This thing would be implanted in your gut, or in my young mind, ‘I found the Black Album in the rock section, not the heavy metal section, does that mean Metallica is not a metal?’ (laughs) Whereas when you’re streaming, it’s just like, ‘Metallica, my grandpa told me to listen to that. That sounds cool. Charlie XCX, this bangs. Mozart for babies, this beat is really dope’. That was more the way that my students were interacting with music, and I thought it was liberating. Like seeing these sounds simply as colours.”

DM: “I think it’s basically good. Is the way that we consume music perfect right now? Definitely not. In terms of the way that kids are genre agnostic? I think that doesn’t matter. Other things will emerge from that, and new forms are coming out of that. I think the only thing that matters is gathering in physical, communal space to experience music. It can’t just be limited to your headphones and your Spotify playlist. The only thing that is in danger is that music has to be a force of community and not just a force of isolation. Obviously, everybody sometimes uses music to block the world out and I think that’s good. I think everybody who has a strong relationship to music has experiences, especially when they’re 15. But I think the flipside, you form this really intense relationship with whatever the band is, and then you go see them live, and you’re like, ‘Wow, there’s X number of people who also feel this way’. I think those two things connect.”

S13: Going back to The Reply and First World War, how things are right now, do you envisage a similar scenario unfolding in our lifetime?

DM: “I think America is going to change really dramatically. America’s kind of teetering right now. I don’t think it’s collapsing yet – not enough damage has been done. But it’s absolutely wild – not even as a progressive standpoint and just from a straight up regular patriot who likes where they live – our country is falling apart for no reason. And that, I think, is the parallel to World War I where the thing that’s interesting is that it’s one of the only conflicts I’m aware of in history where it’s actually opaque.

“If you were to talk to someone in the spring like I say in The Reply, the way that European intellectuals were talking to each other… even the Tsar of Russia was on a yacht with one of the highest-ranking members of the German royalty when the war broke out. They were homies! (laughs) And then suddenly they find out that their countries are at war. Just the total senselessness of it.

“At that time, Europe was undisputedly the most powerful land mass in the history of the world. The British Empire was at the absolute apex of its powers. The standard of living was rising across Europe. Culturally, it was producing the many of the greatest works of art the world has ever seen. Obviously, there were problems. I’m just saying from a standpoint of power, nothing about morality, but about power, wealth…”

S13: It wasn’t exactly a house of cards…

DM: “No, it was an unbelievably powerful set of countries, and then for literally no reason, they fought each other to the point that 40 years later, the whole of Europe had been destroyed. The British Empire had collapsed into the sorry state that it’s in now, where it’s a middling power, and none of it needed to happen! That’s the sort of thing I was probing with The Reply that sometimes in history, for no apparent reason, choices are made, and catastrophe happens. You can see a little bit of that in the U.K. now with post-Brexit. It’s unbelievably worse than it was before.”

S13: Absolutely. And Labour isn’t doing anything to make things better, either.

DM: “Labor is doing a terrible job. But that’s the thing – there was no emergency that led to Brexit. We think that big changes happen when there’s an emergency, and so that’s the thing that is interesting about the Trump presidency. He’s kind of destroying the country, and maybe actually going to break it. I think the jury is still out on that, but I think it could break the United States. He’s very unpopular, but what is the reason for breaking 250 years of precedent at the height of its power? Because they can’t deal with trans people? Literally point 00.1 per cent of our population who doesn’t bother anybody. It’s just wild that you have to kind of laugh at it and cry about it a little bit. I don’t know if there’s going to be a big war. I do know that a lot of Americans are going to move to Europe. I think that’s what’s interesting there.”

The Spiritual Sound is out now via The Flenser. Purchase from Bandcamp.