Daniel Meyer: Kneeling – Album Review & Interview

Daniel Meyer: Kneeling

(The Flenser)

DL | LP

Out March 28

Is the balance between beauty and abrasion hard to achieve? Picking up from where a frustrated musical inroads once abandoned him and setting alight to the bed of past as it sleeps in, the dive bars it drinks in, but watching something astoundingly restorative bloom from its back, Kneeling, the debut solo album from Agriculture singer and guitarist Daniel Meyer, is one of purification and atonement, the sound of a mouth being opened for the first time. Review and interview by Ryan Walker.

11 the flesh and the hide he burned up outside the camp.
12 Then he slaughtered the burnt offering. His sons handed him the blood, and he splashed it against the sides of the altar.
13 They handed him the burnt offering piece by piece, including the head, and he burned them on the altar.
14 He washed the internal organs and the legs and burned them on top of the burnt offering on the altar.

Leviticus 9, 11-14

Inspired by American folk artist Judee Sill and the readings of the Torah, across a Side A and a B, between thick, vintage indie; thick like congealed blood coming out the mouth of a wooden hobbyhorse and the immense, cryogenic atmospheres he is mostly known for in ecstatic Black Metal pioneers Agriculture, Kneeling is a volume of songs about four-five years old. Initially written pre-Agriculture (whom he sings and plays guitar for), the record is rooted in a period of existential analysis for Meyer, where he was bent on trying to figure out what purpose music served him.
In college, he studied classical music, spending the main portion of his 20s obsessed with 20th-century European composers like Hulmut Lachenmann, and the American composer Morton Feldman. After attending graduate school at a conservatory to ”study music as deeply as I could,” quit and worked in a homeless shelter. ”I still think that music is probably the most interesting, not having written a style of song typical of the tones that adorn Side A in a decade, but eventually, investing in some gear with the governmental stimulus checks (essentially Universal Credit), he began creating. ”So that’s where the music from this record came from. I was just trying to figure out what happened when I picked up a guitar and opened my mouth,” he says. ”I recorded all of it and then sat on it for a while because Agriculture started to form at that time, and obviously, I was focused on that. But I’ve always thought that these songs are pretty interesting, and so I asked Jonathan Flenser if he would put them out, and he did.”

Split into two distinct sides, yet the body and mind of these personalities emanate helically from the same root; the foot of something simultaneously plighted by what has been encountered on its adventure, as well as unable to exist without the pivotal moments it introduces into every momentous segment. The act of splitting the musical personalities of the album apart helps the larger picture evolve, and those sides start to become inevitably entangled, running parallel to each other, through the same biblical verses, down the same boulevards, yet still emitting a separate, spiritualized aura. ”Well, I think that as a musician it’s helpful to think of ‘genre’ as a toolbox. If I decide that I want to write Black Metal songs, I know which tools to use: I’m gonna distort my guitar, tremolo pick, shriek, etc. If I’m gonna write these indie rock songs, I’m gonna do a bunch of other things. But ultimately it’s me using these tools so no matter what genre I’m operating in it’s gonna sound like me,’’ Meyer explains. ”So when I started working on these songs, I just kind of made a decision that for some of them I wanted to use Black Metal techniques and for the others I wanted to do songwritery stuff.”

Hung from the opening of Side A is Ugly Man. To a tidal wave of skyscraper-sinking guitars gorging on all they come into contact with, it illuminates the darkness with its devastating monolith of vocal layers, gold at first, then heated into a breeze of charcoal. Short, but like the best things often are – the memory of the moment impresses itself deeper into the spirit long after the tactility of the present has disintegrated into particles of light and air. Descending with a wildly ethereal noise, 16 Angels is a mean dirge of electric guitar drone, a dark Americana-inflected slowcore jam of delicate drums that tumble into a purposeful splash and tie their bones together with pieces of silver string before being butchered by a shattered, stained-glass solo that cuts a canvas through the centre to reveal heaven on the other side with just a touch of the ghostly, monotonous drum nervously sat in the corner of the room ending chaos, sat there, as it always has been, talking to itself under the covers, swinging its legs from a feeble stool in the corner of a room, acknowledging nothing except itself, and probably not even much of that, adding to the parade of chaos that rocked hard a brief breath ago.

Despite what the subject matter or contextual factors might suggest, narratively or stylistically speaking, rather than an erratic disjunction or complicated rupture between moods, observations and sentiments, this is very much a whole, completed collection of songs. Meyer’s fearless explorations are more similar than most people might imagine at first glance (LA is a ritual, a religion; a vigil full of distinct omens, with its fair share of sacrificial procedures to go with them). Kneeling is where Leviticus and L.A. stub cigarettes out in the same ashtray, wake up in the same bed, and share the same shower. It takes a man, a musician, a follower like Meyer to mediate between those spaces, stretched between them; shaking, yet not totally shattering, being rebuilt, before the process starts over. For as the album, let it be known – they are more similar than you might think. Completed with its own common rituals, LA is arguably as strange a story as any passages from the Bible. As much as the city influences Daniel, so was the harnessing of the imagery that runs throughout the book. “So I grew up Jewish and went to Jewish school and was Bar Mitzvah’d and everything. But Jews tend to focus our education on Exodus and Genesis, and I’d always been curious what was in the other books. So I just kinda wanted to check them out,” says Daniel. ”They are absolutely wild books. There are so many strange anecdotes, fascinating rules, and amazing names. All kinds of good stuff. It’s just a wonderful well of profound sounding strangeness that is open for any artist to use.”

Those images, often erupting with unsettling visuals, cradles the opening side in a reflective chamber of contemplation, the closing of certain channels, the crossing of certain oceans, and arriving with the insight of a grown man – deformed and hunchback, a victim of emotionally turbulent dysplasia and circumstantial crisis. But the images lifted from the bible shine an honesty on, and through the record, a kerosene lamp illuminating the way forward. ”I mean, at that time I was just trying to find a relationship with God,” Meyer explains. ”And since I grew up Jewish, I went looking in the most familiar place. It’s not where I ended up finding a spirituality that works for me right now, but I’m really glad I read the whole thing. Only the Old Testament, though – still never read the new one.” Omen, one of the lead tracks, camply, confidently dances under an all-American front porch, sleeves rolled up, tattoos indistinguishable from garden dirt, diesel oil and damaged skin. A ceremony of voices are closely wound and brightly chimes against each other like harmonic phosphors, a gorgeous unfurling chordal roll of guitars shatter and rattles below the fizzing explosion of drums, falling asleep then slapping themselves awake. A final power-howl sees the man combust and a pile of clothes replace the spot where he once stood. Sacrificing A Calf, a literal description of the ritual for cattle sacrifice described in Leviticus, sees a Tascam 4-Track anxiously cross one’s knuckles with the delicacy of a spider. A shimmering mesh of post-rock guitars, rusty mistakes making sense of themselves as they become wrapped up in an increasingly fussy, sedated din, trying to catch up with where the last track lets go. A subtle minor chord change knocks the song into a new shape before quickly fizzing back whilst a bedroom of bruised machines, and a slice of light splintering everything into a clump of silence perfectly lets us slip away into wherever we have been stolen to.

Ecstatic. Spiritual. Black. Commonly placed adjectives when coming to define Daniel’s group, Agriculture. On Kneeling, there’s still just as firm belief in the power of ecstasy, the determined power of the spirit, the magnetic amnesty and transcendental intensity of Black Metal, but it sucks itself inward as though via the sheer force of what has found its way to the surface, the only way to channel that energy is to return. Kneeling represents that schism. This record is just me. I think that’s kind of the whole difference. Agriculture is about creating a community around this super intense thing. It’s like building a big bonfire and inviting people to come hang out around it,” Meyer states. “This record, and my idea of what a solo project under my own name should be, is like a little campfire for me to roast a can of beans on. I will share my beans, but they are mine.”

Side B shows us what followers of Meyer’s group might have expected all along. Yet it implodes because of how Side A precipitated, lured, leaned against us – a lover’s shoulder somehow crumbling to dust just as we are sent to sleep. Side B is plagued by a fierce, blissful, impressionistic blizzard that ravages the streets of LA, the topic of this particular trip. Blanket bathes us in a whirlpool of cruciform guitars cut out of corrugated steel. And don’t be deceived by the manipulated chants – amorphous screeches cutting through a clutter of instruments, eyeballs vibrating, skin wet with electricity. An attempt at perfect memory, but the fallacy of it projects nothing but a rush of fragments, without words, the perception of the place Meyer strolls through is free for our imagination to inform.
AA”I was improvising over each track with all of these shrieks. All I remember is that they were sort of about the experience of walking around Downtown LA at night,” he says. ”I think that all Black Metal is kind of instrumental in the sense that every vocalist is kind of doing a bit. To scream is to use the voice as an instrument, I think. So maybe you’re right, they are instrumental.”

Meyer’s diseased chants and barks bellowing just within earshot, reaching us in a matter of minutes despite being screamed lightyears ago. Feedback whistles as the climax clings on the ledge for dear life, or maybe the whole ominous odyssey is the sound of being consumed by a vortex. Next, as though the trademark of Agriculture’s Living Is Easy EP contained it in a glass box, requiring us to imagine the melodies based on the expressive vibrations erupting on the other side, Lamplight’s heaving-engine guitars and brooding, beatific spectrality drives us to another part of the city with its haunted broadcast of horns and shiver of dreamy effects. The judder of The Beach is a somnambulant beast of a track. A blubbering motor, a rusty grand piano overgrown with time and Meyer’s ethereal caoineadh wails is a track that sends Black Metal below the iceberg into an ambience hitherto chartered. The engine continues to cry, ghostly piano notes jump in and out of focus, creating a disorientating blurriness between purpose and mistake, the vocals eventually evaporating just as a pealing guitar looms from behind.

Both languished and lacerated in equal measure, Pavement picks up the pace by brandishing a cavernous blast beat rhythm with a cloth soaked in chloroform covering its mouth. It’s an unstoppable assault of magmatic guitars, abrasively knocking against the same stacked gallop of notes, the blotted bolts of distant thuds continuing to kick a door into the trunk of chaos. An optimal, arresting adventure through the streets of a great citadel strung out on its own fables, the graffiti permanently doused on its shutters as the works of its great, contemporary scribes. Pavement, like Blanket, like Lamplight, the singularly worded Takeout takes us to another division of LA, another district. The spaces that are so vast and overlapping that they appear empty. This sense of the self being shrunken in an eternally changing labyrinth like a character in a diorama model, complete with all kinds of grotesque, yet breathtaking furnishings. As though a poltergeist is rummaging around in the skips parked in an abandoned scrapyard, it’s a mostly noisy, yet no less captivating track, digressing and diving into the warped, post-industrial ravines of the netherworld. Shards of guitars continue to surge forth and swell apart, the grandeur of the notes too great to be contained in their lowly shell – but it’s the random pangs and clashes, the clamorous cracks and scrapes and disembodied loud noises of the stiff-limbed, loose-ends that dominate this magical necropolis.
AA”LA is such a weird city. I love it here,” Meyer says. ”Everything on earth is happening here, but it’s all happening indoors somewhere and if you don’t know where that is it seems like it’s an empty city. Like, you don’t really run into people in LA unless you go to the right wine bar or whatever. No one is on the street, everyone’s in their cars or in their home or at a show or whatever. There’s a ton of space to spread out spiritually over here.”

A Great Man relies on nothing except silence, piano and voice to cast a spell on us. Meyer’s moist lips practically kissing the microphone. The rustling of the shirt. The sound of dust unsettled. The sound of wires dangling, magnetised to the vortex of what unbearable weight strains the surfaces of where it penetrates. The sound of stiff equipment delicately disturbed. The rallying cry of the uncomplicated, uncluttered Here; only able to be complicated and cluttered because of how crude it is. The piano approximates the threshold of oblivion, no thanks to approaching us from the cold as morphine is injected intravenously into the veins. Meyer’s ever-immersive, indecipherable squalls (a great man, an ugly man, simply a man, a man who defied descent, a man dug up) manifest the effect of something forsaken, foreboding, yet destructively beautiful as the ruins recede, and the city’s summit is reached.

Between a desire to write a chamber music album, a concept album about the 100-year war and upcoming Agriculture material, the beauty and abrasion, the space towards which Daniel Meyer is mostly drawn – when all the people saw it, they shouted for joy and fell facedown.

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Kneeling is part of The Flenser Series Membership 666. More info HERE

Ryan Walker | Louder Than War