Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of Maximum Fun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bolzai. I'm Jesse Thorne. My next guest this week referred to themselves as an ecstatic black metal band.

They're called agriculture. What is an ecstatic black metal band? What does that mean? Well, probably better to show than tell. Here's how they start their newest record, the spiritual sound. The song is called My Garden.

You have all the hallmarks of black metal there.

Mile minute drums, chaotic sounds, noisy, shredding.

A guitar solo that sounds like, I don't know, industrial machinery failing.

Music like, I don't know, industrial machinery failing.

Then about 45 seconds in, you hear it.

The scream.

Like a lot of black metal screams, it is loud, passionate, and almost inhuman sounding.

Usually, thematically and aesthetically, black metal is really dark. I mean, like, the fans and the bands usually wear corpse paint. That's like that kind of black and white face paint that makes

you look like a demon. Everybody wears black, head to toe. The lyrics are usually creepy,

scary, intense.

So, ecstatic black metal, with ecstasy being the state of being an overwhelming rapturous delight,

it's not exactly what comes to mind right away.

Anyway, the song, about a minute later, the music changes. The drums get a little

quieter, the guitars stop chugging, and that goblin screaming is replaced with some very pretty

major key singing about gardens and Buddhism?

Like a lot of subcultures, black metal tends to define itself by what it isn't.

If the vocals are deep and growly instead of high and snarly, oh well, then that's not black metal, that's death metal. If the drums are slow and

boomy instead of fast like a hummingbird, well, that's doom metal. Agriculture doesn't really

play that game.

...