Not sure what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the Merkaba house for our interview. Their well kept garden was the perfect setting- almost immediately I knew what they were about.

YANP- Kurt: As far as the lyrics and just the music in general goes, in combination with everything to do with the “Bones of The Sacred Forest” CD case and all of its earthiness, what are your influences? I guess I’m asking about your beliefs, but really is it anything specific? What do you support?

Merkaba – Nick: My lyrics that I’ve had so far have come from nature-based visions that have involved either the collapsing and or rebuilding of… or something taking over an area, for example humans taking over a forest and turning it into something else or vice versa. It’s all very ecologically based, metaphysically and spiritually based as well. As far as like…

Merkaba- Garrett: … Liberation of the mind?

N: Yeah, and transcendental levels of consciousness.

G: I definitely think we all sort of think about, in our everyday lives, and something that I meditate on a lot is the state of our society, and modern culture… And how seemingly chaotic and close to a… maybe… cliff we are. Just with how the economy, the political systems, are organized and are fueled and propped up by an energy source, oil, that is rapidly running out. All the food systems, the entire globe, are based on oil for which prices are shooting up and we’re going to run out. This global consumer mindset… I dunno maybe modern systems?..

Read the rest of the interview after the break

YANP: The way of thinking that’s taken over in society that stops us from thinking about things like this?

G: Yeah, we’re very in denial about the state of things.

N: We have blinders on. We’ve had blinders put on us, rather from I guess “authority” or “superior” peoples.

YANP: And you mean basically people who shouldn’t have authority but manage to run things anyway…

N: Right, but who get it anyway… due to finances. Haha.

YANP: This makes me want to ask you: do you guys consider yourselves a black metal band? Everything you’re talking about makes me think of those ideals.

N: That’s a good question. Chad’s always got a good view on this one. I do personally, but I don’t look at black metal as being one specific thing. When you get to the roots of it, there are so many other things going on. So I guess what we’ve done is kind of focus on other areas that really hadn’t been focused up until the past few years, like the “Cascadian” sound.

G: When someone asks me I don’t say that we’re black metal because they think of the corpse paint. I say we’re ambient metal, but really it is black metal stylistically. I don’t mention it to most people because they don’t understand the… haha… intricacies of black metal.

YANP: I can definitely understand that. It’s why I went ahead and asked.

G: That sounded so pretentious, “People don’t understand the intricacies of black metal.” Haha.

YANP: Yeah… people don’t wanna talk about that unless they’re into it.

Merkaba- Chad: I like to say it’s just the coming together of people who enjoy each other’s company and connect. And you know, right, we’re all musicians, we’re all artists, we all come from the same place, and we all have similar ideas. So you know, it’s just a combination and you can call it whatever genre you want but it’s just us making music from the heart.

YANP: Definitely. That’s good, good. So I talked to Mike over at CD Central and he said you were doing a split with I think… Panopticon?

N: We’re actually working on a split with Wheels Within Wheels, which is another project from a band out of Louisville called Satyr, and Satyr has a couple of guys in the band that are Panopticon and Wheels Within Wheels and Below, from Clay County, southeastern Kentucky. We just recorded a new demo, a 2-track demo that’s a little over 20 minutes, and that is definitely being submitted to Wheels Within Wheels this week, and he’s gonna demo that out to a couple of labels for a split to try to pick us up. I’ve been talking to Austin from Panopticon as well about doing some stuff with them. I personally would like a little bit more of a concept type deal but a different concept for the Panopticon split, because the demo that we just finished was one previous song that Garrett and Chad had with another band before Merkaba called Fields of Fire. We kind of revamped the song with a more Merkaba type style. So that’s called ‘Lament’. The new track with like-concepted lyrics is ‘Lament Part 2: Enduring Hope’. It’s concepted really well, but the funny thing is we didn’t intend on that. Once I had written the lyrics to the second one, Garrett and Chad had the lyrics to the first one, and we just put them side by side and it was silly not to put them together.

G: Three years apart, but in time…

N: Yeah. But I’m excited about working with both of those guys for sure.

YANP: Yeah man. I’m a really big fan of Panopticon and… Skagos, I randomly picked up their split EP.

G: Skagos is fucking amazing. Probably personally my number one influence.

YANP: I was gonna say, with those two bands I just picked up that split saw the mountains, some writing, “I can’t read it…” and it’s like: I want that. And that was the first time I heard any metal quite like this, what you guys are doing.

N: Nice. That’s a good introduction, a really good one. One note on Skagos, which I guess wouldn’t be a bad thing to mention is we got our full length picked up by a label that Skagos is on out Salem, Oregon called Eternal Warfare. They just picked it up for distro though for now, which is still great. We have sent them a total of 16 copies, the first round was 6 copies and those were just snatched up. They didn’t even get them out of the office before people were like “What is this?!” and so he got 10 more right away. So that’s really exciting.

YANP: Yeah that sounds really good. That’s great news for you guys. I feel like the whole black metal thing has gotten to a point now where it’s getting more popular. It’s been gaining popularity for a while, but it seems like now if you bring it up, people will at least know what you’re talking about.

N: Yeah. Wolves In The Throne Room helped out with that a lot. Almost immediately, as soon as they surfaced it was like: “Well what the hell is this?” And then it just kind of escalated from there.

G: I think one thing with music right now that is happening every day and ever more so is that people are so exposed to a wide range of musical influences that you know… We’re playing a sort of black metal but it’s influenced by everything. All other genres of music are like that too. If you look at new music, the scenes are exploding, and it’s a real time of pushing the boundaries and a lot of genres are morphing and changing.

C: And also the Internet plays a big part. I mean… it’s a big world on there.

N: Definitely. As far as that goes, when we first put out our one track EP from Burning Sensations’ show, Continuum, we posted a link a link up and… well, Garrett would be able to explain that better as far as the R&ABM goes.

G: There’s this blog called the Red Hand Anarchist Black Metal Site, run by this dude in Russia.

N: It’s very good, you should check it out.

G: Yeah, there’s some awesome music. A lot of it is very political… Of course. They posted our first Demo/EP thing that we did.

N: That site gets a shitton of exposure.

C: It’s a lot of bands.

G: We got connected to that through this association RAAN, the Red & Anarchist Action Network, sort of that… A lot of what we do musically and just in our everyday lives is associated with Anarchist Communism, and those ideals.

N: Taoism.

C: Yeah, definitely. We’re just trying to put out positive energy because right now the world is tilting all of this negative energy on us. We’ve got chemical food that’s being fed to everybody, pesticides on everything, chemicals on everything. So you try to make a balance, you make diversity, so everything can live together, grow together.

YANP: That’s really awesome. I appreciate that you guys are living up to what you believe in. I’m pretty aware of what you’re talking about but… I just ate some Taco Bell. It sucks but you know, there it is so, there I am.

C: There’s stuff like this garden happening all over the world right now. Hundreds of acres of food forests.

N: That’s what’s going to be really crucial for this generation of people to learn. We talk so much about our monetary system and how much capitalists blow up the idea of everybody needing to cash in and save and save, and save, and get all of your gold and silver. That’s really possibly the dumbest thing you could do right now because the main investment right now should be food, and seeds.

G: … And friends.

N: And friends, because you know, we’re gonna have to learn how to do it. We are going to have to teach the people around some self-sustainability.

G: This is something that we think about in that it… It’s therapeutic for me to do this music because it’s an expression of me thinking about it.

C: When I’m playing up there, and especially in front of people, I just go blank.

N: It’s a trance.

YANP: I wanted to ask you guys as well: I already mentioned your influences outside of music as far as your beliefs and your lifestyles, but what kind kind of bands do you guys listen to? What are you listening to now, what were you listening to when you started Merkaba?

N: I was listening to a good bit of Wolves In The Throne Room. I wasn’t very exposed to black metal when
this band started. I think that was the neat thing about our influences and how this got started. I’d never played black metal before, and was kind of like, “How do you do that??”. So I was listening to all different kinds of stuff, and at the time I was in a couple of different bluegrass bands playing string bass.

G: An influence for me is Earth. We don’t sound very much like Earth but the drone aspect and I guess the trance aspect of it are big.

N: I also listen to a lot of Sunn 0))) by the way. Got a Sunn 0))) tattoo right here and a half sleeve for them here.

YANP: Oh yeah, there it is, didn’t even recognize that. Nice. I was just listening to The Melvins earlier, I don’t know if you guys are into that.

N: Oh yeah, definitely, they get weird. I love The Melvins for that because they’ll have a super drony record and then they’ll have this silly-sounding almost kind of pop/metal kind of record, and it’s like “What the fuck are you guys doing?!”, but they do it well, so.

G: How about Pelican? They’re going to be playing Boomslang this year.

N: Definitely, and Cough. Cough is playing Boomslang too. That was another huge influence of mine. I was also listening to, actually, the other band that I’m in, They Yearn For What They Fear a lot. They had just gotten started back up and were playing again. They started in 2005 as a two-piece, bass and drums, and they revamped and got back together and then I joined in about 3 months after. But I was listening to them a lot and digging the shit out of them.

G: Panopticon is probably a pretty big influence as well..

YANP: As far as their split with Skagos goes, I was debating with myself earlier about whether or not that’s a concept album. I was thinking about it and I think it might just be this specific genre of black metal acting upon itself. Lyrically some of it is so similar you have to wonder.

G: Definitely. Eco-spiritual stuff?

N: It’s like the “Cascadian” sound I was talking about earlier. A lot of those bands, Wolves in The Throne Room, Skagos, and ah… some others, are from the Pacific Northwest. The scenery and the land out there is a really big inspiration to them and you can definitely hear it in the music.

Later on, in a smokey room full of music equipment…

YANP: What exactly is Merkaba? Why did you choose it as your name?

N: Your Merkaba is your electromagnetic, metaphysical grid.

Garrett hands me a small figurine in the shape of a Merkaba:

Picture taken from bluestarlight.com.au

N: Basically, every living thing has this grid around them. When I say things like grid, or electromagnetic, or metaphysical, people are like, “Whaaaaaat are you talkin’ about??” and the best comparison I can make is to a person’s aura. Your aura is the eye of your Merkaba. So you have this grid that surrounds you and protects you, and it’s always spinning. When one can raise themselves to a higher level of consciousness it spins faster and faster, giving one a closer connection with themselves, the universe, and everything.