A Conversation with Daniel Johann

Salvia Palth's Melanchole became one of the most popular lo-fi rock cult classics since its release in 2013. It has remained popular on social media and seems to continuously be an album that teens, like myself, discover or revisit. Daniel Johann, the artist behind it, has moved through several project names (Salvia Palth, Adore 1996, his own name) as well as genres (lo-fi slacker rock, maximalist electronic, dreampop) while staying almost entirely out of the spotlight.

After going out on a limb and reaching out requesting an interview, he got back to me and we scheduled a time. We called for around an hour and a half talking about Melanchole, the house fire that had destroyed his next album Winter, his newest album Last Chance to See, and the music industry and streaming in general. Here is that conversation we had. It is edited to reduce length and add clarity, but does not compromise the content of the conversation whatsoever.

You started out making music with demos like Little Voice, Healer, Songs for Friends, and eventually a finished Melanchole. Besides growing up isolated in a small town in New Zealand, what led you to start making that music in the first place?

I was pretty epileptic at the time, so I couldn't really sustain outdoor work for long. Where I'm from, the only jobs going were farm jobs. I tried milking a couple of times, but it's not a sustainable lifestyle for someone who needs regular sleep or they'll have a seizure. So it was really a choice between playing video games or making music, and one of those is more productive than the other. Streaming wasn't really a thing yet, or I probably would've tried my hand at that instead.

I hope this isn't a strange question, but do you still deal with epilepsy?

No, I've been medicated for six or seven years now. I had one scare when I was tapering my dose down and then went back up. So my advice to anyone in a similar spot: stick with the same dose, as long as you're not having bad side effects.

When you made those early songs and demos, did you actually like them once they were finished, or did you just feel satisfied enough to put them out?

It's not that I thought they sounded great, they were just the kind of songs I listened to at the time. There was already precedent for lo-fi music before me. I grew up on Captain Beefheart, one of my dad's favorite musicians, and that stuff from the '60s and '70s is about as lo-fi as it gets. Then in the blog era of the internet, there were blogs sharing random free downloads, garage bands, early Ty Segall, Times New Viking, that whole world of garage rock. Gorillaz was huge for me too, that was the first album I ever owned, and the White Stripes, also self-recorded, quite low fidelity. That's what I came up on. But at the same time I was listening to Muse, which is the complete opposite.

With the music you make now, is it different? Were you consciously going for those lo-fi aspects in Melanchole, or was that always just circumstantial?

I never set out to make a low-fidelity recording. It was just so normal to me that I didn't think twice about it. That's what I had access to, gear that could only sound about that good anyway, so there wasn't much point trying to make it sound better. It was more about creating an ambience around the songs. Now I'm a lot deeper into the gear side of things.

Why do you think people resonate with Melanchole so much? I mean, there will always be teenagers like me trying to find meaning in music. But why Melanchole?

I think it's become canonized to some extent, especially now. If you use Spotify, which I've never really used as a listener, you get pushed through a pipeline toward certain things, and my presumption is that part of the album's staying power is that it exists a bit outside its own lane. It's not as cohesive as, say, an Alex G album. There's always been more of a songwriter's bend to it, somewhere between fully written songs and ones that are just kind of stitched together at the seams.

Do you think listeners sometimes read too much into the meaning of your songs?

Honestly, I don't really care, and I've been pretty fortunate. I look at other artists who have genuinely intense fans behaving in weird ways all over the internet, and I just don't really deal with that. Maybe early on there was some of that, but overall it's been positive. I don't get "stans," and I'm grateful for that. I don't enjoy seeing that kind of thing in any genre, but especially in rock music, it feels transplanted from pop culture, these fan armies defending bands in ways that don't really hold up. I've had people imitate me before, but that felt more malicious than anything, and I don't encourage any of it.

Right after Melanchole, you recorded what would've been the next album, Winter, but then a house fire happened and you lost the masters. What happened, exactly?

I'd just moved to Wellington. My first place there caught fire, and a pipe above my room burst and drenched my laptop, and I lost all the files. That was right after I'd moved from Nelson, where I'd spent my last year of high school. All that survived was one long .wav file I'd sent to a friend on MediaFire beforehand, that's the only version that exists now.

Right after that, you shifted from that guitar-based sound to Adore, 1996, which was way more extreme electronic music. What prompted that?

Honestly, I was just bored and wanted the practice. I didn't have anything out under that name yet, so I put music out under it. There wasn't much more thought behind it than that.

Do you think Winter would've landed differently if you'd released it as Salvia Palth around that same time?

No, it was only about 50 percent done. Nowhere near finished, really just sketch demos. It would've taken a lot longer to actually finish. And honestly, I didn't want to put anything out under the Salvia Palth name at that point anyway. There wasn't any real audience yet for that style of music. Americans and New Zealanders had no interest at all. What was big at the time was folk music. A lot of artists people might associate me with could loosely be called folk musicians, but I've never really been one, there are folk elements, but it's always been rock underneath.

Last Chance to See has been out for around two years now, a much more professionally recorded and mastered album. But I still hear some resemblance of Melanchole in it. Was that intentional?

I think Winter has that too, all the guitar music I write ends up coming from a similar method of composition, whether I mean to or not, so it tends to sound roughly the same at its core. The real difference is in the arrangement. With Melanchole and Winter, the songs themselves weren't really the priority, I was more focused on making the recording sound interesting, which creates problems now, because touring those songs is genuinely difficult. Some of those tracks have seven or eight guitar parts. I've got a band now trying to approximate it, but I can't really sing and play a lot of it myself, and figuring out what's even going on in the recordings is a whole separate problem, I don't have the master files for anything before Winter.

With Last Chance to See, I was thinking more compositionally, chords, voice leading. I went to university for music, a double major in music studies and sonic arts, more the cultural and mixing/recording side than, say, Jacob Collier style theory. The fire that destroyed Winter happened one week into that program. I was basically homeless for the first two or three months.

You've said in past interviews that Melanchole and Winter were practice albums, that you wanted to eventually make something "good." Did Last Chance to See feel like that accomplishment?

In some ways, yeah, but that's a bit of a facetious answer. Really I'm just always trying to make something better than what I last made, and I think the only way to do that is to keep making things regardless of style. You also have to get more selective about what you actually release, otherwise you end up with hundreds of songs, most of which probably shouldn't come out. That's what I was doing as a kid, before Melanchole. After that album, even without much of a reception, I understood how an album actually gets structured, sequenced, and put together. So I got a lot more careful about just dropping random stuff.

That turned out poorly because of the fire, years of music was gone, including other songs from around the Melanchole era. Fun fact: "I Was All Over Her" was originally a five-minute song. What's on the album is really just the intro of the song, as I hated the rest of it. I chopped it down to that bit. The rest of that song doesn't exist anywhere anymore, because I wasn't really thinking about anything like that at the time.

Right, I mean there's no way you could've anticipated the success Melanchole eventually had.

No. For the first two or three years, I just knew people were listening, which is more than most people can say, and I was happy with that. Streaming numbers as a concept didn't even exist yet. Spotify literally didn't or hardly existed when I first put the album out, there was Bandcamp and iTunes, but barely anyone used those either. Everything was pirated. Over the next five years or so, it all shifted to Spotify, and I benefited a lot from that shift. But my honest take is that it's also done real damage to the ecosystem that got me here in the first place, there's no real "ladder-up" anymore for someone in my old position. There's an illusion of one, but it's rare now to see genuinely poor artists from a place like New Zealand get real traction. It's mostly people from New York with big PR machines behind them.

When you talk about that damage, is it more about the impact on you personally, or on artists and listeners more broadly?

More about public taste, how people understand where music actually comes from. Take Duster, for example, nothing against them, but when I was coming up, barely anyone knew who they were. People called it "space rock" and had no idea what that meant. Now they're regarded as one of the seminal shoegaze bands. The canon keeps getting rewritten, potentially in ways that flatten things out, because everyone's listening habits get shaped by the same handful of algorithms now. It's very formative for people's taste, which benefits me in terms of exposure, but it's been bad for the kind of extreme, art music I actually care about, the commercial value of that has dropped off.

It's similar with shoegaze as a term, it used to mean almost exclusively Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, bands that existed specifically in opposition to grunge in the '90s. It didn't extend to modern bands at all. The "shoegaze revival" now feels a lot like a reheated version of that. Cigarettes After Sex is a good example, one song lifted a bit from an Elliott Smith song, and then they just ran that same aesthetic into the ground and became one of the biggest bands in the world. Compare that to someone like King Krule, who's doing something really unique, you can't really copy his sound and have it make sense, though you can be influenced by it and recontextualize it, which should be the goal. Mac DeMarco is another one, as soon as he came out, there was suddenly a Mac DeMarco in every metropolitan area. That's never been what interests me artistically. I've always cared more about stuff on the fringes, Phil Elverum's music, for instance. I actually opened for him once, when he toured his Clear Moon show here.

I was going to ask about that. In another interview you mentioned you opened for him playing songs with Dali Gale and Ike Zwanniken. I'd love to know more about that.

It's on a YouTube video my dad filmed, of me playing with Dali's band Absent Parents. My dad titled it "Daniel Johann and the Absent Parents." It's a pretty unwatchable video, honestly, he turns the camera sideways halfway through. It still exists somewhere, I mean it's not like he could've deleted it, he's dead.

And he was a big influence on your music, no?

Definitely. He was an old punk rocker who loved all kinds of music and always had something playing around the house, everything from Björk to Jimi Hendrix, a lot of dub. New Zealand's kind of a reggae and dub country at its core, so that was a big part of what I grew up around.

You mentioned earlier you don't really play live shows. I've only seen one video of you performing live. It was "I Was All Over Her" at what looked like a bar or something.

That video is actually part of why I stopped playing shows. The organization running the event filmed it and published it without telling me, that left a bad taste. I don't have feelings about the performance itself, but the practice of doing that really rubbed me the wrong way. On top of that the whole setup was broken. I couldn't hear my guitar for half the show because the cable they gave me was faulty. That's basically been my experience with live music in general.

If I'm going to do it, it has to be with a band, which is hard, most capable musicians around here are working in cafes. It took a long time to find the band I have now, and I'm pretty committed to them, but we don't have quite enough songs or material to tour yet, and how we'd even do that is still up in the air. Getting into America has gotten difficult, so we probably wouldn't start there, even though that's where most of the fans are. New Zealand's closer to Southeast Asia, which would be my instinct.

I figured that about the whole venue. At the end of that video, you asked if someone had even tuned your guitar.

The whole thing was a mess, I couldn't hear anything for about fifteen minutes trying to get my acoustic-electric Fender working, and then it turned out to be completely out of tune on top of that, in like someone's living room with about forty people staring at me the whole time. Not great vibes. It's that one promotional thing that's basically taken over the live music scene in Wellington, running shows every weekend at a Live Nation owned venue, and you kind of just have to put up with them if you want to play. That, plus the general difficulty and cost of putting on a show makes it hard to justify in a country that isn't really known for this kind of music. Now that I have a bit more leverage of my own, I can do things more on my own terms, but relying on other people's infrastructure is where it gets difficult.

What's next for you, under Salvia Palth or in your band?

I've got a lot going on. I'm basically building a music studio right now, I have a building I'm working on, trying to stop the roof from leaking, slow going but hopefully getting there. The goal isn't just a space for me, I want it to serve the kind of musician I'd like to encourage, because I think the view of what music "can be" has gotten increasingly restrictive, both in New Zealand and internationally. Things that used to be considered normal are now seen as weird, and vice versa. I don't think the infrastructure really exists here yet to help people make the kind of interesting music I'd want to hear, so my hope is to take a more active role in that, whether that's commercially viable is another question. Probably not. But you've either got to do something for your city, or you move to Berlin. Those are basically the options.

Like, listening to Last Chance to See, it really expanded what I listen to, I mostly stick to lo-fi stuff, but this was something new for me.

That's exactly what I'm trying to do with that album, get people who think they only listen to lo-fi to realize that lo-fi and "expansive" music have always been inseparable. Have you heard 1960s to '70s electric period Miles Davis? That's as lo-fi as it gets, and it's nothing like what you'd expect. Or old bossa nova, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, that's where the music people love today actually came from. It's the same thing I mean about Spotify dislocating people from context, the Beach Boys used to be considered secondary to the Beatles when I was coming up, and now it's kind of flipped. Everything gets recontextualized every ten to fifteen years by whoever inherits the influence. The one constant is that Michael Jackson stays popular.

That's the whole point of Last Chance to See really, showing people that the forms we associate with lo-fi and slowcore have real precedent. There's stuff on Miles Davis records that modern bands are still basically copying today, and I don't just mean jazz, rock and funk too. It's astonishingly complex, but calling it "complicated" is a bit misleading, it's more like Jimi Hendrix in effect. Not complicated exactly, but genuinely hard to wrap your head around.

He sent over a link to Get Up with It by Miles Davis partway through the call.

What makes that particular era of Miles Davis so important to you?

It's the point where Miles basically gave up on anything resembling music that came before it. He barely plays trumpet on it, mostly he's just hammering all ten fingers down on an organ, with an incredible band making sense of whatever the hell he's doing at the moment. It's completely unpredictable, genuinely one of the earliest examples of noise music in a way. It shows you what's possible as a trained musician working within that kind of chaos, that you don't have to know nothing to make music like this. If anything, knowing a lot can let you make something really complicated and strange. Though calling it "complicated" undersells it, the effect isn't complicated so much as genuinely difficult to get your head around.

Any advice for someone trying to improve as a musician?

Honestly, the only thing that's ever helped me is just getting better, technically, in whatever area is lacking. I'm primarily a recording guy, so sometimes that means learning how certain microphones actually work. Right now it means I actually need to learn to play guitar properly, I'm thirty, and no one ever taught me. I just picked it up, learned the chords, and did everything by ear from there. I failed the compulsory classical theory course at university three times, counterpoint, all of it, I just wasn't good at it. But I'd like to actually learn scales properly. I've got a friend who's great at it.

Now that I think about it, if Melanchole came out today, do you think it would do nearly as well?

If literally nothing else changed, no butterfly effect from any of this, I don't think it would be big at all. It would just be another album in that style, without the context that let it become part of a broader canon. I don't want to take too much credit, but I think it was part of what helped make that kind of lo-fi, slowcore-adjacent sound more mainstream over time. It's a different landscape now, even pop artists cite that whole scene as an influence.

Definitely.

You know, hopefully, at some point, music will get back to the music part of music.