David Karsten Daniels

The idea behind David Karsten Daniels’s latest project, the album “I Mean to Live Here Still” (Fat Cat), is clear and unsurprising, and in fact a little obvious. Mr. Daniels, a singer-songwriter from Texas who lives in San Francisco, wanted to illuminate some verse and prose written by Henry David Thoreau and went about it by collaborating with a rowdy jazz group.
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Jim Cummins for The New York Times
David Karsten Daniels, whose new album is “I Mean to Live Here Still,” on Monday at Le Poisson Rouge, performing with Fight the Big Bull.
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There’s a clear link between a certain kind of early ’60s jazz sound — not completely free jazz, but aggressive and rough-hewn jazz with elbow room, along the lines of Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman — and Thoreau’s ideas. Both make arguments for an ideal of rebellious harmony. The connection comes easily through the ears and through the intellect; it’s a pleasant, thoughtful record.

But it was in the live execution of that music, as heard at Le Poisson Rouge on Monday night, that the mystery came in. How can a diffident, soft-voiced singer (and an even softer-fingered guitarist) like Mr. Daniels possibly stand up to the strong winds of Fight the Big Bull, an eight-piece group from Richmond, Va., whose gutbucket arsenal features trumpet, two trombones, two tenor saxophones, drums, bass and electric guitar?

The contrariness of the foreground against the background — thin, sorrowful voice against broad, genial ruckus — was echoed by the arrangements. You often heard chattering, out-of-sync trombones over a steady rhythm framework, or tidy horn patterns over rocking, free-rhythm bass and drums. These strategies require a refined, intuitive balance and coordination, and sometimes there wasn’t enough of either. The gig had some deflated patches; sometimes it just seemed as if Mr. Daniels were drowning. But the premise of the music never lost its interest.

On “Die and Be Buried” — the track from which the album’s title comes, in the couplet “Die and be buried who will/I mean to live here still” — Mr. Daniels hollered those lines from Thoreau’s “Maine Woods” in his loudest and plainest voice, over needling brass fanfares and a slow bass-and-drums groove; suddenly something startling was happening, and the audience noticed it.

But the best stretch of the gig came in “Each Summer Sound,” a magnification of a single phrase taken from Thoreau’s journals. It was the set’s longest tune, with the fewest words and the most changes in the music. It had an arc: slow, brushed drums as the band slowly cohered; the introduction of the sad melody; a concerto’s worth of talky improvising from Reggie Pace’s trombone; long notes from muted brass over a quiet drum chant.

As Fight the Big Bull’s guitarist and leader, Matt White, conducted the band, the piece took its time to build and to subside, and each cloudlike strain subsumed the previous one. - New York Times

Combining lo-fi folk and experimental jazz does not sound like a particularly good idea but I Mean To Live Here Still is an album that does just that and exceeds all expectations in the process. With harmonies and arrangements reminiscent of current folk darlings Mumford & Sons, David Karsten Daniels writes beautifully plaintive songs chock full of ideas. On first listen the addition of the avant garde jazz rumblings of Fight The Big Bull seem to overpower the fragile nature of Daniels’ compositions but repeated plays provide a series of unusual and intriguing arrangements that challenge the listeners perceptions of both the folk and jazz genres. The gently rolling ‘Each Summer Sound’ is the undoubted highlight, with its combination of Daniels' beautiful voice and a backing reminiscent of Miles Davis' take on ‘Concerto De Aranjuez’. It is a beguiling example of the kind of risk taking that is sadly missing in most modern music. This is not an album for instant gratification but anyone seeing past their prejudices will be rewarded with a wonderfully crafted and enjoyable album.
- The Music Fix

David Karsten Daniels is what you might call a folk composer. While he lives in San Francisco, his music's earthy tunefulness and gospel influences honor the rural South of his birth. But straight folk has an unvarnished spontaneity that Daniels permits only intermittently. While his core tunes are perfect for strumming on the porch, he dresses them up in arrangements and orchestration from jazz and classical music. His FatCat debut, Sharp Teeth, earned wide praise and equally wide comparisons to Will Oldham, mainly because of Daniels' voice. In practice, he's more like Sam Amidon-- placing at least as much emphasis on the setting as the song-- with a hint of the outsized sincerity of Saddle Creek-style emo-folk.

Daniels next album, Fear of Flying, squandered his gifts for arrangement on undercooked and punitively somber songs. The grimness was understandable, as the record was about his grandparents' physical decline. But his third major release, I Mean to Live Here Still, proves that he can address mortality without the doldrums. With new collaborators, robust hooks, and an energetic take on Daniels' signature sound, it's his best record yet.

I Mean to Live Here Still is a collaboration with the Virginia-based, nine-piece jazz ensemble Fight the Big Bull. The songs, with lyrics adapted from Henry David Thoreau, were worked out via mail, and then recorded all together in Virginia. As a result, they feel painstakingly assembled but not sterile-- in fact, they flirt with controlled chaos. Horns are a huge presence and span the tonal range from free-jazz splatter to Dixieland gaiety. The album's spirit of joyous lamentation often calls to mind New Orleans funeral marches, especially on the chipper "The Funeral Bell". But you're just as likely to hear cerebral percussion breakdowns and pattern weaves.

The drawback is that the songs occasionally get lost in the arrangements. The long, squalling breakdown of "Die and Be Buried" sets up an awesome drop, as does the sharking bass and percussion workout in the middle of "On Fields". But Daniels' voice is so crucial to his music's personality. It's supple and comfortable even at the limits of its range, where it tends to linger. When his voice disappears for long stretches, the album can slip out of focus. It creates the odd impression that the nine-piece band has muscled him out of the room.

But Daniels' ambition pays off when the band is more fully integrated. "All Things Are Current Found" is one of those big syrupy numbers he does so well, where layers of voices and instrumentation pile up sweetly, but with hints of impassioned sourness. The horn player on "Through All the Fates" earns an MVP award for his highly musical but comical turn: At one point he makes the horn "sing" the la la la's from the vocal melody; a good-natured razz. And this jazz unit is also able to handle more formal ideas, like the carefully stacked intervals of the slow-dawning "Each Summer Sound". Daniels is still working his way through some equivocation between art music and folk music, but this is the closest he's come yet to sealing the seams.

— Brian Howe, July 12, 2010 - Pitchfork

Here's how the Internet made an exuberant, messy and glorious new album possible.

David Karsten Daniels is a folky singer-songwriter based in San Francisco. Fight the Big Bull is a nine-piece post-jazz band out of Richmond, Va. When Daniels started writing songs for a new album — songs based on settings of Henry David Thoreau poems — he contacted composer Matthew White, ringleader of the Big Bull.

Online, they spent months trading sketches of arrangements — Daniels imagining country songs, hymns and so on, and White sculpting them for clarinet, saxophones, trumpet, trombones, bass and a cluster of percussion. The man and the band finally met in January for more than a week of rehearsal and recording in Richmond. And then Daniels took the tapes home to mix and master them himself, exchanging notes with White all the way.

The result is I Mean to Live Here Still, a record not quite like anything these artists have devised to date. (You'd be well advised to seek out Fight the Big Bull's All Is Gladness in the Kingdom, released in May, for perspective.) You could approximate it as lush orchestral pop in the tradition of Van Dyke Parks or Randy Newman — if those folks had a house horn section with which to indulge their weirdest weirdnesses.

Across a continent, Daniels, White and the band mixed and matched sounds to the point where genre became irrelevant. Their twangy ballads segue to polyphonic New Orleans jazz ("Though All the Fates"), songs that build from a beautiful chorale to roots-rock and then an improv jam filled with woody percussion ("October Airs" and "On Fields"), slow burns where a single mantra builds, achingly, over the course of eight minutes ("Each Summer Sound"). There are rock beats, swirling flute, "Penny Lane" trumpet, atonal free-jazz solos, jump cuts which explode into colors — all of which serve well-constructed pop songs ("The Funeral Bell," "Die and Be Buried" and so on).

The whole thing buzzes with big ideas — these are Thoreau poems sung over a big band, after all — but they don't feel pretentious. The artistry is too high, and the grooves too interesting. I Mean to Live Here Still will stream here in its entirety until its release on June 22; please leave your thoughts on the album in the comments section below. - NPR

"I might be wrong, but Angles leaves me with the impression that David Karsten Daniels doesn't much care what I think of his music. Well, not me specifically, but rather he is more concerned with attacking his musical and lyrical impulses and getting them down on record than what the casual listener might think. This is a noble way of working, and one I can entirely sympathize with. The resulting album varies in its accessibility, and is occasionally a difficult beast, but is overall a rewarding experience.

"Goodbye," the first song, starts off innocuously enough, with a mellow, Radiohead-ish, synth & drum machine sound. Towards the end, however, Daniels throws it over the edge and into your face, as the refrain gives way to a droning coda, with added tracks of someone angrily yelling, a very effectively disturbing touch. This song paves the way for the rest of the album: moments of stark beauty intertwined with interludes of creeping discomfort.

“Goodbye” is followed by the lush, Beatles-esque pop of “Note to Self,” which manages to stuff its 61 seconds with slide guitar, strings, marimba, and even tympani, without seeming overdone. The juxtaposition gives you a great feel for the breadth of Daniels’s musical vocabulary. These songs are so different from each other, and both so well executed, that one is left more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt for some of the album’s harder-to-digest tracks.

As is likely whenever an artist takes risks and goes with his gut in the making of an album, Angles is not without flaws. There are occasions when I wish the songs would hold together a bit better, or develop their themes further. There are times when I wish more attention had been paid to recording and performance quality. But the rewards here greatly outweigh the risks, and all flaws are forgiven about halfway into "Give Up . . . And You Are Changed," the album's final track. Here the song breaks down and the mantra-like chorus ("You are changed . . .") is repeated by male and female harmony vocals, with organ accompaniment, ever intensifying, and literally sending shivers down my spine (take it from me that this is a rare occurrence, as I'm not usually one for physical responses to music, no matter how lovely). This is a song that takes a strong hand to refrain from skipping back to the beginning as soon as it's over. You should try to resist this temptation until the album is completely over, however, as you might miss a lovely little slip of a song tacked on before the track ends, replete with twittering birds and lovelorn vocals. It's unclear whether Daniels considers this song as a coda to "Give Up . . .," or if it's merely one of those not-so-hidden tracks that tend to pop up on CDs more often than not nowadays. Either way, it's a beaut, and it does seem to fit in with the themes of "Give Up . . ." (resignation, forgiveness and, of course, change)."

Angles is a re-release of an album Daniels originally put out in 2004, which means he’s well overdue for some brand new goods. I, for one, am greatly looking forward to hearing what he’s come up with in the past year or two.
- Slightly Confusing to a Stranger

"Délicieux moment d'apaisante mélancolie comme en offre également l'album de David Karsten Daniels édité par Bu Hanan, label américain qui accueille en outre The Prayers And Tears Of Arthur Digby Sellers présent sur notre volume 8. Avec Angles, David Karsten Daniels mène une analyse à portée universelle sur la déliquescence d'une relation amoureuse. Rien de véritablement neuf certes mais la manière dont l'artiste s'ouvre à nous sans retenue touche au cœur et… au foie. On reste en effet le souffle coupé à l'écoute de ses onze titres exigeants. L'écoute d'Angles coûte, en effet. Et l'on s'en extirpe vaguement triste mais nettement ébranlé. David Karsten Daniels travaille une écriture folk classique pour mieux l'ajuster à son propos. Il s'autorise ainsi excursions expérimentales ou bruitistes et tord le fil de ses idées mélodiques. Un peu comme si l'on étudiait l'effet du visionnage d'un film retraçant les moments douloureux de leurs vies respectives sur la musique de Neil Young, Will Oldham ou Wilco. Pas franchement un moment de déconnade débridée, Angles n'en devient pour autant pas un exercice d'auto-apitoiement pénible."
- A decourvrir absolument

Chapel Hill songwriter David Karsten Daniels–a founding member of the Bu Hanan Collective that includes The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers and The Physics of Meaning–has signed to Brighton, England-based Fat Cat Records. Fat Cat is one of the more prestigous independent labels that boasts global distrubution: Daniels’ labelmates will include Mum, Sigur Ros, David Grubbs, Amandine and Vashti Bunyan.

In June, Daniels mailed a finished copy of his fourth album, Sharp Teeth, to the label, which, according to the demo section of its Web site, listens and replies to everything it receives.

“They seem to be more on top of it than anyone I know. So I sent them one, and I probably got an e-mail from Dave Cawley [Fat Cat co-founder] a week later. Really fast, I was surprised,” Daniels told the Independent in an interview this morning. “We started talking, but they were pretty much in from the beginning.”

Daniels moved to Chapel Hill as part of the regretfully unnoticed Go Machine (they’re still on MySpace, at least). The band released an excellent EP, Look to The, in 2003, but it went on indefinite hiatus a year later. Luckily, most of the band’s members stuck together, slowly but steadily building Bu Hanan into the most artistically exciting musical cadre in the Triangle. Alex Lazara became the collective’s primary producer, while Daniels played bass and guitar and Daniel Hart played violin with most of the its projects. The label signed Kapow! Music in 2004, but things really began to pickup when indie tastemaker Pitchfork Media reviewed The Prayers and Tears’ full-length debut with a more-than-respectable 7.5. Tours with Durham pal(s) The Mountain Goats followed. The Physics of Meaning, the big-band project of Hart, followed that with an excellent eponymous debut.

Throghout, label interest has been strong, but the collective took its time and waited for the right deal. With Fat Cat, Daniels hopes to have found such a situation, and he feels that, with this deal, he can help raise the entire Bu Hanan label to a new level.

“Actually, for Bu Hanan Collective, I feel it’s very much my burden to bear,” says Daniels, asked if he thinks signing will help raise awareness for the work Bu Hanan is doing. “I mean it’s a total crapshoot, I think. Kapow! Music, The Prayers and Tears, The Physics of Meaning: These are all really strong projects, great songs, stellar production. The new recordings will really show this.”

Daniels and The Prayers and Tears will hit the East Coast together later this fall, and Daniels plans to tour the rest of the country and Europe when Fat Cat releases Sharp Teeth early next year.

To hear two songs from Sharp Teeth, see Daniels’ MySpace. If you’re wondering why Fat Cat signed a guy from Chapel Hill, “Jesus and the Devil” should answer your question. That song is just devastating. - The Independent

If George Harrison was reborn as a modern-day indie rocker, he might sound like the tortured, stripped-down orchestral work of Raleigh, N.C.'s David Karsten Daniels. Over four solo albums since his space-rock combo Go*Machine, Daniels has meandered through mopey Elliott Smith territory into the more baroque introspection of 2004's Angles. This is the kind of non-mainstream, unkempt, yet emotionally arresting material that the indie world exists for. - Columbia Free Times

David Karsten Daniels is one of those multi-instrumental semi-morose singer-songwriter genius types over at Bu Hanan Records--they all play on each others' records, and collectively make a skewed, occasionally melodramatic art-folk/chamber-rock thing that melds squirrelly electronic beats with acoustic guitar, plaintive voice, and great washes of strings, both synthetic & non-. - Trainglerock.com

Chapel Hill's Bu Hanan records is as potent an artistic force as you will find in the Triangle, and tonight's bill should be yet another piece of evidence. David Karsten Daniels turned in one of the best moments on last year's Compulation 2, his "Jesus & The Devil" beautifully espousing the slow torture of a man speared on the vacillations of his own belief. - The Independent Weekly

"The third solo album from Go Machine multi-instrumentalist David Karsten Daniels is a sparse and doleful affair. Meddling with an array of indie-rock influences and a wealth of instrumentation, Daniels indulges in that most fearsome of concepts, the "break-up" album, inspired by his own struggle to maintain a long-distance, cross-coastal relationship with his girlfriend of four years. This might seem like a horrifically self-indulgent prospect, but it's handled with a fragile, confessional elegance that grows more intriguing with every listen.

It's not without its reference points. There's a pungent whiff of Radiohead in the opening "Goodbye", mournful nods to Will Oldham in "Scribble Your Name In The Dark", and even the sad-eyed lamentations of the Radar Brothers in "Alcohol". Nonetheless, Daniels' individuality shines through by way of the intimacy of his rambling, conversational delivery. The songs arrive almost as fleeting thoughts, scraps, moments, frozen stills or notebook scribbles, making for a deeply personal record as commendable for its frail honesty as it is for its misty-eyed songwriting.

Likewise, the album flows with a curious mood-swing logic that works in tandem with the "break-up" conceit. The smoldering internal drama of "Goodbye", for example, gives way to the deceptively cheery acoustic ditty "Note To Self", in which Daniels asks, "How could you be so silly as to think we could grow together?" From there, "I'll Just Play Guitar" gives Daniels a chance to console himself in song, "Holding Pattern" is a compelling, wandering ambient insert, and "Marriage Proposal" is the record's centerpiece -- a sorrowful acoustic waltz that burns and crackles like the embers of a charred heart. It's not all misery incarnate, though. Fittingly for a "break-up" record, the album comes to rest on "Give Up... And You Are Changed", and this track's elated chorus ends the proceedings on an almost optimistic note.

Ultimately, Angles is a sparse but beautifully poignant account of falling out of love. It's certainly a grief-stricken listen, but Daniels mostly sidesteps self-indulgence by translating his own experience into something universally resonant. It's highly recommendable, not only as a willfully disconnected and confessional album of battered indie-folk, but also as something of a self-help manual for the broken-hearted." - Splendid Magazine

"In a perfect world, the title of David Karsten Daniel's [sic] solo album wouldn't be Angles. Instead, it would be the singular Angle, a reflection not only of the months Daniels (of Chapel Hill space-rock trip, Go*Machine) spent locked away in his home writing and recording the material for this, his third, solo effort, but also of the singular, direct focus of the work, a melodramatic case study in how to get left behind by a woman who has dreams of her own and, more importantly, just how to survive her.

But, seconds into Angles, you get the intense feeling that the world isn't perfect. "'See you later,' you corrected/ Trying to put it into perspective/ Just to hide what it was," Daniels moans from somewhere inside of a barrel, keeping time with the dirge plodding in the background as a salvo of synthesized noise barges in on his forlorn nostalgia. "The goodbye, goodbye." Daniels spends the next eleven tracks reckoning with the demons stemming from a trans-continental flight and the unrequited, confused love that followed, leaning on his acoustic guitar, Jeff Tweedy and Connor Oberst for precedent and support. He nails Elliott Smith's sad-eyed swing with the accusatory "Note to Self" and tackles the Bright Eyes methodology of testimonial pursued by cathartic cacophony for the album's midsection. "I'm going to learn how to be an alcoholic/ Hard as I think that would be," he declares during "Alcohol," the fatalistic suicide glimpse in which he disavows food and sleep moments before the dawn of the next three numbers.

That resurrection begins with "Siamese Hearts," a wistful number that finds Daniels looking for a Midwest rendezvous point for him and his paramour. It ends with "Give up...and You Are Changed," a gorgeous, if tangled, anthem for the broken-hearted. "I can't do much more to fix this," Daniels demands time and again before relenting to a three-minute chorus of angels chanting "You Are Changed!" above an enormous pedal point. And so it ends, the album and the relationship, the latter prompting the former and the former--an especially vulnerable, extremely unsettled look at a man with little left to lose--eventually curing the latter." - The Independent Weekly

"Sometimes it’s not totally apparent to fans of music how much artists pour their hearts into their recordings. Oftentimes, a listener will dismiss with a simple press of a SCAN button what took months of introspection, hand-wringing, pacing, and sweat. Why does this happen? Somehow, the agony of the pouring out of one’s soul into the art simply does not come across in a few minutes of sounds emanating from one’s speakers. However, once in a while, the listener stumbles across a recording that vividly captures the emotion an artist puts into a recording. With its heartbreaking narrative, lyrical catharsis, manic-depressive shifts in musical mood, and wrenchingly emotional vocal performances, Angles by North Carolinian songwriter David Karsten Daniels is one of those CD’s. Sounding something like a man perilously close to losing his mind, David Karsten Daniels sings about the agony and bewilderment that comes as one slowly realizes that they’ve lost the love of their life. Angles is a graphic encounter of heartache and grief that will draw the listener in and make them weep along with Daniels.

Sonically, Angles sounds something like a cross between Pedro The Lion, Radiohead and The Castanets, only rawer, more animated. The music can be referenced vaguely as singer/songwriter, as a number of Daniels’ songs utilize his plaintive voice and thoughtful guitar strumming. However, infused throughout the whole of Angles are references to Americana, folk, pop, ambient, and Daniels somehow even adds a hint of electronica on a couple of songs. “Goodbye” immediately introduces the listener to the tragic narrative of Angles (in which a couple in love is forced to separate due to diverging life paths). Capturing perfectly the emotions running through the head of the couple as they separate, Daniels sings, “You tried to put us at ease, gave instructions and kissed me to numb the hurt…‘see you later’ you corrected, tried to put it in perspective, just to hide what it was...goodbye”. Sung over a mournful electronic beat, minimalist keyboards, and building to a cathartic wall of emotion in which Daniels insanely screams in the background of the music, “Goodbye” is masterful and powerful. The quick, 1 minute, “Note To Self” follows, sounding almost like a stripped-down Half-Handed Cloud with it’s quirky fun melody, clean vocals, and variety of sounds and instruments. “I’ll Just Play Guitar” is mostly just that…Daniels delicately strumming an acoustic guitar while lamenting about his situation, while very subtle key sounds add depth to the sound. Another short track, “Holding Pattern” is just under 2 minutes worth of ambient sounds that are soothing. “Marriage Proposal” is one of the more fully developed songs, yet starts out very stripped down and quietly. The guitar work and lazy drums give this song a southern dark-folk feel, while retaining its musical freshness with Daniels’ vocal harmonies. The anguish of this song is that Daniels is writing a song of total devotion to a lady (even naming her by her first name) that cannot return his love. “Scribble Your Name Down in the Dark” beings with eerie samples of female voices, then turns on its head to become an under-produced rock jam (sounding like a male-sung b-side off of PJ Harvey’s Uh Huh Her). The song just gets going with a dirty guitar lead when it abruptly ends, giving way to “How Turn to Stone”, a slow folk song that builds to a cacophony of out of tune acoustic guitars and busy drums. “To Tire” is another masterful track, as Daniels sings after a minute or so of odd samples “I’m tired of you wrecking of my life”. The music is dissonantly beautiful, as strange sounds underlie Daniels’ frustrated vocals. “Alcohol” is a classic rock/folk jam, featuring soulful layered vocals, electric guitars, a languid and patient pace that ebbs and flows along with the emotions of the song, and ends in a haze of guitar feedback. “Siamese Hearts” is a simple song, combining folk elements with sugary pop hooks, in which Daniels longs to be reunited with his long lost love. Angles ends with the curious “Give Up…And You Are Changed”, in which he finally resigns his love and casts himself to an uncertain future. Starting as an uncomplicated folk song, “Give Up…And You Are Changed” slowly builds to, of all things, an electronic-beat driven refrain of “you are changed” sung in harmonies with female vocals that reminds me of the kind of music one would hear from Sufjan Stevens (minus the drumbeats). Finally, some time after “Give Up…And You Are Changed” ends, an untitled extra track featuring Daniels, his acoustic guitar, and field recording background sounds comes on. On it, Daniels transparently sings of the fact that his loss of love is still prevalent on his mind and heart, but that the pain eventually fades away. It’s a contemplative and touching end to this see-through account of heart break.

Despite what one may think of the eccentricities found in the music of Angles, no one can - Somewhere Cold