Phil Elvrum - Microphones - Mount Eerie - Climbing the frightening mountain

Phil Elverum made a dream come true. He may not know it, but he did it — maybe not for himself, but for so many like him, people who lived on passions and normal, everyday life.

Phil was born and raised in Anacortes, a small town in the far northwest corner of the United States. It's the typical small American town, immersed in nature and detached from the affairs of the world. The young Elverum spent his days in the woods, right up to the foothills of the mountains, loved taking night swims in the lake next to his house, while the neighbors listened to the radio — and it wouldn't surprise me to picture him lost in long, silent nighttime walks, maybe mocked by his peers, the same kids who would soon leave for somewhere else in search of a more stimulating life, only to end up behind four sheets of five-foot plywood, making phone calls on behalf of some international holding company.

Phil has an introverted nature, but he isn't a depressed teenager. He has friends, a girlfriend, and high school to finish, but above all he has an entire world inside himself, to be discovered bit by bit, all waiting to be explored, just like the nature surrounding him.

As with everything else, he became a musician just for fun, and after all, not everyone gets to celebrate an early teenage birthday with a Beat Happening concert in their own backyard!

Indeed, through a web of connections, Phil can boast friendships with several gurus of the Olympia, Washington music scene — the same city that gave us the riot girls and the legendary indie labels Kill Rock Stars and K Records. This Olympia scene, with Beat Happening themselves as godfathers, was at the center of the so-called "alternative rock revolution" of the 90s, a revolution that — whatever historians may say in the future — was genuinely experienced as such by many at the time. Among them were those who simply jumped on the bandwagon to look cool, while for everyone who truly believed in it (and there were quite a few), it ended in a deeply disappointing flash in the pan, or little more, and today it's often filed away as a mistake born of youthful naivety.

For Phil things were easier. He was able to follow it all up close (Anacortes isn't far from Olympia) and experience it as a fun game, which is really what it should always be.

Olympia rock in the 90s stood out quite distinctly from the rest of the "alternative" trend of the era. The approach was fairly sober and unadorned, enough to recall the output of Washington's Dischord, but the underlying spirit tended to be more good-natured and, in any case, less rigorous. Even the invectives of the riot girls and the noise-rock of Unwound and Karp lacked the kind of seriousness typical of truly "committed" music. Olympia was a well-guarded stronghold, full of precious musical treasures from 90s indie rock.

Against this backdrop, young Phil Elverum began inventing and recording his own music at home, acting from the start as a multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer, limitations and all, picking up without overthinking it the habits of some of the most mythologized musicians of the previous generation, such as Smog or, once again, Beat Happening, led by his friend Calvin Johnson.

The self-produced cassette "Tests" came out in 1999 and stands as the first genuine release under the Microphones name, but Phil was already known for something else entirely by that point.

In September 1998, the single "Jail/Office Building" by Old Time Relijun was released — a strange "roots-oriented" band reminiscent of Violent Femmes and Captain Beefheart, known to fans for appearing on the "Selector Dub Narcotic" compilation curated by Calvin Johnson, who also produced their album "Songbook vol 1", released on K Records in '97. The single was followed within a few months by the album "Uterus and Fire", which sent the band's fame soaring — and it was precisely for these new recordings that outgoing drummer Bryce Panic was replaced by Phil Elverum, who thickened the band's sound with his rocky, primitive drumming.

In Old Time Relijun, the tribute to America's rural roots is unmistakable, as is the fascination with the elements of nature — all things we will find, and already find, in the music of the Microphones, though there will be no room there for the blues deviations and love of improvisation that define Arrington de Dyoniso and Aaron Hartman's band.

Meanwhile, the increasingly prolific Elverum had already lent his drumsticks to Bret Lunsford, guitarist of Beat Happening, in the side project D+. The music of D+ is essentially a pauperist pop in the style of Lunsford's main band, as well as of the long-forgotten Vaselines, only with a few vague country touches courtesy of bassist Karl Blau. "Dandelion Seeds", the band's second album, on which Elverum plays, is credited half to the Microphones, effectively making it a "split album", with the latter project's tracks standing out for their originality in conjuring, with the barest of means, an ambitious, almost liturgical and subtly gothic choral sound.

Toward the end of '99, the Microphones' album Don't Wake Me Up (released on K Records, like all the ones that followed) was received as the side project of Old Time Relijun's drummer. To make the record, Phil surrounded himself with the usual friends, of whom it's never quite clear how many there are or exactly what they do: "The band isn't really a band, but it's not a solo project either," Elverum has said. "It's my life and the lives of the people who become part of it. [...] I've always encouraged my friends to write Microphones songs and put them out under that name." If it didn't sound like an oxymoron, you could call the project an "open solo ensemble".

The record seems to have emerged almost by accident from Elverum's bedroom, like so many lo-fi productions of the era, but it stands out for its sudden drum surges propped up by carpets of keyboards and guitars reminiscent of English shoegazing, as well as for a pronounced melodic sensibility, though kept on a tight leash in the best tradition of the listless 90s songwriters. The result feels like an intimist "Pet Sounds" for the 90s (the Beach Boys are openly referenced on "Florida Beach"). As in that record, it celebrates the end of Phil's adolescence — in 1999 he finished high school and moved to Olympia.

Many tracks move with a slow, martial tread, propped up by a soft noise that stands in for the vocal harmonies of yesteryear. Phil and his friend Mirah sing in barely a whisper amid melancholy instrumental drifts and sudden bursts of noise. Within the album's largely uniform texture, the ballad "I'll Be In The Air" stands out, recurring at several points in the record and making clear that Phil is every bit the equal of the 90s indie-rock heroes paid tribute to throughout "Don't Wake Me Up" — from the Dinosaur Jr.-like bursts of "You Were In The Air" to the My Bloody Valentine-style layering that permeates the whole record, and in particular the track "Sweetheart Sleep Tight". To make his laments more compelling, Elverum puts to excellent use a homemade technical arsenal worthy of the finest lo-fi practitioners of all time, and he would later put his sound-engineering skills to good use for Old Time Relijun as well, with excellent results, especially on 2001's "Witchcraft Rebellion".

But let's take it slowly. Even though no one noticed at the time, Don't Wake Me Up — a record as cohesive in inspiration as it is understated in execution — was a concept album about air, the first installment of a future quadrilogy. On this point Phil has never been entirely clear, in keeping with his intriguing, hazy view of the universe, but he wastes no time putting together the second chapter of the "saga", released in 2000 under the title It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water.

Starting with the opening "The Pull", the music becomes more acoustic and "composed", whereas on the previous album it was the studio-crafted sounds that took precedence over the melodies, pretty as they were. Elverum's guitar skills leave quite a bit to be desired, but his imagination certainly doesn't fall short — so much so that on this record he begins doubling acoustic guitars across two channels to build harmonies more complex and skewed than he'd be able to pull off live. It's a trick we'll hear often on Microphones records, as will the electric explosions that drive songs toward their endings, accompanied by epic choruses that are perhaps a touch out of place, but certainly still a long way from kitsch. "The Pull" is, in this sense, an archetypal Microphones track, one that turns these intuitions into a trademark. The rest of the album, however, doesn't measure up: the shifting moods of the following "Ice" and the lengthy "The Glow" are downright excessive, while the pauperist minimalism of single-instrument pieces like "Drums" and "Organs" leaves something to be desired. Nor can rough-edged episodes like "Sand", a cover of beloved Eric's Trip, or the parodic little march "Karl Blau", be called successful. In the end, the album comes across as a messy jumble of fragments and ideas — some good, but lacking any coherent development; in the closing stretch, though, it recovers with the excellent "Something" and "Between Your Hear And The Other Ear", both collages of electric and acoustic moments, the first introduced by one of Elverum's finest melodies, comparable to certain things by Nick Drake, and the second close to the quirkiest arrangements of Bill Callahan/Smog.

Elverum is drawing ever closer to his ideal master, Barrett, partly due to the evident artistic (and perhaps mental) confusion that's easy to trace through the releases of this period.

Amid general indifference — and it's worth noting that the Microphones have never been especially well known even in their homeland — the self-released and poorly distributed album Windows comes out, also in 2000. This minor record mostly revisits old themes while anticipating new ones, concentrating in its middle section a long series of brief sketches all simply titled "Window", which range widely across every corner of the Microphones sound, from amateurish acoustic strumming, to ambient built with makeshift means, to prolonged indulgence in guitar feedback.

During the same period, a steady stream of minor vinyl releases keeps appearing, later collected in the 2001 anthology Song Island. The record is as erratic and lacking a unifying thread as its predecessors — as, for that matter, any compilation tends to be — but the material gathered here is top-notch. Many tracks retrace the same blueprint as the seminal "The Pull", as with the single "Bass Drum Dream", and there are several alternative takes of songs from the imminent next album (Song Island would actually come out after this album, the one dedicated to fire). Particularly beautiful is the single "I Can't Believe You Actually Die/I'm A Pearl Diver", which ties back unmistakably to American folk roots. These are essentially campfire songs, played among friends with no pretensions, yet able to convey a rare warmth. In the Microphones' music, as in the best lo-fi of previous years, one rediscovers the pleasure of making music purely for oneself, simply to be together and pass the time. In this sense, the Microphones can almost be thought of as a psychedelic version of what American musicologists call "Household Music", referring to songs meant purely for domestic use, a tradition whose great master was, for instance, the country-blues giant Mississippi John Hurt. Broadly speaking, one could argue that the revival of this kind of poetics was perhaps the most authentic message of a generation that, after years of technological excess, rediscovered a naive, adventurous approach to making music. That same adventurous spirit would, from here on, become a necessarily more solitary and personal affair in Elverum's music, pushing him toward places his friends could hardly follow him into. These two songs sound almost like a heartfelt farewell to everything done before: the artist is now ready to distill the best of 90s American indie rock experience into a deeply personal record that is at once a summation of a widely shared sensibility, before taking off for good toward entirely unexplored territory.

The year is 2001: while the success of Old Time Relijun's "Witchcraft Rebellion" keeps raising the stock of the band led by Arrington de Dyoniso, helped in no small part by Elverum's splendid production work, the latter quietly releases, as usual, The Glow Pt. 2. The album, dedicated to fire — though that's not entirely clear — would spread gradually, more through word of mouth among devotees than through any proper promotional push. In any case, excellence isn't common enough to go unnoticed, and among other accolades, the album becomes Pitchforkmedia's album of the year.

The Glow Pt. 2 runs a full twenty tracks and clocks in at over an hour, presenting an overall more acoustic, linear sound than its predecessors. The opening of "I Want Wind To Blow", with its now-classic doubled guitar, is among the most outright roots things Phil has ever recorded — an ancient, whispered melody, carried by the calm cadence of the bass, like an amateur John Fahey trying his hand at singing too. Following a well-established pattern, the track closes in an ascending climax of big percussion and village-band delirium, leading into the epic title track, which moves effortlessly from the most overflowing noise to the gothic-tinged invocations that often turn up on Microphones records. Everything works beautifully this time, and "The Moon" keeps surprising, alternating a tangled arpeggio for a cluster of acoustic guitars with an indie-rock gallop for organ and drums. "Headless Horseman" and "My Roots Are Strong And Deep" head straight toward an ever more ancient, uncontaminated, Barrett-esque sound, the latter — decidedly more psychedelic — self-explanatory from its title alone. The middle section of the record is a sequence of acoustic sketches and noisy rock outbursts interspersed with a recurring sound that keeps popping up between tracks. It's a low, warm sound, barely perceptible yet oddly obsessive in its own way, one that perhaps does even more than the excellent songwriting to define Microphones records as a strange no-man's-land between Elverum's mystical, animist delirium and his fascination with the shadow zones of the psyche — perhaps that very same "The Mansion" Phil sings about halfway through the record, somewhere between frightened and ritualistic. "I'll Not Contain You" marks a return to a more dazed, relaxed song form, almost a bucolic parody of certain 60s naiveties, with vaguely martial undertones still lurking in the background. The unease grows, in fact, on the following "The Gleam Pt.2", which sounds like a Van Dyke Parks song as performed by Smog circa "Wild Love", culminating in the emotional crescendo of "Map". Blissful ecstasy returns in the stretched-out reprise of "You'll Be In The Air", though it's quite different from the version on the debut album. The record decisively takes the path of the baroque song, arranged with inverse doses of imagination and means — which is ultimately the album's defining trait — closing with two noisy, drawn-out tracks, still haunted by that unsettling obsessive sound we mentioned, right up to a slow final fade into nothing.

With this record, Phil didn't simply pay tribute to the indie heroes of his adolescence — he built an unsettling, egotistical monument that's hard to decode, overflowing with musical ideas and at the same time steeped in a deeply personal, off-kilter imagery that justifies the weighty comparisons to Syd Barrett, but without the fear any longer of remaining just another forgettable member of the crowded ranks of imitators.

Perhaps out of a newfound awareness of his own talent, or perhaps simply for lack of time, as he would officially claim, Elverum leaves Old Time Relijun in 2002. At this point one can only speculate about Phil's state of mind, since — to cut things short — he would emerge in early 2003 with an album capable of surpassing its already essential predecessor.

Subjective tastes aside, Mount Eerie is an extremely ambitious record, more so than any other work released under the Microphones name. A concept album about the earth that closes the quadrilogy begun with Don't Wake Me Up. The album is a continuous stream of velvety, intangible sounds alternating with the most deafening noise, in an epic atmosphere built almost exclusively around feelings of anguish and primal terror, carrying the listener into unknown worlds that are nonetheless steeped in human unease — an operation pulled off this well only by Tim Buckley and Robert Wyatt.

"The Sun" rises exactly where the previous album left off: the dull, obsessive drone of "The Glow Pt. 2" pulses more insistently than ever and slowly starts building over wobbly dub structures, while hisses continue to smear the background. Some have drawn far-fetched comparisons to Bernhard Gunter, which, however distant the two artists may be in every other respect, do find some grounding if one approaches Elverum's music as a kind of inner psychedelia, even more rarefied than that offered by the Supreme Dicks, who updated the (guitar-driven) sound of the Grateful Dead for the post-rock era. From the depths of the mind, the track is fired into celestial pathways by an epic fanfare backed by titanic tribalism, almost a space-age samba that comes to a halt, as if before a sheer drop, when Phil starts, timidly, to sing. Elverum's evocative vocal is accompanied by an unsteady little march made of broken guitars and frayed percussion, with occasional bursts of trumpet and other oddities underscoring the moments of greatest panic. The singer sees himself at the foot of the fearsome mountain he must climb no matter what, and in the finale the noisy surge typical of the Microphones is swallowed by a flood of white noise, as if waking from a nightmare. That reading is reinforced by the following "Solar System", a placid acoustic ballad that sets up the start of the climb. "Universe" opens with a mechanical dance of percussion that builds into a kind of martial rock, while the singer, on acoustic guitar, narrates the beginning of the ascent. Choirs begin to take over, and the track closes with liturgical invocations straight out of Popol Vuh. The title track picks up in this same austere mood, after which anything goes: from distorted echoes of desolate work songs, it shifts abruptly into an industrial contortion with hip-hop cadences, before a shadowy wash of concrete sounds and antique accordions dissolves into a fresh wave of white noise. We hold our breath once more and finally hear Phil's voice again, leading an epic, dark choir with horns and great drums marking out the final words in the closing "Universe".

Mount Eerie rightfully enters rock history and elevates its creator from great unstable figure to simply great musician, full stop — as if there were still any doubt after The Glow Pt. 2. Elverum's imagination is now completely unbridled, and the results stand as some of the most memorable musical "feats" of all time.

No sooner had this monster of an album come out than Elverum himself issued a statement declaring the Microphones experience closed for good. His new outfit would be called Mount Eerie, just like his (second) masterpiece. Phil certainly has a taste for paradox, since the best possible follow-up to this latest oddity turns out to be, come early 2004, a record released under the Microphones name after all!

This is Live In Japan, recorded the previous year, in which we find Phil Elverum in a solitary, classically lo-fi singer-songwriter mode. There are also reprises of older album tracks, such as "The Blow Pt. 2", which borrows exactly the melody and accompaniment of "Something" from "It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water". Elverum's style here is increasingly tied to the American tradition and isn't particularly notable for originality, even as it strings together several fully realized songs, better than the average of his earlier, more scattered records. "Climb Over" could easily belong to the catalogue of Will Oldham's Palace Brothers, and overall the record often follows in the footsteps of electric Neil Young, explicitly invoked in the acoustic "After N. Young", only more confused and haunted by psychedelic ghosts. Amid all this, there's still room for two a cappella tracks, including Irving Berlin's Christmas standard "Silent Night", and a ten-minute "Universe Conclusion" that borrows only a few elements from the epic closing track of "Mount Eerie". Ultimately, Live In Japan captures an artist coming back home, playing among friends with no particular stakes and, above all, showing not the slightest sign of having grasped the greatness of his own art: he doesn't seek better production, barely smooths out the music's rough edges, is immune to the allure of sensationalism, and shows no inclination whatsoever toward growing up — so wrapped up in his own world that he's utterly indifferent to the one outside, which is left entirely to us. Lucky us.

Phil Elverum suffers from such a degree of autism or understatement, depending on how you look at it, that it wouldn't be at all surprising to see him vanish overnight, perhaps to take up gardening or trips to Siberia… His proverbial promotional instinct leads him, in late 2004, to release the first two records under his new moniker Mount Eerie. These are the 12-inch "Two songs" and the mini-LP Seven Songs Of Mount Eerie, both — who would have guessed — in extremely limited pressings. The quality of the material isn't exactly jaw-dropping, but doubts about the artist's mental state keep growing by the day. The two songs are essentially reprises of the moods of the band's eponymous album, drawing above all on the dark fanfares of the fearsome mountain and its menacing, resigned choruses. The seven songs on the vinyl don't stray far from that, aside from their shorter average length. A few good drumming ideas and an ever-growing taste for little marches are about all there is to note in these latest releases, which revisit the atmosphere of the previous studio album in an increasingly stripped-down, minimal guise, underlining once again the elusive, unpredictable nature of Phil Elverum, one of the few (unwitting) greats of rock today, playing yesterday's instruments while moving along trajectories still entirely to be deciphered.

In 2005 Elverum, now going by "Phil Elverum And The Sun" (well, alright…), goes independent and starts distributing his own records, moreover forcing buyers to take home both CD and vinyl, along with assorted gadgets, such as full-size posters featuring the album covers. Such is the case with No Flashlight, the official Mt. Eerie album and, in effect, a genuine return to the scene. The record doesn't stray far from the atmosphere of its eponymous masterpiece, but ends up far less successful. This time, to be precise, Phil offers songs of conventional length, mostly built on dark bass drones with drums still prominently featured, though not necessarily as epic and thunderous as they often were in the past. There's even room here for a couple of tracks with unmistakably bossa nova leanings. The record's real problem is a certain underlying sameness that, in this case, doesn't exactly set hearts racing, and there isn't a single song that truly stands head and shoulders above the rest. For fans it remains a near-godsend, but for everyone else No Flashlight is certainly a step backward. Still mostly recommended for fans, though this time genre lovers really do have something to savor: the spartan "Singers", released alongside the main album, is a collection of austere acoustic ballads, either unreleased or alternate versions of songs already out, spanning the past five years. The mournful "Let's Get Out Of The Romance", the dreamy "Where Is My Tarp", and the thoroughly traditional "It's Morning Time Again" along with the reprise of "I Can't Believe You Actually Die" speak a very old language, rarely visited by "cool" musicians, yet capable of conveying absolute warmth. Elverum, then, remains blissfully, ever more lost in himself, seemingly interested in nothing but hanging out with his friends and playing in complete peace. Hard to blame him, really…

Late in the year, another record comes out, titled Eleven Old Songs Of Mount Eerie. The notable new element of this latest release, which otherwise rehashes Elverum's classic singer-songwriter tropes from top to bottom (which isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself), is that it's almost entirely punctuated by an antediluvian drum machine accompanying Phil's off-kilter, doubled vocals. That's about it, but the magic works its spell once again, and aspiring to make masterpieces has simply never been part of this artist's agenda. Elverum speaks simply to whoever wants to listen, and asks for nothing more. If only everyone could do it this well…

In 2008 the new 10-inch titled Black Wooden Ceiling Opening echoes the same mystical breath and transcendental inspiration that marked the divide between his old (Microphones) and new (Mount Eerie) designs: a stoic testimony to human fragility before the eternal temple of nature, toward which he raises a silent lament, one that risks being overwhelmed by eons of deaf indifference.

Acoustic anticyclones mix with centripetal hurricanes of “casserullanti” and electromagnetic fuzz (“Appetite”, “Blue Light On The Floor”); the ungainly indie-rock of “Domesticated Dog” sounds like a dead-drunk Malkmus who's stumbled onto the stage at a Blue Cheer gig and refuses to let go of the microphone. “In Moonlight” rides the desolate western-soul epic of Neil Young with the tracked-vehicle gait of Melvins. The tribal ascent and the miniature indie-pomp of “Don't Smoke” lead into the syncopated percussion and psychotropic stream of consciousness of “Stop Singing”, which clots into an almost prog-core epilogue.

Amid an unstoppable tide of minor releases, EPs, 7-inches and little substance, 2009 brought a new work under the Mount Eerie name. But Wind's Poem is different. First of all because Phil brooded over it for two years, listening to nature speak to him and trying to translate those sensations into music. And then there's a lot of distortion, rippling through Elverum's lo-fi melodies. On some tracks the guitar even recalls certain black-metal atmospheres (“Wind's Dark Poem”, “Lost Wisdom Pt. 2”). There's also a lot of synth, though that doesn't mean a more electronic sound. Rather, an ambient accent, as in “Through The Trees”: eleven minutes of mystical drone, over which Elverum sighs his usual vocal melodies.

In the rest of the album, traces of Elverum's trademark lyricism can still be made out, but they're just nuances in a mare magnum of uncertainty and mediocrity (“My Heart Is Not At Peace”). A few worthy moments break through. Like “Ancient Questions”, where the collaboration with Nick Krgovich of Canada's No Kids becomes evident, or the caustic “(Something)”, or again the violent ascent of “The Mouth Of Sky”. Compositional fatigue surfaces too often, exposing dull, rehashed melodies. The voice, barely more than a sigh, is overused to the point of becoming almost a parody of the one that defined Elverum as a true songwriter.

Wind's Poem is not a bad album. The oceans of synth, the rippling guitars, the sunnier melodies are a breath of fresh air in the suffocating discography of the Mount Eerie project. Yet there's still too much uncertainty, too much indulgence in resorting one too many times to overused solutions.

Already with the previous Wind's Poem, one could begin to sense that the not-quite-aligned mind of Phil Elverum was about to open its doors to a new inspiring muse. Just as the project of artistic rebirth under the Mount Eerie moniker seemed at risk of smothering one of the most interesting songwriters of the past decade in a fog of self-satisfied self-pity, that aforementioned 2009 album fortunately began to chart a way out.

And it's from that very path, paved with happy insights blending lo-fi songwriting with mystical, Teutonic-rooted suspensions, that this new Clear Moon takes its steps, delivering eleven inspired and fully realized compositions, without entirely giving up on its predictable self-referential devices.

The soundscapes drawn by Mount Eerie/Elverum are by now well established and anything but reassuring: gloomy synthesizer carpets and guitars bordering on doom metal catapult the listener into a world reduced to rubble, while the circular structures of the tracks capture a mind trapped in complete stasis.

In this desolate scenario, though, the voice timidly pushes through—measured and intimate as ever—of a Phil Elverum who seems to respond to the situation with a placid resignation so implausible it borders on irony. Emblematic in this sense is the extraordinary opening track “Through the Trees Pt.2”, with the songwriter from Anacortes confessing himself on the wings of a mutating chamber-pop that drifts lightly over a crepuscular sonic fabric. “Misunderstood and disillusioned, I go on describing this place”, sings Elverum, betraying the eerie clarity with which he recounts his experiences while the Apocalypse reigns all around him.

It's an extremely fascinating game of contrasts and contradictions that this album grapples with, one that makes it flow smoothly and engagingly even through seemingly unbearable crossings, like the one that unfolds along the lumbering pace of “The Place Lives” and leads into the spectral otherworld of “The Place I Live”, blessed by the ghost of Florian Fricke.

It sounds paradoxically comforting, in its whimpers of humanity, the dramatic crescendo of sax and droning orchestra that closes out the march for damned souls “Lone Bell”, before the stage is given over to the gem “House Shape”, an admirable example of suspension between swirling pop melodies and post-apocalyptic mantras from unknown galaxies.

Less than four months later, Elverum released a follow-up, Ocean Roar (2012), which doesn't shift the musical coordinates of its predecessor by an inch. The narrating self already appears backed against the wall from the first minutes of the claustrophobic “Pale Lights”, where assaults of feedback and keyboard drones are interrupted only to let Elverum whisper a single verse amid desolate silence. It's the only attempt to let a shred of human emotion surface in a one-way journey where chaos reigns unchallenged. Even the dream-pop embrace of the title track takes on a mocking connotation in a context that reduces it to nothing more than a fleeting glow: the sublime Halstead-esque scaffolding is a device that emphasizes the drifting of a mind with no points of reference (“Lost in thought/ The mind wandering again/ Drifting west over the hills/ Pulled ou to sea”).

The natural continuation is an “Instrumental” that ideally splits the album in half, with the desperate outpouring of an identity trapped in the wasteland of its own thoughts. Amid the impenetrable noise clouds that wrap around the record's core, there's room to glimpse yet another tribute paid by our man to Popol Vuh, this time openly, with an “Engel Der Luft” ravaged by searing guitars, a symptom of that interest in black metal that Elverum has never concealed.

The compositional artistry of this standout talent later manifests itself in “I Walked Home Beholding”, a final, harrowing testament of life, complete with finger-snaps marking the imminent fulfillment of an inescapable fate.

Slightly inferior to Clear Moon, to which it's inevitably compared given the continuity of narrative thread and the reuse of certain devices, Ocean Roar nonetheless stands as a more than worthy continuation. The credibility with which Elverum sets psychological drama to music is the common thread of another extraordinarily intense work, one in which it's not hard to recognize, in the wreckage of the mind being recounted here, the same wreckage to which the hostile world housing it seems to have been reduced.

Live in Bloomington, September 30th, 2011 previews some tracks from the then-imminent diptych made up of Clear Moon and Ocean Roar, and together it accounts for the recent years of the Mount Eerie project, revisiting several tracks from the earlier full-length Wind's Poem. From the imposing rock band rich in layered sounds down to a set of just three elements: two keyboards and a guitar guide us through this brief journey where the tracks are stripped bare, reduced to the purest essence of their ancestral message; just as Elverum can't help but name the sky or the stars in his lyrics, yet never makes them sound trite, as if each time he were renewing within himself the deep wonder of contemplating them.

Beyond the unusual lineup, what makes this live album essential is the carefully curated selection of songs, truly representative of the artistic path Elverum is pursuing with his collaborators. And it's rare, especially in the digital age, to find a live recording that isn't simply a filler release meant to keep longtime aficionados entertained.

Phil Elverum's introversion has gradually led him toward a worldview that is increasingly closed in on itself, to the point of necessarily demanding the one man band format, and thus recording Sauna in near-complete autonomy. Only a small choir of female voices plus one male voice, and Evin Opp's flute, are placed with precision within the album's narrative arc, whose apparent calm — as described in the landscape of the opening track — is threatened by distant thunder. It's the prelude to an inward journey that this time leaves very little room for wonder, plunging instead headlong into an existential void perhaps never so explicit before.

A void that needs to express itself, both through elementary metaphors — the recurring image of a pile of burning coal as a faint sign of life — and through unusual imagery leading to mysterious revelations. Never before has Elverum felt so haunted by the deceptive appearance of things, by the sense that this life is merely a veil separating our bodies from a bottomless sky, and that everything originates from and dissolves back into nothingness (I was born/ out of nowhere/ and back to nowhere/ I’ll return). Ancestral doubts posed — indeed asserted — with a detachment at times almost ruthless, so much so that it calls for a few fleeting returns to order, with two instrumental interludes completely detached from the context: percussive embryos that mimic the comfort that only the immaterial richness of books seems able to guarantee (In my bag,/ a book of zen poems/ that I read and re-read./ They all say:/ “Don’t worry./ Dreamed dust 
is always blowing./ All this is a veil”). Through it all, in the end, what remains essential is clinging with whatever strength is left to this reality, however pale and evanescent it may be ("This").

From the most placid contemplation to turbulent rage, "Sauna" sustains a feeling of suspension, even of dissatisfaction with an expressive form that cannot change, and yet the need to keep finding that outlet to glimpse a hint of answer within the maze of one's own questions.

Saturday, July 9, 2016 was the tragic, precise moment when Elverum came face to face with death — "real death" — and, as if waking from a child's innocence, suddenly found himself in an uncomfortable adulthood. His young wife Geneviève had passed away from cancer, leaving incomplete a family picture to which a daughter had only recently been added.

There's no denying that Phil's recent songwriting had increasingly revealed a devouring inner turmoil, which found voice both in the Swans-like saturation of Ocean Roar and between the intimate lines of Sauna; voices from the edge of a precipice, symptoms and premonitions that would find their inescapable confirmation in A Crow Looked At Me, stitched together within the silence of private walls out of genuine need for processing, almost entirely free of artistic intent.

This is entirely evident in the uninterrupted accumulation of thoughts, essentially a diary that follows the steps of the isolation that characterized the autumn following the tragic event.

Not only do the already sparse rhymes disappear, but even musicality itself fades away in this flow of prose poetry, almost mundane in reporting scenes of a desolate everyday life: reality, the micro-universe contemplated over an entire career, is suddenly stripped of its mysterious fascination, which lives on only in its projection filtered through the luminous memory of Geneviève. Hence the need, despite the unsuppressable despair, to bring back into the world every useful fragment so as not to let her image fade — the imprint of a life so meaningful to someone else.

For Phil, this amounts to a sense of responsibility, to the heroic and honorable duty of a widowed father who hasn't let go, and who, even in the depths of despair, has never lost sight of the radiant beauty of what remains.

Just a year later comes the second part of Phil's painful daily diary: in Now Only, the still-unanswered questions are as if washed back ashore, and no sooner are they asked than they scatter like ashes in the wind. Now the songs are snapshots of past and present, of a life that seems impossibly distant and of another, entirely different one, dragging itself forward, stumbling at every step into nostalgia. And that menacing electric "Distortion" that ran through so many Mount Eerie tracks now takes on a universal meaning: the warping of an entire private life's path, until recently marked by a far more abstract and distant sense of death.

Here too, the steady, delicate guitar arpeggios are only occasionally enriched by keyboard colorings or light drum rhythms, confirming the overriding desire for isolation and spiritual solitude. Phil's voice retains a characteristically static tone, like a mantra repeated to himself so as not to succumb to the suffering.

It matters little, in the end, whether — renewed emotion notwithstanding — the songs on these last two albums are probably not the best ever released under the Mount Eerie name. Even if the wellspring of their inspiration were the purest Phil has ever drawn from, he doesn't appear to be at the height of his expressive powers: he acts on instinct, leaving himself a mark of this ordeal in view of its necessary overcoming, a vantage point from which he will finally be able to remember only the brightest essence of what once was.

But the true measure of Phil Elverum's courage can be felt in the live dimension of (after), recorded in November 2017 at the Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht, inside the 13th-century Jacobikerk. There is, in fact, an abysmal gap to bridge between the painful silence of the house in Anacortes, Washington, and the Gothic arches of the ancient Protestant church: the voice that, within those domestic walls, gradually retraced those lines of ink set down in one go, on "(after)" sounds like a feather surrendering to the storm — and which, through the sheer force of that surrender, prevails.

Reliving the course of Geneviève's illness, so starkly described in songs like "Soria Moria", could never simply become part of a mere "setlist": it's a titanic challenge that must be faced every time with the same awareness, the same integrity, like an irreligious act of faith directed equally at life and death.

And it may well be the effect of the natural reverberation spreading through the naves, but it's nonetheless curious how these individual songs, built on just a handful of arpeggiated chords, end up sounding like the verses of a sprawling Easter Vigil Exsultet, where light finally floods in and overtakes the darkness, which dissolves into thunderous applause, rising from the deepest, most compassionate part of the heart that makes us human — however fragile and condemned to the anguish of loss we may be.

In light of his marital loss and his recent (though already-ended) second marriage, “Lost Wisdom” now looks even more peculiar within Phil Elverum's songwriting career: in 2008, it was the only album in which his voice doubled up with that of Julie Doiron, setting aside an expression that had until then been almost entirely solitary. After his last two diaries of domestic desolation, the lo-fi indie pioneer thus returns to contemplate a duet, as if to share too heavy a burden and, one step at a time, loosen its suffocating grip.

All wisdom undone by fate's wayward hand: that could be the overall meaning of Lost Wisdom pt. 2, but despite the persisting weight of his existential condition, Elverum finally manages to let some air into the lines of these eight songs, which retain the free form and conversational cadence of A Crow Looked At Me and Now Only.

Subtext returns, and with it poetry, in Elverum's post-traumatic writing, to the point of making this iteration of the duet with Julie Doiron feel denser than it ultimately is. It is a deep breath, that much is true, and listening to it no longer delivers the gut-punch we had by now grown used to. The only consolation thus remains the writing, the singing that bears the memory of what has been lost; the power of the word that each time brings back to life what has vanished – and with it a faint, undying hope.

2020 becomes the year in which Phil Elverum decides to resurrect the moniker under which he had released his first string of albums. Born in Anacortes, a fishing town on the Pacific Ocean almost on the Canadian border, the songwriter had put his lo-fi folk project on hold seventeen years earlier with the splendid “Mount Eerie” (K, 2003), taking on the very name of the mountain at whose foot he was born, and dissolving his music into a rarefied, stretched-out songwriting prey to rhythmic jolts and droning storms.

Microphones In 2020 represents a sonic synthesis of Mount Eerie and The Glow, Pt. 2 (K, 2001). The album consists of a single 44'44" track built on two chords/sections that repeat in a loop, inlaid, depending on the narrative openings, with other instruments (piano, bass and drums) that echo the more mature work of Owen/Mike Kinsella. The guitars split in two, Microphones-style, with a wavering, out-of-phase sound reminiscent of Terry Riley's tape experiments, leaving, across the first seven-plus instrumental minutes – played on his first-ever guitar – time and space for the listener to lose their bearings and overwrite their own thoughts.

At its center lies Elverum's coming-of-age story, an imaginative journey backward through his "sentimental education" with music that made him the man he is today, whose voice arrives almost unexpectedly within the track. Elverum's reflective nostalgia becomes an analytical process through which the author, undertaking a journey during which he makes the recordings, retraces the stages of his becoming a musician and renews the doubts that have accompanied him ever since, aided by a sense of repetition familiar to minimalist music that here finds an ideal balance with the limit of repetitions sustainable in a singable song within the folk and rock tradition.

On the narrative level, it adopts the process of coming-of-age and the memoir form – central to American independent culture – to bring out the formative moments of an artistic path that is both particular and universal, looking at its origins not as an act of self-indulgence but as a cyclical reflection on the substance of one's being and on the shape of one's music, imagined as a single, boundless track made up of imperceptible oscillations, fractures, voids, disintegrations, placid entrances and massive interventions.

Microphones In 2020 is an intertextual experiment that originally reactivates recurring forms and motifs through the DIY practices dear to Elverum and to the Olympia scene he hails from artistically, bringing them to life in a threefold present of Augustinian memory, which is simultaneously past, present and future.

Phil Elverum returns after five years with his mature-era moniker, under which he has released most of his work since 2004. He returns having reconciled (once again) Mount Eerie with Microphones, and he does so by making an album of incredible intensity and precious craftsmanship, recorded from December 1, 2022 to May 2024 "nowhere," as the author notes on the photo of the (home) studio inside the record. As Elverum has by now well accustomed us to, Night Palace is not "just" a record, but a total conceptual work, the expression of an artist able to connect, in a visceral way, poetry, photography, painting and video to a sonic experience that uniquely combines songwriting and sound art. The American songwriter has always worked through Do-It-Yourself practices, making lo-fi not only an ethical and aesthetic choice, but above all a philosophical practice with media-archaeological traits, made of acoustic instruments and tape machines on the verge of obsolescence, rarefied distortions and crystalline choruses, memories, impressions, presences-absences.

At the heart of this shadowy and commanding new work – about 81 minutes of music spread across 26 tracks that make up two LPs – is once again Mount Erie in Washington State, at the foot of which lies the seaside town of Anacortes, set on a peninsula overlooking a jagged archipelago of islands in the Pacific Northwest, on the border between the US and Canada. The nighttime silhouette of the mountain overlooking the sea, together with the hand-lettered, uncertain-looking words "Night Palace," dominates the cover art made by Elverum himself. It is the poignant landscape of an ancient land once watched over by the Samish people, as well as the place where Elverum was born and has never left, living in full harmony with the place and with all the moods and vibrations created by his being there, in that moment and in that time.

The album immediately offers an enormous variety of genres, reverberations, expressions: from post-rock/jazz songwriting à la Karate ("Huge Fire") to ballad ("My Canopy"), from light electro-pop (" Walk") to elegiac folk ("Blurred World"), from the indie psych-pop of Guided By Voices and Yo La Tengo ("Empty Paper Tower Toll," "Non-Metaphorical De-Colonization") to the noise of Dinosaur Jr. ("Writing Poems"), from lo-fi ("I Saw Another Bird") to hi-fi ("I Spoke With A Fish"). But it's not (at all) that straightforward. "Night Palace," in fact, constantly blends various stylistic traits within single tracks, making this the album's defining trait: minimalism with slowcore and doom ("Breaths"); the barest songwriting with the most absolute sound art ("I Heard Whales (I Think)"); psychedelic indie nursery rhymes with lacerating, pulseless drones ("Co-Owner Of Trees"); folk with spiritual ("the Gleam, pt. 3").

With Night Palace Elverum sketches a complex genealogy: of himself and his relationships, of the US and its history, of his land and its spirits, of lo-fi and sound art, of music and the other arts. "A" genealogy and "a" history, among genealogies and histories. In perpetual motion while standing still, against the genetic nomadism of the quintessential liberal capitalist society. And we find ourselves before the immense work of one of the most important composers of his (and our) generation.

Contributions by Simone Coacci (“Black Wooden Ceiling Opening”), Mattia Braida (“Wind's Poem”), Andrea D'Addato (“Clear Moon”, “Ocean Roar”), Michele Palozzo (“Live in Bloomington, September 30th, 2011”, “Sauna”, “A Crow Looked At Me”, “Now Only”, “(after)”, “Lost Wisdom pt. 2”) and Maria Teresa Soldani (“Microphones In 2020”, “Night Palace”)

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