The indie rock legends behind Low and The Microphones will be performing at First Avenue this week Alan Sparhawk (left) and Phil Elverum (right) This week, two incredibly fortunate audiences will get the chance to see two sui generis musicians sharing a bill for the first time: Phil Elverum, 46, of Mount Eerie (and formerly of The Microphones) and Alan Sparhawk, 56, (formerly of Low) will be performing at First Avenue on Thursday night and Milwaukee’s Turner Hall on Friday night Elverum has been performing as Mount Eerie releasing his eleventh album under that title And after nearly 30 years singing with his wife Mimi Parker in Low Sparhawk has been touring behind his first solo album Both albums were recorded in the northern border towns each of them calls home—Washington state’s Orcas Island for Elverum Both albums tapped local collaborators—Olympia Washington’s black metal duo Ragana on Night Palace and Duluth/Minneapolis producer/songwriter Nat Harvie on White Roses And while both albums are products of each auteur’s ongoing decades-long commitment to musical experimentation Night Palace is in some ways a musical return for Elverum while White Roses is a radical departure for Sparhawk Night Palace brings back some of the distortion and poetic lyricism long associated with both Mount Eerie and Elverum’s former project while White Roses finds Sparhawk without his guitar his voice isolated and nearly unrecognizable processed through the robotic effects of an autotune vocal harmonizer These vectors of return and departure seem profoundly intertwined with the fact that both artists very publicly lost their partners Elverum’s wife and the mother of their daughter was lost to pancreatic cancer at the age of 35 Sparhawk’s wife and the mother of their children was taken by ovarian cancer at the age of 55 sometimes accompanying himself on her instruments intimately describing the aftermath of her death and the excruciating process of continuing on as an artist is his first album singing on his own after years of singing in devastating harmony with Parker in Low with Sparhawk in mid-tour mode in Washington and Elverum preparing for tour at his house on Orcas Island for a three-way call ahead of their two shows together We discussed how it’s possible that they’ve never met before when grief shifts from being an auto-response to a more conscious choice and when sad music can actually be dangerous You're both sharing the same bill in Minneapolis and Milwaukee this week and I was just thinking about all the intellectual and artistic connections between your music and your lives So which soulless accountant put the two of you together for these two shows I suspect we were just in the same neighborhood at the same time and it made sense for one show and then it made sense for another show Have you spent any time with each other's music over the years but we probably know a lot of the same people I've been listening to Phil for a very long time I keep thinking that we would've met at some point in the '90s just hanging around some of the same people briefly or something Elverum: One of the favorite shows I've ever seen was Low playing in Olympia at a tiny place called The Midnight Sun in probably '97 just like lying in a pile of coats next to my friends Sparhawk: Yeah, I remember that. That was a fun show. I think Lois Maffeo set that up she took us under her wing pretty early on Are there any particular songs or albums from Low or Mount Eerie/The Microphones that made an impact on you Sparhawk: I think we spent quite a lot of time in the van on tour early on listening to one of The Microphones' records And that was probably the most time that I've spent as far as really learning the songs that’s probably where we ended up getting cornered the most Do you have any favorite Low songs or albums I worked in a record store when I was a teenager in Anacortes and we would get all these promos from the distributor And I remember getting a CD in called When the Curtain Hits the Cast And one where the cover was a piece of 35-millimeter film but black—what's that one called Elverum: And the Double Negative album—just the beautiful quilt of distortion that you made and distortion has always been part of your sound but especially on the last three Low albums you did with BJ Burton distortion has come in and out of your music over the years but on this new record distortion is really present and used in a beautiful way My friend Drew says you’re both attracted to a specific kind of distortion: “side chained distortion.” Why the affinity for it distortion is the sound that I hear in my brain But I think the appeal of distortion is that you're amplifying this signal and pushing it against the ceiling subtleties in a sound that you don't hear necessarily on the surface And when you start hearing the way it pushes against the ceiling you start hearing which parts of the sound are pushing against the ceiling harder and the things that are not as far up start coming forward—the harmonics and complexity to the sound comes forward as the distortion increases And side chaining isn't distortion as much as it's having some other sound controlling the dynamic of another sound and the process of the distortion settling down becomes its own sound And sometimes something has hit that ceiling and is bouncing off of it it almost cancels itself out and there's almost a moment of silence among the heft of sound that's happening So the way stuff breathes and the way sound comes at you and the way it's hitting the limits of its possibilities You can feel when things come together or come apart—and there's also drama to it I spent last night walking up a hill in my neighborhood in Minneapolis and listening to Night Palace in the dark it just felt like you’ve returned to some of your older modes of making music while retaining the changes you’ve made along the way you're really exploring distortion in this beautiful way—that's inspiring I agree with a lot of the stuff you said about distortion it also reminded me that what I like about distortion is that it takes the performance out of my hands a little bit It does its own thing in unpredictable ways You just can't really play it—you just can open the door to it and let it do its thing Are collaborators harder to come by in Duluth and Orcas Island How has your geographical circumstances impacted the people and how you've made music over the years Is it harder to make music in these two places the difference is I've lived in that community for a long time It's a small enough community that you can get quite a good sense of who's there and you meet a lot of people and you get to do things with different people I have several bands with different people in town On Night Palace you sang about how you live in a “vacation place,” Phil artistic punk community that I had when I lived in Olympia when I was younger But after moving away from there 20 something years ago Elverum: They're playing in my band for this tour it's just they're the musicians that I taught my songs to So it's hard to practice having bandmates that live far away What were you most interested in exploring on this one—was it the sound I think I was just messing around with some stuff that was at the house I think I was probably a little bit frustrated with hearing myself sing and having a little bit of a moment with trying to figure out who it was and what I was as myself And so I was just messing around with some instruments that I don't usually use and the voice thing was an accidental thing—just something that the kids had been messing around with And it spoke to me and I found myself able to sing mostly because it was a different sound—I wasn't hearing my own voice anymore I was just hearing this other sound even though I was doing the singing And I feel like there's something about that that just opened up and I don't know started coming up with things that I liked and started playing them for my kids and a friend and that's when it started to look like I was going to do something it just happened kind of by messing around and maybe doing a little bit of avoidance And I feel like I found something and then it went from there Listening to both of your records made me think about your losses And it's still surprising and frustrating to me with how much intensity it impacts my life There’s something automatic about your reaction to death—you don’t even have the chance to think about what you’re going to do And then you gradually are able to make some conscious choices you wrote about how in the immediate aftermath of the death of your partner Geneviève that it felt like an “intrusion of impermanence.” And you shifted the way you wrote songs—to more of a “nuts and bolts” description of life how unconscious was the making of this new music and when did conscious decision-making start to creep back in I did not feel I had very much control over whatever was coming out of me there was a good while there where the idea of consciously sitting down and trying to write about it actually felt really gross and insulting in some ways The apprehension of the idea to write about this type of experience—it feels profane or gross But then the automatic version of it kicks in it looks like something completely different and it's not so much what it is as much as this valve that somehow gets opened up so I was pretty taken aback about how direct it would get every once in a while And Phil, as you wrote, you shifted to writing about nuts and bolts of life: “no symbols, no poetry, no wind.” But on Night Palace, it seems like a lot of that—the distortion, the incorporation of field recordings How did you decide on which parts of your personality to express on this project Do you feel like you maybe are in control again in some ways or maybe it's not as automatic of a reaction now I think that parts were a more conscious decision—I wrote a few albums or maybe two in that reactive phase of being like this proximity to death and grief and stuff and make art out of it—it felt wrong or something So my way of letting it out was just to focus on the small reality of day-to-day life I wrote a bunch of songs like that and then got to the end of that and felt like I don't want to keep writing in that mode I don't actually believe that it's true that we need to reject that I think that actually the mystery of creativity and inspiration and art and ambiguity is actually super important and it's the center of my existence and so I intentionally brought that back in it's like a pendulum swing—I was reacting against these experiences You've both made sad music before and after these losses Is there a sad song that has stood out for you in your life and did it help to hear it or did it hurt to hear it Elverum: Well, for me, that's all I listened to when I was a teenager. Not all, but I really gravitated towards melancholic, minor chord, Red House Painters it's hard for me to even think of what a sad song could be—it just seems like everything is happy and sad and nuanced and complex suddenly crack into that subconscious and open up and you'll feel what needs to be felt at that moment and sometimes it isn't necessarily a sad song or necessarily something that's speaking directly to your sadness even I remember that process and how random it was how there would be moments where you would feel it very deeply it wouldn't even have to be a song that refers to sorrow or anything The kids were playing one in the car and I had to pull over I didn't even need to hear the words—there was something about the moment and the emotion that was going into what he was saying and something about the backwards sample that was going on in the background that just for some reason got its hooks inside me and it just tore me open and I had to pull over So it can be unpredictable. I don't seek it out. I remember hearing the beginning of one of Nick Cave's songs recently—the one after he lost his son So sad music can be both literally and figuratively hazardous I'm gathering from listening to Night Palace that you practice Zen Buddhism or are at least curious about the egoless approach of Zen Buddhism And this album might also be your most political or maybe your most philosophical take on the potential impact of your songs on your audience and our world It's very outspoken in its criticisms of the American way of life and our colonial history but it's also balanced with this realism about your hopes and dreams for change But it does feel you're engaged in the fight in a different way on this one Maybe what's new is just that I named it a little bit more openly I'm too old to get stuck in self-editing like that—I’m just going to speak from the heart it's just releasing all of the strategizing around not saying things directly you’ve made big political statements on your songs and sometimes they're swallowed up by distortion and your sound and sometimes the sound and the jarring distortion is its own political statement you seemed more concerned with an interior experience—your feelings about your family What kind of impact are you hoping White Roses will make on a listener That stuff's all such a gray area—it all blurs in and out I don't think we've ever consciously sat and thought I think we've always tried to stay true to what comes out and just trust the writing and creative process and trust that it's a reflection of what's really going on inside—and that's just always been the best way to go it gets simpler when you lose someone close—there's a lot of stuff that falls away that you thought was important and you start seeing what is most important: peace Sparhawk: I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here White Roses was very much just literally trusting what was coming out of my mouth and what was coming out the top of my head and just trusting that that's what needed to come out and there's this slight separation between you and the song and then someone else could play and sing or whatever here's what came out of me that seemed to make sense cut them up and put ‘em together into songs You said at first you played these songs for friends and family but now that you’ve been out on the road with them for a few months it was a weird experience having to go back and memorize something that I'd already written so I'm able to improvise and go with what feels right in the moment before I was hiding a little bit behind the guitar It's an opportunity to be a little more generous and a little more trusting—looking people in the eye you’re been touring backed up by this great band and so these Minneapolis and Milwaukee shows will be the beginning of the last chunk that we're doing I’ve only seen you solo, or playing with Julie Doiron It's funner to play more complex compositions or whatever We're not trying to faithfully recreate the album because that's not possible it's a pain in the ass to tour with a band though—it's much simpler to just show up with a guitar and play I'll probably do that some more after this Steve Marsh is a senior writer at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine Key Enterprises LLC is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for mspmag.com for people with disabilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone, and applying the relevant accessibility standards Tricycle is a nonprofit that depends on reader support Indie rock luminary Phil Elverum on the Buddhist breadcrumbs in his back catalog “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” and the art of being engaged but not hung up Perhaps viewing the connection we find with others as an impermanent reminder of a deeper bond of endless energy passing through all life the song concludes: “This sky mirroring emptiness/is where I first found you.” Washington—Elverum meditates and sees this place “emerging through the mist…,” before and beyond the language colonizers used to define it and violently steal it from Indigenous peoples Talking with Tricycle just two days after Donald Trump’s election victory inaugurated a fresh round of doubt about what our future holds Elverum reflects on the Buddhist breadcrumbs in his earlier work and how he hopes to see the world heal from the imperialist poison still flowing everywhere This interview has been edited for clarity and concision They don’t get acknowledged by most of my listeners But now Tricycle is calling and I have a bit of impostor syndrome [laughs] Was there something specific that finally made that change possible I went to a weeklong Zen meditation retreat where I had to practice alternating between sitting and walking meditation for seventeen hours a day a mandatory meditation situation [made the change possible] Night Palace by Mount Eerie I had an on-and-off-again relationship to my meditation practice That was sort of the shift for me—making practice more of a daily habit Your music has always seemed very Buddhist I found Buddhism in my early 20s by way of Jack Kerouac and Dharma Bums and then following the threads of that back to Hanshan’s Cold Mountain Seeing these people sitting still for years and years in a simple [hermitage] and looking out and watching the clouds change shape As I made my interest in Buddhism more explicit on my records, like on the album Sauna I escaped from the temple and went down to a coffee shop and streamed it on my phone.” [laughs] That gave me more awareness that there were many serious practitioners out there I played a show earlier this year in San Francisco and they were teasing me afterward about how overt it was like I was covering Dogen in my songs rather than writing originals I’ve had the perception that people weren’t picking up these breadcrumbs because I’m making quote-unquote “indie rock.” I’m disseminating these Buddhist ideas in a weird place and I am trying to blur the line and recontextualize these ideas using new vocabulary They were doing back to the land (specifically decentralist and antistatist environmentalism) and rejecting American imperialism but they were also not aware enough of Indigenous issues When I think of decolonization and personal roots and belonging inhabiting a place and the sense of permanence—when you actually are more concerned with impermanence and the role of hanging on to an awareness of history—-there is a contradiction there I’m trying to hold both of those things at the same time My song “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization” is basically just a bumper sticker and it’s not a system of thought or a plan at all this country has from the very beginning been this racist and that truth is now more overt and publicly accepted the bummer is that so many people are actively contributing to that and the facade of representative democracy is gone Despite all the terror of being alive right now It can feel so apocalyptic to live in our times and that kid wants to have a whole life and maybe kids of her own So I am thinking of one thousand years from now and wanting to think about that healed world that we want to have let’s live out our time here doing the best we can but dismantleable if you zoom out a little bit more It’s a question of being engaged but not hung up I take a weird comfort in the perspective of maybe humans will survive To actually live in the present moment and still be engaged with the maximum effort to improve things is It’s not about the results but the time spent Thank you for subscribing to Tricycle! 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Log In Subscribe now to read this article and get immediate access to everything else Discover what over 30,000 subscribers have access to Full access to 30+ years of content with over 7,775 articles Continuous new writings from leading Buddhist teachers and New York Times bestselling authors Take an online Buddhism course at your own pace Please check your email to confirm your subscription Would you like to sign up for our other mailing lists By continuing, you agree to Tricycle’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service he became a single parent and his next marriage swiftly ended the hugely acclaimed singer-songwriter explains why he’s turning outward to consider the world around him Phil Elverum’s life centred around performing and recording music First as the Microphones and then as Mount Eerie he had accumulated a catalogue of songs through which he made sense of his world written with a diaristic honesty that won him a loyal following the cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée a distraught Elverum began “rejecting my life’s work” and focused on single parenthood with their daughter obsessed with our creative lives,” he says I asked myself: why had drawing at a table 16 hours a day or making all these dinky little LPs been so important to us I questioned the existential value of art and music and poetry These had been my tools to understand life ambitious and perhaps surprisingly political record he says marks “a reset in my life” intimate folk-rock and inchoate blasts of black metal to deliver what he describes as a “multitudinous” sound it finds Elverum “looking outward … I didn’t want ‘Phil Elverum’ to be a character in this record at all” “all the songs I’ve written have been about what it’s like to be a human in the here and now This album examines his home in Washington “from poetic and confronts the violence done to Indigenous Americans I want it to die … Let this old world shatter and reform.” “Modern life is pretty alienated from our past the brutality that undergirds this system we’re all benefiting from,” he says “It’s an uncomfortable truth to admit: massive genocide happened here He fell under the spell of Canadian group Eric’s Trip whose revelatory lo-fi jumble of indie-rock and acoustic experiments was and set up an old eight-track tape recorder in the back room of Anacortes record store The Business whose owner was Bret Lunsford of indie legends Beat Happening he composed his first cassette releases as the Microphones He had developed a songwriting voice influenced by the “underground soap-opera” storytelling of Eric’s Trip; the “grounded small-scale autobiography” of independent comics creators Chester Brown Julie Doucet and Joe Matt; and the radical honesty of Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow “It was about displaying your embarrassing fallibilities,” he emphasises “An expression of punk idealism: ‘I’m no phoney – this is the real me.’” The Glow Pt 2 was released on 11 September 2001 and Elverum promoted it with an inauspicious solo tour isolated odyssey across the southern states There was aggressive patriotism and flags everywhere: racism the ramping up to war.” This darkness weighed upon him the soundtrack to Black Orpheus his only companion he would pull over his station wagon to jot down new song ideas existential concept album that opened with five minutes of unaccompanied drums to simulate being in the womb and climaxed with lyrics about Elverum being ripped apart by vultures and then reborn It sounded like nothing else happening in music right then But Elverum had no time to bask in Mount Eerie’s critical acclaim; he left Olympia in the wake of its release and something had to change.” That Scandinavian winter “I needed to keep moving forward,” he says its albums pursuing his every whim and concept – be that duetting with Julie Doiron from his beloved Eric’s Trip (Lost Wisdom) or embracing synthesisers (Clear Moon) or Auto-Tune (Pre-Human) or reimagining black metal (the thrillingly maximalist Wind’s Poem) Castrée was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer; she died the following year Performing in Santa Ana Photograph: Harmony Gerber/WireImageIn the immediate aftermath of this loss and that’s it.’ But it wasn’t long before songs started coming to me ‘This is just for me.’” The songs addressed the loss of Castrée with characteristic he sang that death was “not for singing about … when real death enters the room His family urged him to release these songs it was appropriate and respectful to not skirt around or use euphemisms But I was afraid of hurting people by being blunt in this realm where people prefer the opposite of bluntness I had a nightmare where I sang these songs and some stranger stormed the stage and punched me in the face another collaboration with Doiron – he “deliberately tried writing more poetically” The album is as autobiographical as those that preceded it moving with Agathe to New York to live with her and I got dumped and had to move back home.” The more poetic approach was “because the person in these songs” – namely Williams – “was still alive; I couldn’t speak as freely about her and felt more protective of her anonymity.” He sighs “I can’t listen to those songs now.” They were written in “a period of hopefulness” during the break-up “when I thought maybe understanding could be reached It’s still a little embarrassing in hindsight The trauma from that lasted a weirdly long time It seems like [losing Castrée] should be a bigger trauma He has since started a new relationship. “I’ve been talking recently with my partner,” he says, “about the role of the past in one’s present, and about moving forward. I have a lot of layers of past; I have this daughter, and her mom died, and we have some of her things around. And I’ve got this new life, this new house I built, a new partner.” His next record, Microphones in 2020 attempted to make sense of all this: it was a single album-length song that served as a treatise on memory and past and art After this unexpected final Microphones release ‘the line is drawn – I’m freed from my past Phil Elverum in 2024 Photograph: Indigo FreeLike much of Elverum’s work Night Palace is by turns dark and redemptive Those lighter moments are often the most poignant; I Saw Another Bird revisits the grim omens that haunted A Crow Looked at Me suggesting the agony that inspired that album has passed “I feel like I’m in the later stages of dealing with the loss and the grief,” he nods I get to live in the luxury of: I’m going to spend today looking at that cloud passing over the hill and thinking about what it means when a bird squawks at me to find something real and meaningful in this human experience that it’s with you for life and just changes,” he continues I’m in a phase now where the role grief plays in my life is giving me this beautiful Night Palace is out now on PW Elverum & Sun Phil Elverum’s work (first as The Microphones now—for the last two decades—as Mount Eerie) is a tender study into the infinite reverberations of small things: asphalt parking lots After a detour into more narrative (though still quotidian) songwriting Elverum returned last November with Night Palace: an epic and dynamic plunge into elemental mysteries and personal histories Night Palace is a very expansive and eclectic album not unlike some of the Microphones records the recording process was much more solitary What entices you towards more solitary music-making these days I always kept The Microphones pretty ambiguous whether it was a band or a collective I mostly decentered myself in the list of names I don’t want to minimize the other musicians’ contributions those friends were people I brought in by saying can you sing this note for a little bit?” Night Palace isn’t that different in this sense This has always been my own solitary studio experimentation those Microphones albums were made in a phase of my life where I lived in Olympia downtown I’ve written about this in Microphones in 2020 trying to get at what was different about that time Even though the actual practice of me recording happened when no one was around Do you find yourself surrounded by other artists these days I live on a small island now and I’m way less social I can go for long uninterrupted days just doing my own thing Is part of the reason you’re able to work way more isolated now because you had a background in a much more social I wouldn’t have that stability to build on Since I only have fifteen minutes sometimes What’s your day-to-day routine like when you’re recording I’ll have equipment set-up from the night before thinking about what I’ll do the next day while making dinner or talking to people Or if I moved that section over here?” When I actually have the freedom to start my work day I have to stop to eat lunch which is annoying I go until it’s time to pick [my daughter] up Does it feel more like a day job in that sense I’m going to work during my available hours you’re just not good in the mind afterwards Does parental obligation keep you from going overboard and living entirely in that zone It’s easy to romanticize the art life and wonder What if I could go for 18 hours and really ruin my body and not pee or eat or keep the fire going?” I like having to be more grounded and healthy about it One of the great lines on this record is “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall.” How do you expect these songs will mutate as you tour them It’s a good question because I’ve never really tried to replicate an album in a live context; I always see it as two separate things You shouldn’t try to replicate multi-track recording live but we’re still getting to know each other every time we play a song it feels different Terror and joy mixed together is the sweet spot to be in when making art for a while you were making records in rapid succession There was a much longer caesura between Microphones in 2020 and Night Palace Was your approach to recording very different for this one I decided after Microphones in 2020 that I didn’t want to record on the computer anymore: something I’d done for the previous four or so albums It started out of practicality; I was moving around a lot I didn’t have a space to set up for analogue recording I decided I wanted to revert back to analogue which takes up more space and requires a lot more tinkering What do you like most about recording analogue It makes you more mindful of what you’re doing to the song rather than just hitting the space-bar infinite times [With digital,] you’re checked out; you’re not actually hearing it So it’s more about the practice of making music than the sound the time it takes to rewind a tape to the beginning—that pause—makes you take a breath and recentre A part of the A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only records was about peeling back how your own songwriting had long dealt with death or what you call “conceptual emptiness” as a poetic subject or metaphor especially a song like Non-Metaphorical Decolonization’ is doing something similar with the concept of post-colonialism my mind turned to the line in ‘Toothbrush / Trash’ where you position photos as a force colonizing memories I woke up with that song in my head the other day and maybe that’s why; [my late wife] Geneviève was Canadian Colonized was a bit of a loaded word for that moment This was before I was feeling imperative about talking about actual settler-colonialism in a song A trend in your recent work is interrogating the very idea of metaphor What do you think the potential harm in a metaphor is I’ve been prickly over the years of writing these songs then people talk to me about the songs and say “Oh I love nature too!” People mirror back what they take from the music and I often realize I’ve just created an escapist which is having people interpret it as pastoral escapism Are you saying hearing that reception has changed how you approach songwriting It’s made me way more aware of my tendency to use those words I’ve rollercoastered; I go through a phase where I’m like I had a realization walking on the beach nearby It was a peak Pacific Northwest nature experience I was super alone at this meditation retreat “This moment is what I want to evoke.” But this other part of me said If you just talk about rain and solitude and wind You’re creating this Pacific Northwest nature escapist fantasy.” But then part of me said Speak from the heart.” I don’t need to think about how people will take it That’s why there are songs on Night Palace that are very metaphorical It’s always a bad path to get too meta and get too mindful of the listener One of the things I find most censors artistic practices is—when you’re a person who reads discourse and goes on the internet—you have all these common forms of criticism that implant in your brain and moderate certain impulses or is it more isolated to this one example I mostly do a good job not looking at that stuff But the amateur commenters can be disorienting I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to look at that stuff you did record the song ‘Get Off the Internet’ The song ‘Swallowed Alive’ has your daughter screaming as vocalist I had the idea a long time ago to record her screaming I wanted to make some black metal with her for personal use Her screaming wasn’t recorded alongside the drums in the song They were recorded on their own from my improvising I recorded that improvised blast of noise then her screaming into a mic that was running into a huge bass cabinet with distortion I had a mic on that cabinet recording onto a four-track I recorded the clean and distorted signal through the amp That’s why it sounds like a huge man talking swallowed alive and you live to tell the tale.” She was just improvising She’s so proud to have a vocal part on the album she asks if they asked about ‘Swallowed Alive’ Do you and her share a lot of music together Every car ride we bicker about who gets to choose the next song But she’s always exposed to whatever weird music I’m listening to There’s a lot of parent-offspring collaborations Alan Sparkhawk (who you’re playing shows with soon) has a new album with his kids on it Leonard Cohen’s son recorded most of You Want It Darker Is a close creative relationship something that appeals to you I would be so happy if she has a life in the arts of any kind but there’s no particular pressure about it Another collaboration on the record: ‘Blurred World’ has Geneviève credited with humming Was that just an old archival recording you sampled Not my own songs; I used to record friends a lot One of the songs was by Alex Mahan which Geneviève and I had done background humming on The two humming tracks were beautiful on their own so I erased all other instruments and wrote ‘Blurred World’ to fit with it Are there other archival elements that slip into the record The same thing happened when I recorded over a song from Adrian Orange [Thanksgiving] On his song ‘You’ve Been Fucking Indoctrinating Me Blues’ I had these room mics on an organ and piano take The song was recorded with a full band in a big room But the room mic on the organ and piano was the weirdest and gate to make it sound really distressed That’s the root of ‘Myths Come True’ There’s some really old tapes on ‘Breaths’ too I was into the idea of making tape collage rather than songs So there’s some old stuff from Dub Narcotic studios in the early-00s on the record I wanted to transport the atmosphere of that time and place onto songs Is that another thing working with analogue offers you It makes you look at old tapes from your archive though it’s actually harder to do it with analogue than a hard drive that’s organized But when you have to record over the tapes I imagine you listened to everything before taping over It’s like recarving the same piece of wood there’s a lot of returning references on Night Palace The line “My roots are strong and deep,” for instance Even Joanne Kyger’s “The Night Palace” has come up at least twice in your work before this album Self-referentiality can get to be too much to get too spiralled inwards into your own self I don’t want to try and disguise the interconnectedness of my work and present it as unique islands of disconnected things I like that as a listener hearing other peoples’ work I’m reading The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard right now; it’s part of a trilogy of novels A character they run across in a grocery store actually appeared two books earlier The feeling of making that connection is so satisfying your self-referentiality is interesting because lines (like “Let’s get out of the romance”) appear across your work but often they keep getting complicated or contradicted when you come back to them It feels like we’re seeing a whole evolution of your thought across your music It’s easy to let things boil down into a closed and easy answer Mount Eerie’s Night Palace is out now via P.W. Elverum & Sun Night Palace by Mount EerieNight Palace by Mount Eerie All our content is free to read; if you want to subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 2/1/2025) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 2/1/2025) The material on this site may not be reproduced except with the prior written permission of Our Culture Mag Limited This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page As the new album 'Night Palace' brings his sound full circle we're looking back on his career highlights BY Alex HudsonPublished Oct 28 Phil Elverum has come full circle. In the '90s, he became fixated on making DIY recordings, writing songs mostly as a way to have something record; he even named his band the Microphones as a celebration of the recording process Over the years, he turned his focus to the natural world, renaming himself Mount Eerie and writing existential poetry about the wild Pacific Northwest landscape that surrounded him in the small island city of Anacortes, WA. By the time he got to his most recent albums, recorded in the wake of his wife Geneviève Castrée's death in 2016 largely abandoning his studio experiments and focusing entirely on anguished lyricism With his 26-track double album Night Palace he's returned to the old way of doing things he's made an insular sonic world akin to his work with the Microphones leaving equal space for hushed ambient folk fuzzy bursts of indie rock noise and swooshing instrumental soundscapes To celebrate this return to his classic style we're ranking his 20 best songs from across his career including both the Microphones and Mount Eerie At the transition point between his two projects Elverum turned his attention toward something grander: the natural world and the blurry distinction between his internal self and the universe around him After a blast of static segues out of the previous song (making "Solar System" un-playlist-able) Elverum whisper-sings a frighteningly beautiful acoustic ditty about his body being subsumed by canyons It perfectly articulates the communion with nature he's been seeking throughout much of his work since 19. Mount Eerie"Moon Sequel"Dawn (2008) and in this follow-up to 2001's "The Moon" (more on the that song later) he spellbinds with a stripped-down ballad backed by nothing more than a couple of layered acoustic guitars While most Mount Eerie songs mull on deep questions about life "Moon Sequel" is made up of refreshingly petty quibbles about how an ex is thriving without him and "the way that you get all my friends in the sack." 18. Mount Eerie"Crow, Pt. 2"Now Only (2018) Now Only's devastating closer chronicles daily routines following a family tragedy — not the immediate aftermath when life carries on in spite of the grief Elverum describes making breakfast for his young daughter who heartbreakingly asks to listen to her late mother's album Elverum's response is matter-of-fact and absolutely crushing: "I'm sobbing and eating eggs again." 17. Mount Eerie"Sauna"Sauna (2015) An oppressive drone blankets the 10 minutes of Sauna's title track with taped-down organ keys and a reverberating gong creating a wall of sound to represent the near-stifling heat of a sauna Elverum has always been brilliant at using soundscapes to evoke a physical setting with the sound of water hitting hot coals fully setting the scene and turning the sauna into a tiny universe of its own: "I don't think the worlds still exists / Only this room in the snow / And the lights through the cold / And only this breath." 16. The Microphones"The Glow, Pt. 2"The Glow, Pt. 2 (2001) Elverum speed-runs through a collage of his signature sounds 2 acting almost as a calling card for the album's sonic tapestry: a fuzz-punk intro Howling lyrical motifs that he has returned to throughout his career ("I took my shirt off in the yard," "There is no end," etc.) it's a career-best vocal performance from the typically soft-voiced singer 15. Mount Eerie"Ravens"A Crow Looked at Me (2017) Even when singing some of the most harrowing grief songs ever committed to tape Elverum still finds poetic beauty in the natural world With ravens as the song's central omen for death Elverum's minor-key riffs set a mood that's eerie yet strangely inviting — an apt accompaniment for lyrics that are both crushingly specific ("It's August 12th 2016 / You've been dead for one month and three days") and gorgeously impressionistic ("I glanced up at the half moon pink chill refinery cloud light") Mount Eerie"Tintin in Tibet"Now Only (2018) When I spoke with Elverum in 2018 he told me that his grief albums were "a tribute to my own destruction," rather that a true celebration of his wife "I still haven't made a beautiful tribute to her," he said I'd argue that he did exactly that with "Tintin in Tibet," a song about singing to his late wife despite her absence and chronicling both the very start and the very end of their 13-year relationship but also about being "abandoned and in love apart from the rest of the world / We had finally found each other in the universe." 13. Mount Eerie"Through the Trees Pt. 2"Clear Moon (2012) "I go on describing this place / And the way it feels to live and die." Over the years Elverum has sung many self-aware manifestos about his reasons for making art and Clear Moon's meditative opening track is as concise a raison d'être as he's ever given Amidst wide-panned acoustic strums and bell-like chimes of electric guitar he offers an impressionistic portrait of the landscape around him from the sublime ("There's no part of the world more meaningful / And raw impermanence echoes in the sky") to the ridiculous ("I know there's no other world / Mountains and websites") 12. Mount Eerie"Between Two Mysteries"Wind's Poem (2009) Twin Peaks had a real zeitgeist moment circa 2009 and were frequently cited as an influence by indie bands at the time It's obvious why Elverum connected with the show given its moody Pacific Northwest atmosphere — and "Between Two Mysteries" channels the show very literally interpolating part of the score and even name-dropping "the valley beneath twin peaks." It's gothic and yet strangely jaunty with a calypso-esque groove (which sounds like vibraphone or marimba) that might be his catchiest instrumental hook This early standout was such a monumental triumph that Elverum framed the entirety of 2001's The Glow It clears the path that Elverum subsequently followed to greatness with an 11-minute soundscape that begins with naturalistic acoustic balladry crescendos with a fuzz groove that sounds a bit like DIY "Heroes," and then disintegrates into abstraction Mount Eerie"Soria Moria"A Crow Looked at Me (2017) The Microphones"I Want Wind to Blow"The Glow Elverum is able to create an entire sonic universe breaking his guitar part into pieces — the melody the droning bass notes — and panning them wide entirely enveloping the listener with an acoustic guitar The off-kilter arrangement is a mission statement: even as digital recording techniques became increasingly easy to access around the turn of the millennium it's still worth chasing the fragile beauty of un-quantized human error 8. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron & Fred Squire"Voice in Headphones"Lost Wisdom (2008) Part of the fun of Elverum's catalogue is the way Elverum constantly reinvents his own material allowing the same songs to appear in multiple forms across different projects He released the albums Lost Wisdom and Dawn within less than a month of each other with the haunting "Voice in Headphones" appearing on both It's the harmonies of Julie Doiron and Fred Squire — singing a hook borrowed from Björk's "Undo" — and the fractured guitar distortion that make the Lost Wisdom version especially spine-tingling By 2012's twin albums Clear Moon and Ocean Roar Elverum had absolutely mastered the art of self-producing his albums in his converted church studio called the Unknown Compared to the beautifully janky arrangements of his early work "House Shape" is simply immaculate — organs synths and acoustic strums that pulse against each other like billowing fog the mist gloriously parting halfway through the droning verse proving Elverum's impeccable restraint as an engineer and producer 6. Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron"Love Without Possession"Lost Wisdom, Pt. 2 (2001) In a self-penned biography accompanying new album Night Palace, Elverum addresses his brief marriage to actor Michelle Williams (without actually naming her) saying that in the "stunned negotiation page" after their split he wrote a series of poetic songs about love: "It didn't work I am embarrassed." He certainly needn't be embarrassed about "Love Without Possession." Essentially a tender articulation of the old saying that "it's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," it celebrates a defunct relationship without shying away from the devastating pain left in its wake "I wake up gasping in the void again," Elverum calmly admits Mount Eerie"Real Death"A Crow Looked at Me (2017) It's impossible to compare Elverum's grief songs to the ones he made in other eras I've never heard anyone articulate the immediate aftermath of loss quite as starkly as "Real Death," a song about how the raw reality of death defies being turned into art A story about Elverum's late wife ordering a backpack for their daughter is so harrowing that it's frankly difficult to listen to — but "Real Death" sets a new standard for songs about pure and it's impossible not to be in awe of the stark truth-telling 4. Mount Eerie"I Walked Home Beholding"Ocean Roar (2012) Elverum's music has always been closely attuned to the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest But rather than marvelling at the enormity of nature "I Walked Home Beholding" finds awe in the everyday: a quiet walk home when it felt like "the whole town had been abandoned except for me." With gentle organs and pin-drop cymbal taps the stillness of the scene brings about a quiet epiphany as Elverum is "totally at peace with the meaninglessness of living." While A Crow Looked at Me reels in the immediate aftermath of death the subsequent Now Only has a year's worth of perspective No longer simply trying to make it through the day Elverum casts his observations wider — as on the staggering 11 minutes of "Distortion," as he reflects on how his idea of the afterlife has changed over time There's the naïve moment he had to read from the Bible at his grandfather's funeral at a child and how he told his mom he wanted to be remembered by future generations; how an early-20s pregnancy scare forced him to consider his ancestors for the first time; how Jack Kerouac's daughter dispelled the aura around her famous father; how his late wife still lives on in his memories It's a crushing yet beautiful articulation of mortality — that while each of our lives are "a galaxy of subtleties," everyone is ultimately bound to be misunderstood and forgotten Elverum's music has never quite belonged to a "scene." He arrived a little before the mainstream explosion of "big indie," and his geographical remoteness and rough-around-the-edges production meant that he never quite fit in with all those politely folksy artists on the Garden State or The O.C But if there was ever a song that sounded a bit like a big indie rock hit it's "The Moon," an adrenaline surge punctuated by cinematic horns almost anthemic enough to be Broken Social Scene so it's still completely singular: the rickety acoustic guitars that introduce the song provide its unlikely underpinning and his meek-as-ever voice is practically swallowed by the grinding organ while singing about lost love "certain death," and the meaninglessness of living on a rock that's spinning through space 1. The MicrophonesMicrophones in 2020 (2020) Be the first to get our biggest stories delivered to your inbox. Elverum started releasing his sonic meanderings as The Microphones (later evolving into Mount Eerie in 2003) The journey to now sees the fragility of his melodies strain pushing at their boundaries with a sense of pensive optimism with a rhythmic stream of consciousness where every syllable is felt first and heard second With an industrious discography of around 16 albums under both projects—most of which hold an expansive tracklist Elverum has traced every path through and around longing The record reveals itself as a sort of apotheosis a return to a certain poetics after Elverum faced a “non-metaphorical impermanence,” when his wife passed from cancer in 2016 His sound teeters on the edge between soft realism and poetry and the dichotomy of everything matters and nothing matters wavers in his prose Night Palace rings of a renewal and an exploration of motherhood as he raises his nine-year-old daughter in their home on Orcas Island part of an archipelago off the coast of Washington state Transcending the idea of what it means to mother be that in how music nurtures us or how we nurture the music “It’s that kind of feeling of being cared for by the world rather than attached to it Night Palace might be seen as a reflective response to Elverum’s 2001 cult album reminiscent of the former album’s intense world-building where even a song under a minute depicts an eternity While the 81-minute effort comes 23 years later—finding Elverum on a different path than any he might have ever imagined—it seems like some things never change “I do think of all the stuff I make as being It’s always eligible to take some further or keep evolving I like that sort of ‘unfinishedness’ about things.” This practice of revisiting is evident throughout his numerous albums and projects And the same could also be said about the imploring of fog “I know language like this might unintentionally create an escapist ambiguous ‘nature’ for rattled suburban youth to find soothing and disengaged refuge in,” he expresses My hope is someone out there will hear past the distracting nature picture I keep accidentally describing and get prodded by the ideas beneath.” Perhaps Elverum’s lyrical use of these well-known and ever-present elements of the earthly experience create a sort of vocabulary outside of language a deeper way to communicate ambiguity and what is unexplainable I can’t help but wonder where we are headed or is he too preoccupied with the present and memory hitting him all at once “There’s a part in [“Demolition”] where I say ‘Wonder if maybe someday my daughter’s granddaughter will be old here,’ which is my way of thinking like What will a thousand years from now look like?’ I feel like the theme of our time is alienation from each other and from the land and from the sort of difficult things in our cultural past like genocides and wars and the theft of North America from Indigenous people So when I think about if we’re all going to live a thousand years from now I picture a big healing in all of those things and a reintegration of acknowledging the difficult things in our past Acknowledging the debt that we owe to the land itself.” I finally ask Elverum to let me in on the meaning of life maybe those are kind of the same statement in a way?” he offers “I think maybe the answer for me is just in the continual asking That’s where I want to be: in that state of wonder and exploration We’re obviously these puny little humans that have short lives and the best thing we can do is keep our minds open and keep exploring until we die.” And with that all we can do is continue to push that rock up our hill Photographed by Canh Nguyen Written and Produced by Bree Castillo ‍ Styled by Jordan Lewis  Stay up-to-date with exclusive events and content his first solo album as Mount Eerie in six years He’s also shared a music video for a new song from the record titled “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” Watch that visual and check out his complete list of tour dates below and bring Mount Eerie across the North America Opening the first leg of the tour are Ragana while Hana Stretton joins Elverum for the final stretch Revisit Pitchfork’s feature “Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum Starts Over, Again.” All products featured on Pitchfork are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Menu Listen Mount Eerie Returns with New LP Night Palace The album will arrive on November 1 via Phil Elverum’s own label With 232 pages and an expanded 12″ by 12″ format our biggest print issue yet celebrates the people and Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records the sophomore album from the endearing Brighton duo is a jolt of punk-rock beauty The NYC-based project’s second album delights in its confident sense of chaos with vocalist Cole Haden knowing full well there’s no way we’re going to avert our gaze for a single moment Channeling Ziggy Stardust’s glam transcendence Will Toledo resurrects the album as a grandiose narrative vehicle while marking his valiant stride into the rock canon Mount Eerie is back for the first time in five years with the extremely Mount Eerie–sounding new album Night Palace. Following his revival of The Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum will return to his Mount Eerie project on November 1 when the new LP is released via his own P.W The news comes alongside two tracks: “Broom of Wind,” which is accompanied by a music video and “I Walk.” The former is an old-school Elverum track that sounds more like his early K Records days than his most recent efforts Elverum also announced two shows this November in New York and Los Angeles. Find those dates here, and check out “Broom of Wind” and “I Walk” below. You can also pre-order Night Palace here "You DO NOT want to live in a world without the freakish weirdos who make the music that is the most alive the art that's the least profitable" BY Alex HudsonPublished Jan 20 Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie and the Microphones has been an outspoken critic of Spotify and its infamously terrible royalties and now he's reminding listeners of the importance of supporting "the freakish weirdos who make the music that is the most alive." In a newsletter sent to subscribers on Friday afternoon (January 17) Elverum recommended the book Mood Machine by Liz Pelly which examines Spotify and the streaming economy He decried "passivity and disengagement," telling fans or anyone else's music (providing you can name who the artist is not just what playlist might contain them) You DO NOT want to live in a world without the freakish weirdos who make the music that is the most alive The assholes and billionaires want you to live in that world and they can make it happen so please give your little tithe to the poor punk nerds and fend off the bots." Well said! If you have any tithe to spare for a poor punk nerd, Mount Eerie's excellent album Night Palace came out back in the fall Read our recent interview with Elverum here. "The trauma from that lasted a weirdly long time" BY Alex HudsonPublished Nov 18 admitting that he finds it "embarrassing" in hindsight "I made all these life changes. But then it didn't work, and I got dumped and had to move back home," he told The Guardian saying that he wrote poetically rather than strictly autobiographically "because the person in these songs was still alive; I couldn't speak as freely about her and felt more protective of her anonymity." "I can't listen to those songs now," noting that they were written during "a period of hopefulness" during the split "when I thought maybe understanding could be reached It's still a little embarrassing in hindsight It seems like [the death of late wife Geneviève Castrée] should be a bigger trauma Despite Elverum's fraught feelings about the album, Exclaim! gave the album a 9/10 review upon its initial release. The song "Love Without Possession" is included in our recent list of Elverum's 20 best songs. BY Alex HudsonPublished Apr 16 Phil Elverum has spent much of his career awestruck by the natural world, writing album after album about the soggy majesty of the Pacific Northwest. But at Mount Eerie's latest Toronto show he took a less romantic look at the same theme focusing instead on the grim realization that the landscape he worships has been stolen through colonialism and genocide — a message made all the more urgent by the apparent colonial aspirations of the US's current regime An opening set from Hana Stretton established the quiet as she held the crowd hushed with delicate folk soundscapes her soft strums and unintelligible coos set against the backdrop of twittering pastoral samples This was one of many such sound collages heard throughout the night: Elverum and his bandmates created rickety ambience using wooden chimes, recorder, wood blocks, and some sort of a wind instrument that sounded like an atonal harmonica, all while whooshing wind sounds backgrounded the entire set, filling up any moments of silence. This is an artist who has released an album called Wind's Poem Elverum was unafraid to test the patience of the near-full Concert Hall devoting nearly all of the hour-plus set to last year's Night Palace; a goosebumps-raising version of 2008's "Voice in Headphones," complete with an audience singalong of its Björk-borrowing hook was the only time he dipped into his back catalogue at all (He called this version "a cover of Mount Eerie.") The spoken word piece "Demolition" was a particularly bold swing with the meek-voiced Elverum monologuing about a meditation retreat for more than 10 minutes The political implications of his world-building came into focus with the churning electrified "Non-Metaphorical Decolonization" — a song that earned whoops from the crowd when Elverum introduced it "I appreciate the enthusiasm for the concept of Land Back." The crowd also saved cheers for the song's quietly scathing verses It was a night of challenging arrangements and ideas When someone behind me in the balcony began chatting to their friend at a normal volume practically everyone in the section turned around to glare at them who seemed visibly relieved by the comment "I was concerned because of how our countries are at war," he said wryly declaring himself a representative from the US who had come to "squash the beef," and offering to let Canada "absorb most of the United States." He continued, "Sorry for all of the confusion with all of the assholes we have. But seriously, it sucks. Reality sucks right now. Fuck 'em all." It wasn't quite as vicious as Jack White's anti-Trump rant a couple months earlier but it was possibly even more radical: a tearing-down not only of the US's administration and even of the idea that countries should exist at all It was a heavy sentiment, but hopeful, too; a message of peaceful acceptance, even when it comes to crumbling empires and horrifying news cycles and death itself. As Elverum said when introducing "the Gleam pt. 3" and its story of dementia and the inevitability of death: "Maybe not like 'AHHH!' but more like 'Ahhhh.'" a dog barking in the background and a car drive by and all that stuff — it blew my mind" BY Vish KhannaPublished Oct 30 "I like albums that feel like compilations — that go to lots of different places," Phil Elverum tells Exclaim! from his home studio on Orcas Island just off the coast of Washington. The discussion is centred around Night Palace, the first new album by Mount Eerie in five years With its mix of field recordings and ambient hum, Night Palace is a refined return to the analogue world of Elverum's earliest musical innovations, back when he was known as the Microphones. "It would be punishing if it was 80 minutes long of all the same pop-punk or whatever," he continues. "That would suck. And I should say, it is edited down. There're lots of recordings that didn't make the album." Elverum is known for his home-recording style and an idiosyncratic approach to self-managing virtually all aspects of his creative and commerical life. He now lives a half-hour ferry ride away from Anacortes, where, as a young musician, he played drums in a band called D+ but came to public prominence on his own, first releasing music as the Microphones between 1996 and 2003 (plus intermittent revivals, including touring in 2019 and releasing a final album in 2020), and then as Mount Eerie. In each of those projects, listeners can hear traces of Eric's Trip, Will Oldham, Sonic Youth and Stereolab, who are among the artists that Elverum has cited as director inspirations. Moncton, New Brunswick-bred Rick White's four-track recording approach in Eric's Trip — not to mention his collaborations with Julie Doiron — is still something Elverum draws from. White's influence is evident as ever on Night Palace. "I was a teenager, and I was doing a zine, and my friend at the record store was funnelling me all the promos that he could from Sub Pop and K," Elverum recalls. "And so, I got a promo cassette of [Eric's Trip's classic 1993 album] Love Tara and it just blew my mind. Loved it. And I just went all in — started writing to [Doiron's own label] Sappy Records and ordering every single thing. I still have all the correspondence from Julie, because she would write, 'Thanks for the order, Phil!'" Elverum was so smitten with what he calls the "beautiful and tactile" nature of White's recording style that it continues to impact his approach with Mount Eerie, whose records possess distant voices, otherworldly sounds, and a range of styles and instruments that place the compelling songs in a singular, intimately off-kilter universe. "It felt homemade," he says of Eric's Trip's records. "I was listening to albums that had been recorded in a nice studio with a producer who was editing out all the chatter between the songs. And so, to hear, like, a dog barking in the background and a car drive by and all that stuff — it blew my mind." Though he never saw Eric's Trip live when they were initially active, Elverum made a pilgrimage to Moncton in the late 1990s and eventually released two collaborative records with Doiron, whose earnest authenticity, along with White's penchant for both stark and saturated sounds, has left a mark on Elverum's music that's still evident all these years later. "I feel like it's more obvious If you look at my artwork" he says "I feel a little embarrassed how much I used to lift from Rick White's aesthetic. Like with Don't Wake Me Up and early Microphones stuff, it was so obvious. Although, at the time, it didn't feel like I was intentionally stealing a thought. I thought of my ideas originally, and then I would see a Rick White thing and be like, 'Ah, damn it, he was there first.'" Elverum’s last release was “The Microphones in 2020” under the project The Microphones. It revived Elverum’s use of the project name “The Microphones,” and “Night Palace” continues this revival of themes from over 20 years ago. For example, the song “The Gleam Pt. 3” follows up on this journey, particularly “The Gleam Pt. 2” by The Microphones, released in 2001.  Unlike some of his previous work, the album never settles on one genre, mixing drone, indie folk, shoegaze, and moments of black metal, as heard in the song “Swallowed Alive.”  What shows through time and again is Eleverum’s relation to the Northwest. A longtime resident of Anacortes, Washington, Elverum captures what it feels like to live in the Northwest with songs like “Wind & Fog,” capturing the atmosphere, and “I Heard Whales (I Think),” capturing both a specifically Northwest experience of hearing whales and the natural sounds themselves. Easily, the most immediately catchy song on the album is “I Saw Another Bird.” Its bouncy drums click throughout the song, acting as a more upbeat relief to the rest of the darker, slower, and more purely introspective moments on the album’s runtime.  Two longer songs in an album of short tracks and soundscapes are “I Walk” and “Broom of Wind.” Both are long and sprawling but more focused than some of the other songs before and after them.  Holly Brusse is a first-year student at Seattle Central College. Her interest in journalism started when she joined her high school newspaper during her sophomore year of high school. She enjoys writing on politics, music, and pop culture. Outside of school she enjoys listening to music, painting in watercolor, and spending time with her cat. Northern Transmissions is a music website started for music lovers, by music lovers. We feature interviews, album and live reviews from today’s most influential independent bands and artists. Northern Transmissions also features music news from around the world everyday. will release his forthcoming album Night Palace he has shared the track “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” The song sees Elverum address in concrete terms the urgency of acknowledging our violent and avoidant cultural heritage as beneficiaries of North American colonialism It illuminates the flaming trauma of our current political moment by looking under the big bulging rug “The final single to be released in advance of Night Palace is a break in the clouds,” explains Elverum “a clear voice bringing down an unambiguous hammer onto the ground of here and now: We live in the raw wound of a stolen continent empowered by multi-generational internalized racist destruction Our self-serving dishonesty and subliminal ignorance will only keep us trapped as cycling perpetrators so why not look right at the thing and give it a name Elverum announces a 2025 North American tour with support from Ragana and Hana Stretton Tickets will be on-sale Friday at 10AM local time The vinyl release of Night Palace will come as two LPs wrapped in a gigantic poster (62″x43″) packed with imagery and fully annotated lyrics this physical version is considered the official “full” embodiment of this work Elverum has also scheduled a Bandcamp listening party this Wednesday 30th at 12:30 PM ET for fans to hear the record in advance Mount Eerie 2024-2025 Tour Dates (New Dates in Bold) Pre-order Night Palace by Mount Eerie HERE “Behind the dry smirk of the title (sequelling out from A Crow Looked At Me) there are huge feelings that get opened,” Elverum said when discussing “I Saw Another Bird” in a press release “We are ridiculous little people toiling on the ground but the sublime darts around above us always and resume the conversation with the big unknown Search NewsReviewsInterviewsRecords In My LifeSong of the DayVideo of the Day P.W Mount Eerie, real name being Phil Elverum had taken a 5-year gap after the release of Lost Wisdom there comes serious introspection and reevaluation of oneself and artistry and the 26-track epic Night Palace is no exception There’s a lot to process and take in with the album is intimidating and requires the listener to commit to the album fully in order to truly appreciate it The record is expansive and is a perfect showcase of how to build atmosphere Elverum uses space in his songs to help build a world and immerse the listeners in the album with some songs having sound effects or deviating from the usual tone of the overall LP (like the sound of waves in ‘I Heard Whales (I Think)’ or the electronic aspect of ‘I Spoke With A Fish’) The real heart and soul of the album is the writing Backed commonly by an acoustic guitar (with the exception of drums and electronic guitar for rockier Elverum uses his lyrics as a vessel for self-exploration He dives into heavy themes such as reckoning with his place in the world; looking at nature the future and also exploring the theme of loneliness and community In ‘Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night’ in beautiful poetry; seen in the line: “Awash in privilege we hold our meditation retreats out of earshot from the world’s bombing and cries.” The stripped-back nature of the song emphasises the focus on the narrative and the extremely emotional topics ‘Myths Come True’ features references to the Greek epic The Odyssey with Elverum taking on an Odysseus-esque role and seeing a cyclops walking across the sky featuring songs that can range from a minute long to 12 Some songs hold value only when they exist within the context of the project as a whole but this is not a casual album This is a deeply personal and extremely vulnerable album that leaves the listener feeling transformed at the end as they accompany Elverum on the soulful journey The strength of the album isn’t in the casual listening or in the individual songs – these are all weaknesses for the songs by themselves do not work as well as when they are listened to alongside the others and attention is paid to the record and to the lyricism one can walk away from Night Palace feeling much more thoughtful and appreciative Order Night Palace HERE which ultimately offers a welcome challenge Mount Eerie’s 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me and its follow-up were largely acoustic efforts filled with intensely pained songs written in the aftermath of the death of songwriter and producer Phil Elverum’s wife Songs like the aching “Real Death” frankly questioned the purpose of making art at all filled with Motorik beats and buzzing guitars that threaten to swallow up Elverum’s fragile vocals The DIY feel of the album’s packaging and presentation extends to the lo-fi recordings themselves as well as the lyrics which read like diary entries turned into poetry: “I walk until it’s all fallen away/Coming into the clearing/There’s a pause between the breaths/I look up,” Elverum sings on “I Walk.” Elverum lives in the island town of Anacortes and like black metal musicians paying tribute to Scandinavian fjords and forests Mount Eerie’s glitchy noise mirrors the Pacific Northwest’s weather with sounds and samples evoking storm clouds amassing on the horizon Elverum’s song titles often make allusions to nature and animals and Night Palace is no exception: “November Rain,” “Co-Owner of Trees,” “I Heard Whales (I Think),” among others Elverum pushes sonic elements to their breaking point: The folky “(soft air)” quickly transforms into a blast of feedback while the droning keyboards on “Wind & Fog pt 2” overpower the brief stretches of vocals and guitar and guitar plucking buried under a sea of static And while “Broom of Wind” is fairly tuneful it consists of just one verse followed by guitar and clarinet solos before ending suddenly With such a varied work—there are even allusions to popular music like a short sequence of trap hi-hats and Auto-Tune on “I Spoke with a Fish”—some kind of structure becomes vital But the album’s song sequencing feels arbitrary and the sound mix obscures much of what Elverum is trying to convey because Night Palace defies easy categorization Steve Erickson lives in New York and writes regularly for Gay City News He also produces music under the name callinamagician document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id" "ab112c875083e8a09615a299de5a4c9b" );document.getElementById("facec42938").setAttribute( "id" and website in this browser for the next time I comment Mount Eerie, the long running project of Phil Elverum is gearing up to release Night Palace Eerie’s first new album in five years The record is seeing its release via Elverum’s own P.W The first single from Night Palace is “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” The song addresses our violent and avoidant cultural heritage as beneficiaries of North American colonialism “The final single to be released in advance of ‘Night Palace’ is a break in the clouds a clear voice bringing down an unambiguous hammer onto the ground of here and now: We live in the raw wound of a stolen continent empowered by multi-generational internalized racist destruction Elverum has announced a 2025 North American tour hitting Chicago Look for support from Ragana and Hana Stretton Issue 73 featuring Pinhead Gunpowder is available now This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website  Learn more Phil Elverum's long-running project will perform in Vancouver BY Megan LaPierrePublished Oct 29 Mount Eerie's new double album Night Palace arrives this Friday (November 1) and Phil Elverum has now announced a 2025 North American tour behind it The stint on the road will bring him to Canada for shows in Vancouver Joined on the first half of the run by Ragana the tour kicks off on February 13 at Vancouver's Rickshaw Theatre Elverum will then spend the majority of the rest of the month making the rounds stateside before taking a break in March Things pick back up (this time with Hana Stretton opening) on April 13 in Chicago with his remaining Canadian dates following swiftly on April 15 at the Concert Hall in Toronto and April 16 at Montreal's Fairmount Theatre the tour concludes on April  20 in Washington Tickets go on sale Friday (November 1) at 10 a.m. local time. Check out the full 2025 schedule below, as well as latest album cut, "Non-Metaphorical Decolonization," and Exclaim!'s ranking of Elverum's best songs There are two Mount Eerie shows planned for this November Check out Elverum’s list of upcoming tour dates below 09-07 Olympia, WA - Northern Sky Festival at Oyster Bay Farm10-14 Olympia, WA - Capitol Theatre11-19 Brooklyn, NY - Warsaw11-21 Los Angeles, CA - The Bellwether Winter in Northwest Washington’s temperate San Juan Islands may not be the freezing brutal onslaught faced by comparable latitudes further inland and minimal daylight can be a taxing monotony whose balmy lack of rain remains a well-kept secret the region may as well not exist from October to June Recently relocated from his native Anacortes to the nearby Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum spends his new album finding unlikely solace in those dark “I live year-round in a vacation place,” he sings on the cheekily titled “November Rain.” “I love the winter wind in my face.” Elverum made his name with a handful of early 2000s albums released as the Microphones Despite the far lengthier tenure and more diverse output of Mount Eerie (the moniker Elverum adopted in 2003) he retains the reputation of the starry-eyed kid whose studio experiments and nature imagery offered mystical depictions of his homeland a 45-minute-long song/album that examined vivid snippets of his youth in an attempt to explain why nature-driven musings no longer moved him “For a while I tried to reject my life’s work,” he writes in Night Palace’s bio “I thought it was perverse to seek understanding and create beauty out of the ambiguities.” Whereas Microphones In 2020 mined Elverum’s past in service of a dense lyrical explanation of his current mindset Night Palace treats the entirety of his 25-year discography as a sonic painter’s palette rendering it his most eclectic album to date If you only love one specific Microphones or Mount Eerie era there’s something here for you; if you’re an Elverum obsessive a noisy-yet-melodic smear reminiscent of 2005’s No Flashlight slowly parts the curtains on Night Palace’s nocturnal tableau The much more concrete “Huge Fire” follows calling back to the doomy rock DNA that coursed through 2009’s Wind’s Poem and 2015’s Sauna Elverum deftly pivots from knotty abstraction (“Breaths”) to hair-raising black metal (“Swallowed Alive”) to the sweetest most earnest acoustic song he’s laid down since The Glow Pt The wildly varied character of those first 15 minutes continues throughout Night Palace’s 26 songs and 80-minute runtime With callbacks to long-dormant musical modes come the trees and landscape-centric lyrics that seemed unlikely to ever return Elverum has gone against type by not immediately reflexively making sense of his new surroundings via song and Night Palace reveals a pent-up wealth of poignant observations He’s tromping through his overgrown property reveling in solitary trips to the rocky coastline pondering the slight intricacies and boundless depths of the sky and the weather Elverum’s younger self would have used these environmental features as mystical props or thinly veiled guises for youthful horniness but now he incorporates his singular vision into a deeper philosophy On “Empty Paper Towel Roll,” he looks through the titular device and finds a parallel to his “narrow tunnel vision.” As he squints upwards “Can I abandon this position/ See beyond my little life?” Night Palace’s music and vivid scenery clearly hearken back to pre-A Crow Looked At Me days but the meta-narrative approach that has defined Elverum’s last decade persists his discography has always felt like a living entity of its own thanks to a penchant for self-reference and boundless alternate versions of existing material but lately he’s scrubbed out any trace of opacity from his work but at its heart lie Elverum’s deepest self-examinations to date given its jarring transitions between Elverum’s softest as well as omnivorous lyrics that contrast with the focused specificity that has defined his last three releases and Microphones In 2020 announced their intentions with no subterfuge; Night Palace patiently comes into focus as it progresses The first half’s renewed emphasis on the physical world is imbued with a probing self-aware tone that bears the weight of Elverum’s lived experience — loss spiritualism — and it’s intriguing enough on its own But 40 minutes into this engrossing navel-gazing reverie comes a track called “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” Night Palace’s tone doesn’t shift so much as it reveals an underlying wrinkle Elverum’s music has never been explicitly political — although his clear reverence for nature and DIY culture has never been difficult to extrapolate into a broader worldview — but he spends this album’s back half confronting socio-economic and racial issues with the same level of intensity that A Crow Looked At Me addressed death Elverum characterizes Night Palace as “some Zen some Zinn,” and this snaps into focus on “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization.” As its title suggests Elverum’s principle concern is this country’s legacy of genocide and subjugation of Indigenous Peoples: This mission statement expands into a critique of the way the San Juan Islands once inhabited by various Coast Salish nations have become summer vacation destinations for the wealthy but it’s also dominated by luxury homes that lie vacant for the majority of the year “I can see the lights of the unoccupied second homes/ That they keep lit up for no reason,” he sings on “November Rain,” before asking “Don’t they realize all our stolen wealth/ Is built on screaming bones?” Elverum is quick to acknowledge his complicity the shaggy rocker “Co-Owner Of Trees,” with a succinct career bio that makes even the modest life of an ethical indie musician sound slightly absurd: Night Palace’s loving reevaluation of the Microphones’ and Mount Eerie’s 2000s material is obvious from the jump but Elverum solidifies his newly evolved opinion of his early work on the final three tracks “Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night” is one of four songs that he wrote in one day during a camping trip in the North Cascades in August 2022 a fruitful session that feels like the genesis of the album’s themes Perhaps this majestic isolation reminded him why he spent the bulk of his career enamored with Northwest Washington’s natural beauty spoken-word “Demolition” is a more granular analysis of Elverum’s relationship with his new home “I used to dream that my roots were strong and deep,” he says “Then I dug down just barely and found cathedrals/ Here: a long guest in someone else’s home.” Closer “I Need New Eyes” was written during a return trip to the North Cascades almost exactly a year later It is Night Palace’s obvious conclusion a thesis-in-reverse in which Elverum investigates his initial outlook much more honestly and empathetically than the “I was young and naïve” disownment that has lurked throughout his last three albums “I just wanted to say something true/ And complicate my youth,” he sings before explaining how his view has shifted due to maturation and a concerted effort to acknowledge the diabolical forces that created and continue to impact his surroundings Great albums don’t have to justify themselves against political climates or their creator’s previous work and albums are not inherently great because they do so In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election and the COVID pandemic too many musicians acted upon an urge to put the country’s dire issues on their backs and while that may have garnered praise in the short-term it rarely elevated the art into something that retains resonance there’s been a rise in self-reference and fan service most obviously in a mainstream film landscape that has become reliant on hollow resurrections of existing IP but also in a decimated live music economy where reunions and anniversary-pegged album playthroughs have become the only sure payday Is Elverum’s on-record political consciousness less cringeworthy than Idles’ Joy As An Act Of Resistance Is his invocation of “My Roots Are Strong and Deep” that different from Alien: Romulus shoehorning in the iconic “Get away from her Your answer may depend on how deeply you care about Mount Eerie but personally I think Night Palace avoids the pitfalls of these now-commonplace tactics they’re uphill battles rather than opportunistic tie-ins Night Palace is hell-bent on mindful retrospection and it’s Elverum’s restless creativity that keeps it afloat under the weight of its ambitious intentions There are surprises both charming and arresting around every corner of Night Palace and I’ve barely touched on two-thirds of its songs While leaving a wealth of analysis on the table I’d like to close by singling out “I Spoke With A Fish,” perhaps the weirdest and silliest song on the album Elverum wrote it on the same 2022 camping trip that birthed the most incendiary big-picture critiques of his career he’s just trying to see the world through the eyes of a fish The premise seems as absurd as the song’s trap hi-hats and closing Big Lebowski soundbite but Elverum’s perspective shift yields profound results The river housing the fish is no more fluid than the surrounding mountains that jut up and crumble down over millennia — slowly “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall.” Elverum’s eagerness to incorporate even the most inconsequential animal sighting into his ever-evolving philosophy explains why his music remains spellbinding years after he first achieved transcendence We rely on reader subscriptions to deliver articles like the one you’re reading Become a member and help support independent media The most important stories and least important memes always questioning his own art and assumptions awed by the natural world but wary of assigning metaphorical significance to it he’s still trying to explain what the long song he’s been singing for his entire career really means the last album he put out before Geneviève’s death The passing of the Band’s wizard-in-residence Garth Hudson at 87 last month left the pioneering Americana group without any original members which makes the upcoming performance by officially sanctioned Band tribute Chest Fever a bittersweet occasion bittersweetness is an emotion practically synonymous with the Band whose best-known statement was their worn-out Last Waltz farewell show and whose multiple lead singers often sounded like they were wailing together in communal misery No one writes about the Pacific Northwest like Phil Elverum singer-songwriter’s music as Mount Eerie feels just as rugged and elemental as the landscape whose majesty haunts his songs gathering all the previous threads in his music into his most towering statement since his early masterpiece (via The Microphones) The Glow Pt The socially conscious doom-metal duo Ragana opens Portland’s Randall Taylor has been recording tape-loop music as Amulets since 2013 gaining fans far beyond Portland’s niche experimental scene by posting videos of his process on YouTube while releasing albums of haunted ambient sound collages on labels like the Flenser and Beacon Sound His upcoming Holocene show celebrates the release of his new Beacon Sound offering gothic compositions closer to post-rock than hauntology Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today. Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today. AIRNA eyes Phase I trial in 2025 for lead candidate A developer of RNA editing therapies whose lead program targets Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD) said today it has closed an oversubscribed $60 million Series A financing with plans that include advancing the treatment into the clinic next year In addition to launching clinical trials assessing the AATD candidate AIRNA says it will use proceeds from the Series A to build up a pipeline that is envisioned to go beyond rare diseases “We were really fortunate in this difficult funding environment to be in a position where we were oversubscribed We had more interest than we were able to accommodate and had a unique opportunity to really select the investors that we wanted to work with,” president and CEO Kris Elverum told GEN Edge He said AIRNA isn’t disclosing how long of a runway the financing will give the company how large of a pipeline it is hoping to develop Elverum did say AIRNA is looking to develop therapies for common disorders in numerous therapeutic areas “We’re looking at larger indications with high unmet need and others where RNA editing can provide unique therapeutic potential,” Elverum said “This financing that we’ve completed is quite a strong validation of not only the superiority of our technology and our data for AATD but also the broad potential of our platform across a variety of these different indications to really help patients in need Some pipeline candidates will be developed through collaborations with larger partners he added: “there’s so much we can do with RNA editing yet as a small company there’s only so much we’re able to do ourselves.” AIRNA is among several companies focused on developing RNA-edited therapies. Furthest along in the clinic to date is Wave Life Sciences, which expects later this year to release RNA editing proof-of-mechanism data for its own AATD treatment WVE-006, now under study in the Phase Ib/IIa RestorAATion-2 trial (NCT06405633) subcutaneously delivered RNA editing oligonucleotide for which GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has an exclusive global license Also among RNA-edited therapy developers are “Our technology is eminently more translatable to delivering a target product profile that is exciting for patients,” Elverum said “We’ve been able to solve that in vitro to in vivo challenge that so many in the industry have struggled with.” which he said will combine optimal potency with a safe drug that can be easily administered subcutaneously and infrequently: “That differentiation is really important for patients but also allows us to move from target to target I think we understand the biology of RNA editing in a very unique way that allows us to also exploit the full potential of RNA editing as a modality.” AIRNA develops therapies based on its RESTORE+™ RNA editing platform RESTORE+ first targets a defined site in the RNA strand activating changes to composition and functionality of a therapeutically relevant protein and delivery of oligos that precisely engage the RNA at the target site upon delivery into the cell the oligo recruits endogenous adenosine deaminases acting on RNA (ADAR) to make an adenosine-to-inosine (A-to-I) edit at the target site that is read as guanosine (G) The A-to-I edit changes the code in the RNA enabling the repair of pathogenic point mutations or inducing therapeutically effective gain or loss-of-function mutations that precisely change protein activity “I think the advantage by changing individual letters in the RNA are multi-fold,” Elverum explained You give patients and physicians the freedom to continue to make choices about their healthcare and what medicine’s optimal for them as their lives evolve it allows us to go after biology for large indications where the root cause is most often at the RNA and protein level,” he continued “And that means that we can deliver a drug product that can be preferred by patients earlier in the disease course That’s really fit for purpose for those large indications.” RESTORE+ is based on pioneering research by AIRNA’s two academic co-founders, Thorsten Stafforst, PhD, of the University of Tübingen and Jin Billy Li, PhD, of Stanford University. Stafforst’s lab in 2012 published the first paper showing the selective repair of point mutations in messenger RNA (mRNA) through site-selective editing on a specific codon and co-founders Paul Vogel and Tobias Merkle were the first to publish peer-reviewed papers showing ADAR-mediated RNA editing and the use of oligonucleotides to recruit endogenous ADAR for targeted RNA editing In 2019, Stafforst—the founding member of the Gene and RNA Therapy Center (GRTC) at University Hospital Tübingen—was corresponding author, and the other three co-founders were among eight co-authors of a study demonstrating how an earlier version of the platform RESTORE (recruiting endogenous ADAR to specific transcripts for oligonucleotide-mediated RNA editing) enabled the engineering of chemically optimized antisense oligonucleotides that recruited endogenous human ADARs to edit endogenous transcripts in a simple and programmable way “We successfully applied RESTORE to a panel of standard human cell lines and human primary cells and demonstrated repair of the clinically relevant PiZZ mutation and editing of phosphotyrosine 701 in STAT1 the activity switch of the signaling factor,” the co-authors reported in Nature Biotechnology and natural editing homeostasis was not perturbed.” “That’s when you saw a lot of venture capital firms and companies that knew how to make oligonucleotides get excited about the space and tried to get in it,” Elverum recalled “Ultimately Thorsten and Billy decided to form their own company AIRNA emerged from stealth in September 2023 with $30 million in initial financing from an investor syndicate led by ARCH Venture Partners The Series A round brings AIRNA to $90 million in total capital raised with participation from Ono Venture Investment Alexandria Venture Investments (the venture arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities) other undisclosed new investors—as well as AIRNA’s syndicate from its initial financing last year which included ARCH Venture Partners and ND Capital (formerly NanoDimension) “This financing is a flagship example of a new investment model where we were able to bring together the best investors in Europe and in the U.S. to work together with a team that’s also being built across continents and across countries to develop the strongest therapeutic options,” Elverum added with a Boston office announced last month and an additional office in Munich Brumm was formerly President and CEO of Dyne Therapeutics a Forbion portfolio company working to develop oligonucleotide-based therapies to treat muscle diseases Building a trans-Atlantic team is no small concern to AIRNA collaborative company culture even as its operations are divided between its home base in Cambridge AIRNA won’t disclose the size of its workforce though Elverum said the company plans to expand it over time “We’re really growing across multiple areas within the company Copyright © 2025 Sage Publications or its affiliates, licensors, or contributors. All rights reserved, including those for text and data mining and training of large language models, artificial intelligence technologies, or similar technologies. Not a soul in existence can convince me Phil Elverum doesn’t live in my headphones. Anacortes, Washington, which may be the essence of Mount Eerie in city form, should be addressed to either side of my ears, as if natural splendour is a portable device to Elverum. When he sings, it’s a closely felt lullaby. When he strums his guitars, he creatively pings them between ears, as if the listener is surrounded by a naturally occurring indie folk band. Listening to a Mount Eerie or Microphones song is indistinguishable from living inside of one, in its own physical space. There are pockets of the record where Elverum is even reaching the exact midpoint between his sound and Swans, where his typically distorted, lo-fi takes on rock get jettisoned into post-rock-esque propulsion. Conversely, there are just enough indietronica moments that you can conjure the visual of Elverum dusting off his synthesizers in an abandoned church. It’s a record of instrumental multitude filtered into backgrounds and soundscapes for the last near-decade of his poetry to rest atop. With every track a souvenir of good ideas taken up throughout an illustrious career, and every lyric a hard-earned proverb, Night Palace could easily be defined as Elverum’s wisest release. It contains the breadth of a career and of a life spent in dedication to compatible wavelengths, of sounds in the new. Get the Best Fit take on the week in music direct to your inbox every Friday Phil Elverum decries genocide and gentrification while exploring more personal themes that once again unify his distorted lo-fi recordings as a cohesive testament to feeling insignificant Mount EerieNight PalaceP.W. ELVERUM & SUNABOVE THE CURRENT is the first from Phil Elverum’s project in over five years and will arrive on November 1st via his own P.W “Broom of Wind” and “I Walk.” Elverum has also announced two live performances this November in New York and Los Angeles Mount Eerie released world of an album called Sauna in 2014. Immediately after, Elverum became a father and then his partner fell ill with a fatal cancer and died a year later. These and other brutal waves of change kept pounding for years and it was all documented in the white knuckle songwriting on the albums A Crow Looked At Me (2017), Now Only (2018) and Lost Wisdom pt. 2 (2019) A person catching their breath after a traumatic experience has a kind of reoriented clarity Art that is made without urgency or expectation has a chance to reach beyond the usual It was in this patient clarity that Night Palace came to be written and recorded from 2022 to 2024 Elverum’s life settled back down and he reassembled the old analog reel to reel studio at his quiet deep woods home and began experimenting again the first song’s first words announce Over the next 80 minutes the songs weave our concrete reality together with the charged and rippling world beyond These are songs of re-surrendering to a state of wonder and abandoning the wrung-dry skepticism that this hard world can impose in songs of decolonization and backwoods protest he writes with a sharp eye trained toward the quiet flashes in the blue distance Stone Woman Gives Birth To A Child At Night 25 Washington-based DIY hero takes us through his week in listening from a “sexually suggestive” EDM song by Pickle to a Nina Simone record picked out by a jazz-loving child Ouch’This article is more than 2 years oldThe Anacortes Today it’s On The Drums by Pickle: stark electronic club music as we drive down the forest road but some of this song is kind of sexually suggestive I’d heard Eddie Van Halen’s guitar on Beat It recently and thought: “I should see what his band sounds like” but I like thinking about music in a way where I find inspiration or understanding from unexpected places That’s why I like exploring pop music with my daughter but I haven’t got sick of Halsey as quickly as I do some of my daughter’s music Sometimes I can’t stand her picks any more Pickle’s On The Drums – video9.06am Back at home It’s been sent to me this very moment by my friend Nick Krgovich who is seeing Ata Kak play in Vancouver soon I try to listen – that’s maybe the only way I find out about things I discovered Emily Alone by Florist via some person I didn’t know and it became one of my favourite albums ever 12.33pm I have had All Along the Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix blaring in my head since I woke up so I take the cure and actually listen to it I blast it and put my face right up next to the speaker trying to hear how they made that special mashup backing of compressed drums and brass and the signature vibraslap 12.37pm Bad news: Apple Music autoplays the live cover of All Along the Watchtower by Dave Matthews Band 7.05pm I put on Bruno Hoffmann’s album of Music for Glass Harmonica I don’t remember where I got this record but I’ve had it for years and put it on all the time I put on Tinish Geze Sitegn by Kuku Sebsebe an Ethiopian singer that I found via a friend’s playlist 7.20am I start every day with Democracy Now! this American news show that’s been on for 20-something years The theme song is jarringly funky slap bass – it doesn’t match the grim morning news report we take turns picking songs on my phone again: Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan grinding down and refinishing a cast-iron wood stove and I am alone with the songs playing on repeat in my head Today it is Your Party by Ween; I hope the silence will dislodge it Ween’s song Your Party – video4.27pm When my daughter gets home from school Tonight there’s a slight October chill; Nico’s Desertshore on vinyl is perfect We follow it up with Nizimi by Nikaido Kazumi The Moon Last Night by Loren Connors and then Ma Jeunesse Fout le Camp by Françoise Hardy I used to be married to a French-speaking person – my daughter’s mom – for many years; a lot of French music came into my life via her A lot of the French records in the house were hers but I have my own relationship with Françoise Hardy records – I love them on my own now Somehow no music until 4.51pm when I put on It’ll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil while getting dinner ready I like how their albums feel like an interesting radio show Tonight I put on Adrian Orange & Her Band by Adrian Orange/Thanksgiving, one of my favourite records of for ever, which prompts me to revisit the very cruel Pitchfork review that came out at the time, and to entertain the world’s pettiest thoughts about tracking down the reviewer and confronting them. I have done this in the past, but I’ve learned my lesson – it never ends well. But this review felt vindictive, like it crossed a line into tearing a person down. My friend Adrian Orange wasn’t popular, and was actually sensitive, and this bad review did kind of mess his life up – I’ve had that happen with other friends too. So it’s not victimless for people to indulge cruelty in expressing their opinions. Adrian Orange’s song Fire Dream – video7 October8.05am Driving to school we listen to a spooky Halloween playlist via my phone, featuring I Put a Spell on You by Nina Simone, The Addams Family theme song by Vic Mizzy, Haunted by Beyoncé and Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon. Zevon has this line that’s so good: “Little old lady got mutilated late last night”. I like the poetry of that. After that, we just shuffle: I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got by Sinéad O’Connor, Every Channel by Elevator to Hell, Returner by Lucky Dragons, Balloon by The Raincoats and then Caroline, No by The Beach Boys – the sessions version, with studio chatter. For me, recording music and thinking about production, I love hearing how things are made – like the Björk podcast. One girl who is over keeps insisting on that Nina Simone album, Little Girl Blue. Everyone keeps trying to change it to the Charlie Brown’s All-Stars read-along record, but she is like: “No! We need to listen to jazz!” There is a good point when she says: “I found the perfect record, you guys! It’s called, and get this – Sonic Youth!” (It was the Kool Thing 12” single.) Read moreNo music all day until early evening cleaning the house to have some friends over for dinner 4pm Most of my listening is about feeling the energy of the day but sometimes I like pushing against it – like putting on 100 Gecs Sometimes that hits the spot: leaning into insanity I love this music: it’s funny and real and sad and powerful and surprising and irreverent and touching I don’t really understand what’s happening so we’re keeping the fire going in the pit outside We play a little bit of piano from Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou then we play Tenniscoats on shuffle for hours and music in a language you don’t understand very well allows you to continue with the conversation It took me a few years to get into Tenniscoats but now they are one of my favourite bands Phil Elverum’s four-week songwriting course with School of Song begins on 30 October. Enrol for the class here The first single is ‘Uninhabitable Earth which comes with a visual shot by David Longstreth’s older brother featuring drone footage of Lake Tulare in California and recording the piece in studios and homes in the Netherlands staging several “work in progress” performances  along the way the “radical psychedelia” of new fatherhood and the fresh challenge of writing for a large ensemble “The need for this music arose in a few days in Fall of 2020 when T was pregnant with our daughter,” Longstreth explained It was the middle of the pandemic; no one was flying The irony of escaping the fires by burning more carbon.” He described what they found upon arrival: “The beauty and restorative cool of Alaska A muddy bald eagle sitting on the shale stone bank of a coastal slough surrounded by rotting carcasses after the salmon run.” Longstreth added that while Song of the Earth “is not a ‘climate change opera,” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage Song of the Earth features contributions from Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie) Paragraph One’ is a word-for-word retelling of paragraph one of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth.) Mount Eerie is playing the Deer Lodge in Meiners Oaks tonight Frequently as strange as that old horror comic “Eerie,” Mount Eerie is the project of Phil Elverum who has released more than 20 albums and EPs or as The Firesign Theatre once so astutely noted “gas music from Jupiter,” while others are of the cat-scaring Elverum has a cool voice even as he shifts gears like a high school driver’s ed class learning to drive a stick shift in his attempt “to communicate the momentary experience of being human.” Frequently slo-mo weirdness that’s endlessly interesting with thought provoking lyrics and perhaps a good fit with a double-bill dream gig with Spiritualized The fortysomething Elverum is from the great Northwest — Anacortes Washington — where he added an “e” to nearby Mount Erie to create his current project He began as the frontman for the Microphones and started Mount Eerie in 2005 and he paints — and probably not the garage All this stuff is filtered through his own label His music is fairly expensive comparatively speaking Elverum is an artist being arty to likely make memorable memories He’s also punctual as he answered these email questions with no hesitation PE: I know you are probably expecting a music-related answer and I’m sure we’ll cover that sort of stuff later in the interview but if I can open the doors a little bit right off the top I guess the most honest answer is that most of my time has been wrapped up in beekeeping I work primarily with Buckfasts; as some of your readers will no doubt know these bad boys are incredibly resistant to tracheal mites and do really well in cooler climates With everything going on in the world today I had a hell of a time with wax moths last season BL: With such a vast and weighty discography PE: I’ve definitely been swamped with apparel this quarter We partnered with Avia for an athleisure brand focused on shorts and lightweight (predominately mesh and mesh-hybrid) jackets I’ve always been an obsessive runner and recently got pretty deep into the CrossFit scene Just kidding but the rush is freakin’ addicting Not a fan of clean thrusters but what are you gonna do Still can’t quite kick cigarettes but due time BL: Why isn’t there more successful musicians doing something original like you are I take inspiration from the greats and add that Eerie twist BL: You seem to have carved out your own niche in the music biz — what might that be PE: I came up steeped in that sort of Twenty One Pilots thrash mindset but filtered through a pop lens I think what “clicks” with folks is probably the disingenuous lyrical honesty coupled with my dark sexual energy BL: What was your big break or have you had it yet PE: Feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars: That’s the goal Touring with MCR (My Chemical Romance) was huge I can’t say too much about it but there’s a Marvel thing happening in 2025 BL: I’m assuming you had certain expectations when you began this crazy adventure – is it like you thought it would be or has it turned into a whole other thing PE: At the start it was the parties for sure — a lot of late nights I was co-founder of a Fight Club offshoot in Bothell and you have to print that for obvious reasons BL: Is songwriting a gift or a skill that can be learned And if you ask “the big man” upstairs it’s most likely considered a blessing I have a pretty robust network of yoyo friends and yoyo-based connections around the country who I’m constantly checking in on I started with butterflies but quickly moved onto imperials after a brief stop in modified land 1A and 2A were never REALLY my thing but I’m pretty much obsessed with off-string BL: What’s the plan for this Deer Lodge gig I’m in a fairly messy suit-countersuit thing with most of my band around residuals and syncs and the NDA is compromising as hell anyway but suffice to say the whole band thing is extremely touch-and-go right now I’m not here to stop the flow especially if the vibe is stank You get what you give and you give what you get and I am always down for that BL: What’s the strangest gig you’ve ever played PE: I was asked to do a TedX thing about my gastrointestinal issues It’s not full blown IBS but it’s not far off Lara Stein was pretty keen on getting me so the payday was massive BL: What are some of the cool places your music has enabled you to visit PE: I do the timeshare thing in Kansas City and before you ask I was there before the whole Taylor Swift thing My buddy at the steamboat museum keeps it interesting BL: If you could have a dream gig with anyone — alive or dead — who might that be I actually had one dream come true when I got to co-write a song for Pixar with Glen Ballard BL: I’ve actually killed people in Washington — I shot several rebel traitors at a Civil War re-enactment near the Chehalis River a few years back PE: Whatever floats your boat but the tax loopholes have absolutely kept me — and my so-called LLC — here for close to 30 years now Email notifications are only sent once a day or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to read or post comments One subscription gets you full access to the Ojai Valley News | Ventura County Sun coverage daily online Subscribe today for as little as $1.12 per week Thank you for supporting local independent accurate View archived e-Editions of Ojai Valley News Your browser is out of date and potentially vulnerable to security risks.We recommend switching to one of the following browsers: Account processing issue - the email address may already exist Subscriber digital copy of Friday's newspaper Invalid password or account does not exist Submitting this form below will send a message to your email with a link to change your password An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the email address listed on your account Phil Elverum continues to muddy the idea of a musical identity on his first album since 2020 yet sounded closer to his autobiographical reflections of grief as Mount Eerie This is the point – regardless of the name Elverum’s sense of self runs through it all Night Palace is a dense journey through the synapses of Elverum’s brain complete with lyrical callbacks and reflexive self-mythology These are the most maximalist songs he has put to tape in years stretching from sub-one minute sound collages to 12-plus minute prose poems Melodic indie sits close to a black metal scream by Elverum’s daughter which a minute later segue’s into louche lounge rock The intensely personal blends with the political and existential he narratively draws a line between the violence of settler colonialism and this event which reconfigured his life and art and attempts a break from the past: 'Allegiance to nothing at all but the burning present moment / I cut the chord connecting then and now and start again' is a sonic and spiritual rejection of modern musical standards winding meditation that is well worth your time times and work of Elverum will know full well Whether it be due to his upbringing or the fact he’s dedicated his life to music tapping into the natural mystery of his native Pacific Northwest and fictional renderings by the likes of David Lynch with there stout connective tissue joining his two most famous outlets relaxed spiritual ponderings to moments of pure wrath he provides yet another stellar demonstration of his aptitude and the character underpinning it Although he intends to release the record as two LPs when letting go of stresses and extraneous thoughts at the front of the mind you suddenly find yourself floating in a cerebral immersion tank where the water flows expressively in a loose time signature including the tragic death of his wife Geneviève Castrée in 2016 the pandemic and a divorce from actor Michelle Williams He composed it at a relaxed pace over two years throwing up surprises on the wind-beaten shore from precious metals to messages in bottles characterised by recording on analogue reel-to-reel equipment This approach and recording quality give the album a tremendously human feel a rawness present throughout its traversal of the gamut of emotions naturalistic musique concrete and stream-of-consciousness postulations to the krautrock jams and even the odd blast of unsettling Phil Elverum has long been the master of flowing journeys into the mind’s eye a record of such substance that it takes a few listens to really make sense—mirroring the process of analysing his emotional currents that made it—he’s produced one of his best yet All it takes is to turn off your surroundings A concluding comment from your local ageing music nerd: “I’ve been listening to Phil Elverum for the best part of three decades Nothing will ever beat The Glow Pt 2; trust me Release date: November 1st | Producer: Phil Elverum | Label: P.W releasing a daunting amount of experimental music: 41 LPs and singles in the past one and a half decades among them an excellent trilogy of fuzzy noise albums about the wind Dude even lived by himself in an isolated cabin in Norway for a whole winter—that record is called Dawn Elverum was still the Microphones until last year’s A Crow Looked at Me recorded the whole thing with an acoustic guitar and a laptop in the room where she died It also might be Elverum’s most beloved work ever even more widely adored than anything from his days as the Microphones the legendary label that put out The Glow Pt At lunch the day of his New York tour date “We don’t even know how many copies [The Glow Pt It’s just an endless black hole of information.” But on his own having self-released nearly everything since and nothing he’s put out himself has sold better than A Crow Looked at Me He’s quietly funny in the way you might expect from someone who thinks about grief a lot He also likes to nerd out on the nitty-gritty of record-making which he does when he talks about his new LP “That stuff you just described is like 10 percent.” When I say Phil Elverum does everything himself Lots of artists write all their songs and play all their instruments and do their own publicity and book their own tours (He only recently stopped scheduling his concert dates.) Elverum’s self-reliance comes from the reasons you’d expect: He’s uncompromising going it alone is also the simplest process Or do I call the record-pressing plant and say Both Elverum and Castrée were artists—and after the diagnosis, the notion of creating art suddenly lost all meaning. A Crow Looked at Me charts this futility, remarking on how death isn’t for making poetry. On the record’s opening song, Elverum declares, “I don’t want to learn anything from this.” He may not have wanted to learn anything, but the lessons were there anyway. A year later, his new album, Now Only, acknowledges—or at least interrogates—the role of art in grief. If A Crow Looked at Me is about the rawness of grief, Now Only accepts its absurdity. “I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade,” Elverum says. “And I was thinking, Well, we still know about Michelangelo. He was from the 1500s. So he died a little bit less.” Is that the goal? To die a little bit less? Elverum is surprisingly uplifting here: “It’s not a fear of death. It’s more like we have this finite number of days alive on Earth. How best to use them?” There’s a matter-of-factness to Elverum’s delivery that never tells you how to feel. The effect: You listen more closely, lean in so you can hear the words. Maybe Elverum wants you to cry. Sometimes he wants you to be moved. I think here, with the reference to drugged-out teens and Skrillex, he wants you to laugh. Death is ludicrous, after all. The day the record came out, a friend texted me these lyrics from “Earth,” followed by his thoughts: dude liekwhat the fuckhow can you just. sing that But the moment comes across as less melodramatic than you’d expect and, in its own way, disturbingly ordinary. Later on the album, in “Crow Pt. 2,” Elverum details making breakfast for his daughter. She asks to listen to her mother’s records, and recognizes the sound of Castrée’s voice through the speaker. Of the moment, Elverum sings, “I’m sobbing and eating eggs again.” Facebook comes up in our conversation, in no small part because the Cambridge Analytica story has broken the week we have lunch. Elverum has a Facebook account, but he doesn’t use it to promote Mount Eerie. Instead, every few months, he’ll post a photo of Castrée. “I only use [Facebook] as a way of disseminating pictures of my wife. It’s not music-related at all. A few hundred people like it. It’s a nice repository of JPEGs of her,” he says. We talk about some of the people in Silicon Valley working on radically increasingly the human lifespan. “There are some people that are trying to cure death, this tech immortality... That seems mentally ill.” The irony of it is that people in tech are trying to solve death, but the ways in which they do it seem to remove all the joys of living. “Like people that get too crazy about health food or dietary stuff and remove the love of eating, which is the whole point of living.” With that, Elverum takes a big bite of his smoked salmon, sips of his grapefruit juice. The waiter comes by to ask how the meal is. Elverum tells him that everything is great, thanks. After lunch, I wait for the subway. It’s an idle moment, so I open Gmail, I open Twitter, I open Instagram, I open Facebook. I think about Elverum posting photos of his dead wife and wonder how the algorithm will fuck with it. But maybe Facebook loves grief. People engage with that. I made one mistake at lunch: I asked if Elverum would ever perform songs from The Glow Pt. 2 again, because I’m one of those awful nostalgic people who wants to hear the album they listened to in high school performed from front to back. Elverum is polite but slightly annoyed at the request. I’ve basically asked him if he’d sell out, like Weezer or some shit. “It’s all about hype and marketing,” he says. “It’s so gross.” “Somebody from Pitchfork Festival wanted me to have a Microphones reunion,” he says. “It’s a joke. It’s just me. I’m essentially doing the same thing that I’ve done 20 years ago. There’s nobody to reunite.” Elverum feels lucky, though. Even as a single dad, he’s never felt the financial pressure to force an album or a tour. “I’ve had more than zero dollars for a long time,” he says. Elverum’s noticed an audience shift at his concerts. It used to just be young people, since Elverum is stubborn about putting on all-ages shows, “which means grown-ups aren’t going to come.” But since A Crow Looked at Me, it’s young people and old people—the two demos that probably obsess about mortality the most. “I’m singing these songs about death and stuff,” he says. “I see somebody who’s, like, in their sixties or seventies at the show, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. Fair enough.’ ” After the show, a friend who was also in attendance texts me: I’m rektI didn’t know he was the microphones guyI never heard these songsBut was crying after the first one lol 01 Apr 2025 16:00:00 GMT?.css-1txiau5-AnswerContainer{color:var(--GlobalColorScheme-Text-secondaryText2);}Elverum won 5–1 over Lillestrøm 2 on Tue Predicted lineups are available for the match a few days in advance while the actual lineup will be available about an hour ahead of the match This is the first time the teams are playing against each other Have scored 8 goals in their last 5 matches Who won between Elverum and Lillestrøm 2 on Tue 01 Apr 2025 16:00:00 GMT?Elverum won 5–1 over Lillestrøm 2 on Tue 01 Apr 2025 16:00:00 GMT.InsightsHave scored 12 goals in their last 5 matches Elverum is playing home against Lillestrøm 2 on Tue I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail A week after you died a package with your name on it came And inside was a gift for our daughter you had ordered in secret And collapsed there on the front steps I wailed. And another, from the second track, “Seaweed”: Where the three of us were going to build our house if you had lived You died though, so I came here alone with our baby "The stuff that used to ring true still does in a way and also doesn't anymore," says Phil Elverum huge question I tried to think about with this giant song was mainly how to encompass these contradictions." Phil Elverum has built and battled entire universes. From 1996-2003, his band, The Microphones as friends from Olympia sang and banged on instruments as needed With a bull-headed bravado that comes from a dreamer's naïveté the dead flew off as vultures and the dawn promised something new every morning the music responded in kind as disorientingly layered acoustic guitar ushered in thunderously distorted bass ragtag choirs and a furious cacophony of drums even and especially regarding our (in)significance in the world but could just as easily nurse a broken heart "I took my shirt off in the yard," he once yowled "No one saw that the skin on my shoulders was golden." The title track from The Glow Pt 2 — an indie-rock album from 2001 that appeared on several year-end lists and decade retrospectives — bombastically called attention to youthful vulnerability loudly sounding the barbaric yawp so many bright-eyed poetry teachers blithely encourage idiotic way," Elverum would put it years later When I called Phil Elverum to talk about his first album as The Microphones in 17 years — the absurdly titled Microphones in 2020 a single 45-minute track — he was building a house On an island off Anacortes — the coastal Washington state town where he was born and has lived most of his life — he's about to paint some pine tar on the exterior siding "We've been working on it all week," he says He drew up the plans himself and gave them to an architect to make it buildable but there's probably going to be room for a music corner in my bedroom," he says "And maybe if I ever have any money left over someday I'll build a little outbuilding for music to keep the drums at least." Like every other parent thrust into both work and childcare during this pandemic his daughter Agathe finished up preschool via Zoom the house is a welcome project as Agathe tries outdoor "I'm pretty happy to get to live here," Elverum adds not only recounted his brief marriage to actor Michelle Williams but also began a process of looking back on Elverum's younger self Why is there a new Microphones album in 2020 "What was The Microphones?" is the better question and the one Elverum maps his newfound songwriting cadence upon as run-on sentences excavate and challenge familiar lyrical references and sonic gestures He comes back to The Microphones not as some nostalgist but a time traveler attempting to make sense of the "disinterested sun" that still rises and sets everyday This interview has been edited for length and clarity Lars Gotrich: The record begins with two chords on an acoustic guitar It's a technique you developed early on as The Microphones I'd love to hear the story of this guitar and how you first found this sound Nobody's ever asked that and it's pretty central to my whole thing I worked at a record store called The Business It was more than a record store — books and cameras and just junk would bring things in from garage sales and put a price tag on it and hang it on the wall "I just got this for five dollars," and hung [this guitar] on the wall and I just took it small acoustic guitar that felt exactly right for me it's only five dollars." But actually I don't think I even paid him those five dollars [Laughs.] But I've written every song I've ever written on that guitar pretty much and recorded all of the acoustic guitar that's on any of my records In terms of that technique of using two tracks to make a rhythm: in the year 2000 We Stayed in the Water starts in a similar way with a rhythmic foundation I think back then I was trying to emulate this thing that happens on the Red House Painters album Songs for a Blue Guitar It starts with a beautifully recorded chord on acoustic guitar for a while before the singing starts And I really liked how it goes on for long enough that it ushers you into a new place You forget the world you were in before you started listening to the album It's like the waiting room before the album starts Why is it important that we sit with that sound for the first seven minutes of this album it's going to go for seven minutes." I just did it the way that it wears down at your sense of time and reality and makes you forget yourself or maybe similar to the way that meditation works It's not pushing beyond discomfort because it's not uncomfortable And I also wanted to use that seven-minute space to account for the 20 years that have passed or whatever How many years have passed since the last Microphones album Everything fundamental about you as a person and you as a songwriter had changed in such open and open-ended ways Your songwriting style has changed significantly: You now favor long phrases that would never scan and there's little in the way of traditional verse-chorus-verse format I'm listening to this record and wondering how old forms meet new modes What did the songwriting process look like I always write my songs in a notebook on paper with pencil and scribble it out and erase it and move things around it's so long; it was very papery because I was taping pieces of paper together to make a scroll long enough to hold the whole thing but I was spending so much time rifling through my different sheets and losing track of what section I was in that I just made a big and it comes with the record — there's a poster in there that's a scan of it that long scroll is sort of the last step of the writing process I just walk around with it in my head and mumble to myself And get ideas for different vignettes and scenes and almost write in a non-poetic way I just write an account of what I remember and then from there With death and life upheaval and heartbreak in the passage where I'm talking about watching the movie Crouching Tiger much longer account of me watching that movie you're telling me that you only included the necessary parts?" [Laughs.] But it's true I tried and tried to get it down to only the necessary parts I was just trying to find moments that exemplified a certain thing about whoever I was during those years and whatever The Microphones I had lots of little narrative moments that didn't make it into the song I felt like exemplified this one certain thing beyond just a cool movie that I liked It was a pivotal point for me because it shifted the thing I was trying to say in my music It shifted it away from romantic sorrow and towards something more ephemeral and universal and deeper You spend a lot of time laying bare the intent of The Microphones and but this line stuck out to me: "I decided I would try to make music that contained this deeper peace / buried underneath distorted bass fog imbued with light and emptiness." I've never heard a more succinct read on your music Were you always so aware of what you wanted this music to convey What do you want people to hear out of it?" I always kind of avoid answering that question and actually I still kind of avoid it I'm not talking about my hopes for other people I want to make "fog imbued with light and emptiness" for myself because I feel like that's what I want to hear and that's what I feel compelled to make Maybe I was able to phrase that succinctly because I gave myself the assignment: I was like What was The Microphones and what were my goals then and what are my goals now in terms of this weird pursuit of creativity You reference your own work quite a bit — not as a backwards-looking wink but as a set of thematic motifs but it's tempting to do self-referential stuff because it feels good and it gives people clues to follow — that's the embarrassing kind of nostalgia But I do those things because I want to make a body of work that is woven together because it is — that's what the world is like There are several lyrics I could choose from you provided both an earthly sense of place (being under the moon often with someone or some idea) but also illustrated a cosmic power to behold you revisit and often question many of those motifs but also build on a new one about life's uncertainty: "the true state of all things." Meaning is constantly changing even and especially in the "giant meaningless" as you describe it Do those old themes still ring true in any way I thought that also; I knew that impermanence was the main thing: whatever I believe now I will not believe tomorrow The stuff that used to ring true still does in a way and also doesn't anymore And also the person I was 20 years ago is still in me and so on huge question I tried to think about with this giant song was mainly how to encompass these contradictions so there's a character in The Watchmen called Dr He is able to exist in several realities at once; he can be in the past and he can be in the present He's kind of a tragic character because he has this omniscient knowledge He is seemingly distant but also emotionally traumatized by these conversations that he can hold in the past and present with a person whom he loves And as this record moves back and forth through time I was wondering how memory works for you or maybe how it's changed It's changed in a weird way in the past few years memory takes on some other weird powers that it maybe didn't have when you're younger and haven't experienced huge things like that I'm drawn to revisiting memories and trying to learn from them but I'm also drawn to just get rid of them the type of stuff I've been doing during quarantine (like sorting through the boxes in my parents' attic and getting rid of all my archives) it's to unburden myself from the weight of all this memory even though I also think it has so much value between knowing about the past and being liberated from it which I think actually is socially and politically potent at this moment with people tearing down monuments and this global catharsis that's going on; remains to be seen which direction it will tip it has a lot to do with being able to responsibly look at the past and digest it and then step beyond it Nature has always been a character in your music One thing that has changed is my relationship with that word or that concept There was a time in early Mount Eerie albums where I was really trying to talk a lot about The distinction between wild and not wild is an illusion I sort of let that one go just because whatever; it's just a word The thing that's drawn me towards non-human places is the neutrality or the seeming neutrality of it — the eternity of it the welcoming blankness of an original state of things or feels more like an original state of things than a Cracker Barrel parking lot You quote "Freezing Moon" by Mayhem here: "the cemetery lights up again" and "eternity opens." There's so much to unpack not only in those phrases you have to remember that the band's guitarist No, no. And, in fact, it's sort of a joke in my song because I say I heard the song "Freezing Moon" by Mayhem and these words jumped out. But you can't make out the words. I only know of those words because I heard Wyrd Visions' acoustic cover of "Freezing Moon." What I like about metal is the cathartic transcendent experience of listening to extreme music; I still listen to it a lot I think there are moments of levity in all of your music like touring with Will Oldham's band Bonnie "Prince" Billy in Italy and their matching tracksuits It's possible that my memory is flavoring things It's possible that that's not 100 percent true that they were wearing matching tracksuits and sunglasses But it is true that he has his band wear a tour costume pouring over the details of a 7-inch artwork eye-opening experiences with music and recording — these give me pictures of a young Phil Elverum I felt and still feel very protective of him This in no way measures your experience with grief but I remember my own seismic shift of worldview in my mid-20s So when I was thinking about those pictures of the young dreamer "I know what's coming and I don't know how to protect this person I don't even know." It's like a Greek tragedy; the audience knows what's coming too — "Innocent of the real air of death that awaited down the path" — in talking about the album Mount Eerie where I'm singing some mythological idea about dying I definitely did learn stuff from playing around with a mythological version of death That's what I was trying to show or understand with writing this song All of it has been informative and necessary But it all sort of stews up into the present moment I'm still stewing up for a future-present moment But I definitely did learn stuff from playing around with a mythological version of death that I was able to engage with the reality of it and not just be completely muted by my grief I feel like my prior engagement with big concepts maybe helped me get a little bit of a head start It was part of my vocabulary already or something I've been thinking a lot about the early Microphones records, not only because of this record but especially listening to the recent Mirah reissue, You Think It's Like This​.​.​. But Really It's Like This where it felt like anyone in your Olympia orbit could sing a Microphones song There was such a camaraderie in the music you made with Karl Blau but does that kind of musical community make sense for the music you make now or want to make in the future I think maybe I cultivated that ambiguity around it the mystery of like who's even making this: Is it a group I've never really liked centering myself or my image of me as I say that now seems disingenuous because of how self-analytical it all is I don't want to put my face on the cover and I enjoyed putting my name in small print in the liner notes Certainly there were shows where I would play my entire set that were just songs by my friend Adrian [Orange] Or Kyle Field and I would suggest songs for each other or send each other words as assignments to sing or give each other each other's notebook that's always sort of been its own little island with friends appearing sometimes I hope I'm not remembering it incorrectly and not giving people credit But The Microphones albums were always my refuge