AEM028 Mount Eerie

When I was six­teen and at the height of my Micro­phones obses­sion, I saw Phil Elverum at the First Uni­tar­ian Church in Philadel­phia. [Ed.: Jake, why do all of your reviews start with an ado­les­cent anec­dote? Are you writ­ing about music just to revisit your unspoiled youth? Jake: Um…Yes.] The set had all the famil­iar Micro­phones vibes: pseudo-mystical lyri­cal mean­der­ings, fans sit­ting on stage, and endear­ingly mousy stage ban­ter. The real sur­prise came when I asked Elverum to sign my jour­nal. Rather than give me the minimum-effort John Han­cock, he spent ten min­utes draw­ing an enor­mous moun­tain tow­er­ing over the clouds. “That’s Mount Eerie,” he said, point­ing to the moun­tain, “and that’s the world.” No one, includ­ing Elverum, has unlocked the full sig­nif­i­cance of Mount Eerie the con­cept, but that hasn’t stopped him from delv­ing deep into murky sym­bol­ism. Since that con­cert, the Micro­phones have ditched their orig­i­nal moniker for Mount Eerie, released Mount Eerie Pts. 6 and 7 as a sequel to the five-track Micro­phones swan song called—you guessed it—Mount Eerie. More recently, Elverum has been explor­ing the sounds of Nor­we­gian Black Metal, an ele­ment once present in clas­sic Micro­phones songs like “Samu­rai Sword,” now brought to the fore in albums like Black Wooden Ceil­ing Open­ing (2008) and, most recently, Wind’s Poem (2009). Elverum’s story is a famil­iar one. Music lov­ing kid works in a record shop, starts play­ing around with record­ing equip­ment, records sloppy and earnest demos. The dif­fer­ence between Phil Elverum and other home record­ing artists, how­ever, is that his record­ing projects even­tu­ally caught the atten­tion of Calvin John­son, found­ing mem­ber of Beat Hap­pen­ing and head of K records, dur­ing a brief stint in Olympia. Elverum was given access to Johnson’s famous Dub Nar­cotic stu­dio where he began a long discog­ra­phy as The Micro­phones, includ­ing It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water (2000) and the sem­i­nal The Glow, pt. 2 (2001), the lat­ter of which was recently treated to deluxe reis­sue. While The Glow, pt. 2 was and remains his most crit­i­cally acclaimed album, 2004’s Mount Eerie unveiled the sever­est themes of Elverum’s imag­i­na­tion. Con­fronting death, rebirth, nature, and the uni­verse, the album was an epic five-part opera set on Mount Eerie—a real moun­tain on Fidalgo island that looms over Elverum’s home­base in Ana­cortes, WA. It may have been unin­tel­li­gi­ble to those who’d been won by The Micro­phones’ more con­cise lo-fi folk state­ments; for oth­ers it rep­re­sented the cul­mi­na­tion of a genius’ life­long med­i­ta­tion on the universe’s mysteries.

When I spoke to Elverum he was reluc­tant to embrace an over­ar­ch­ing the­matic inter­pre­ta­tion of his music. “I guess it’s true that my songs can seem focused on nature, but it’s not inten­tional,” he said. “It’s just the world that makes sense to me. Maybe it had to do with grow­ing up with my fam­ily and going on camp­ing trips… But I’m really hes­i­tant to talk about nature as this pic­turesque, sep­a­rate place other than the world we live in. When I sing about nature, I feel like I’m try­ing to sing about the same world that we all live in and that there are these totally wild things that are totally nat­ural that hap­pen in our daily lives. It’s not like you live your life, and then you go on vaca­tion to a beau­ti­ful place, and then come back to real life.”

After the heady explo­rations of Mount Eerie the album, The Micro­phones were rein­car­nated as Mount Eerie the band. It’s unclear what exactly prompted the name change. Of course, that ele­ment of mys­tery is a vital part of Elverum’s aes­thetic lan­guage. “All of my stuff that I do I end up hav­ing not that much con­trol over it. It just comes out, you know? So I can only look at it from the same per­spec­tive as you, like ‘oh well from this era there are a bunch of songs about this topic and from another era there are a bunch of songs about that.’” This might seem like a frus­trat­ingly lazy attempt at self-definition, but there’s some­thing much deeper at play. “I kind of con­sider all of my songs to be part of one big project,” he explains. “Although some songs are lit­tle islands of their own, they don’t get touched once they’re done, most of them are just part of this larger con­ver­sa­tion that I’m hav­ing with myself.” Rather than try to plot a grand aes­thetic mis­sion and force all his music into that mold, Elverum writes songs about life the way we actu­ally live our lives—with great uncer­tainty and open senses.

That open­ness has recently per­vaded the record­ing process. A-side “Lost Wis­dom,” the epony­mous track from Mount Eerie’s 2008 LP, was a spon­ta­neous home-recording ses­sion with Julie and Fred Doiron of the influ­en­tial Cana­dian out­fit Eric’s Trip. “Well, we didn’t intend to record an album,” Elverum explained. “We were just casu­ally record­ing these songs in my stu­dio, for no rea­son. It was ambigu­ous what they were going to be used for.” Despite Elverum’s mod­est defer­ral to the forces of spon­tane­ity and ambi­gu­ity, this song proves to be a mini-masterwork. Just dig the lyrics, which are so per­sonal as to ren­der per­son­hood an uncanny specter: “My lost face in the mir­ror in the gas station/ Who are you but my face that I wake up with alone?”

B-side “Stone’s Ode” charts an epiphany at the foot of nat­ural won­ders. Sud­denly, “life has new mean­ing. Alive, propped on bones, over­whelm­ing feel­ing.” Sen­ti­ments like these abound in Elverum’s music, which seeks beauty in the self as much as it does in the won­der of our envi­ron­ment (broadly con­strued). It’s the mys­te­ri­ous alchemy of the per­sonal and the uni­ver­sal that gives Mount Eerie its unfa­mil­iar famil­iar­ity. Some­times, magic. The great expanse of our senses induces a moment of spir­i­tual clar­ity. The ves­sel of spirit, the self, becomes unten­able, vaporous.

Jake Brun­ner

Side A — Lost Wisdom Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Side B — Stone’s Ode Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Down­load the lat­est ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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