When The Microphones Became Mount Eerie
“Universe, I know you.”
The Microphones’ Mount Eerie was released in 2003, smack dab in the middle of my college years — you know, when everyone’s an obnoxious know-it-all trying to blow each other’s minds with Ulysses or whatever. The Glow Pt. 2 hadn’t hit me then, its romantic sorrow palpable and relatable, but uninteresting to me, someone coming into his own existential understanding of the world. But here was Mount Eerie, a ramshackle epic not just unmoored from indie-rock trappings but brashly barreling towards infinity.
This is where The Microphones, a lovesick studio tinkerer grasping at meaning, became Mount Eerie, a thinker asking much of the world and impatient for answers. This is where a dreamer imagined a universe he could face head-on. The mythology — the fear of and the battle against death! “your Big Black Cloud will come”! — and the music — booming dub drums! raven choirs! weird distortion! a literal alpenhorn! — were mysterious, yet vulnerable in a youthful, defiant kind of way.
The original CD released by K Records came with liner notes that unfolded like a giant map of Phil Elverum’s universe, his black & white illustrations of mountains peeked out of thick fog and were printed on vellum paper, which turned those creases into gaping holes if you opened the package more than once. There’s a script, but no lyrics, just plot summaries: “In which, coming out of the canyon in the dusk, you realize your ball of fire friend has set and doubt creeps in. A big beautiful backdrop above asks you intimate questions.”
The Close Dark Voice [sung by Khaela Maricich]: “Do you really think there’s anybody out there?”
In my days as a baby music writer, Mount Eerie challenged how I wanted to write about music, to let its movement guide my words. I’m sure the review filed for Tangzine back then, now forever lost to the ravages of the internet, is absolute garbage, but do remember its abstract structure, an attempt to mimic the album’s own.
In Mount Eerie, I saw a fellow dreamer, so when I met young Phil in the first Microphones album in 17 years, Microphones in 2020, out today, I suddenly felt very protective of that young man’s heart and dreams. I saw a dreamer about to face harsh reality and become forever changed. And I told Phil as such.
“I’m singing some mythological idea about dying, about death, like a cartoon character of death,” Phil Elverum told me recently, for NPR Music, reflecting on Mount Eerie. “Innocent in a naive, idiotic way.”
Phil’s music has always been self-referential, first as a self-mythology, but later as a way to make sense of existence through woven strands of familiar lines and sounds. Microphones in 2020 questions that familiarity with a searching tenderness. That examination includes an obsession with death that coursed through both The Microphones and Mount Eerie catalogs, brutally uprooted by his own experience with death in 2016, and documented by A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only.
(I still miss Geneviève. A lot.)
Phil Elverum returns to The Microphones not out of nostalgia, but excavation. That’s mostly what we talked about. Our conversation went deep on memory and meaning, with some tangents about Sun Ra and fan service that didn’t make the final piece. The unedited transcript is ~5000 words, bookmarked by domestic chit-chat about kids and homeownership. But I wanted to share a section that I found illuminating, cut from the NPR-published interview for any number of reasons.
Lars Gotrich: Have you been reading anything lately?
Phil Elverum: I keep starting books and not being grabbed by them and putting them down, so, yeah, not really. Just dabble on my bookshelf. The last thing that grabbed me was More Poems by Joanne Kyger. She’s great. And the last book I have started was Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. That’s a pretty interesting one. I don’t want to read fiction. I don’t want to escape.
I’ve been working out this idea about escapism and how it doesn’t really exist, especially this past summer when everything is just awful day after day. And specifically, I’ve been thinking about how there’s really no escape in pop music either. Even the most innocuous pop song has to reckon with context.
Yeah, I think escapism only works to the degree to which you can deceive your own self. That’s hard to escape.
When you think about art made by “complicated” people, I think we should still discuss these pieces of art, but the context needs to be available. I recently gave an obvious example of Picasso. Picasso’s art changed my life when I was a little kid. But then I discovered who he was as a person and that changed my relationship to his work. But I still can’t deny what that work has done for me as a person who thinks critically about the world.
It gets the distinction between how we value the identity of the person who made the thing versus the thing that they made. The song, not the singer. Maybe it’s personal, maybe it’s societal or cultural, where we draw that line of what we value. I am starting to realize that, in myself, I don’t care who made the thing. I don’t want to know. And maybe I’m a little bit sociopathic or something to not care so much about the individual identities of these makers.
That line in my song where I’m talking about Bonnie “Prince” Billy and his band wearing silly costumes and presenting some version of themselves as Italian tour version, that freed me up. I don’t think I explained it clearly enough in the song, but it opened my mind to be like, “Okay, you don’t just have to try and present your authentic, true self in art.” In fact, it’s maybe better if you don’t, because the amount of focus that’s going to get put on the songwriter or the film director or the painter or whatever is going to be confusing and weird and misguided and distract from the thing that’s being made. I personally think that nobody should care about what Picasso did — that’s not true. I mean, people should care about what he did. And fame is a big problem — I need to figure out how to phrase this better. In my unrealistic, idealized version of life, we wouldn’t know the names of any famous people. We would only know the things that they did.
I guess I’ve become the opposite over time. I can no longer separate the art from the artist. Maybe that’s not what we’re really talking about…
It kind of is, but I also feel like that’s natural and I feel like, wait, am I the weird one? Like, we are social apes. We relate to everything by facial recognition and tribalism. And so maybe it’s totally natural for our minds to work that way.
I remember my friend Mehan telling me, around the release of My Dark Twisted Fantasy, “If you’re gonna listen to Kanye, you gotta deal with Kanye.” (My god, how that turned out!) That started my wheels turning towards historical and personal context in art, that every brush stroke, every down beat, every cinematic shot, comes from somewhere, and should reflect upon story of that work.
“In my unrealistic, idealized version of life, we wouldn’t know the names of any famous people. We would only know the things that they did.”
In the moment, I pushed back lightly, but upon reflection, I think about the last four years, where Phil Elverum, who does not enjoy the spotlight, was very much thrust into the public eye as a widower, then as the husband (and later, sadly, divorcee) of a movie star. “We lived a very human existence,” he told Jayson Greene last year, “and that [celebrity] world mostly felt like an abstraction.”
Phil has been irrevocably transformed; his autobiographical music, once for dreamers and weird indie-rock kids and nerds like me, became fodder for GQ and Vanity Fair. For him, it’s not quite art vs. artist — it’s something deeper and, true to his whole thing, foggier that he can’t quite articulate, yet. But after his experience, who can blame him yearning for semi-anonymity, even if that means no one knows his name. — Lars Gotrich