Microphones

Phil Elverum, hailing from the state of Washington, originally played drums in the trio D+ (Dandelion Seeds of 1998) and (from 1999) in Old Time Relijun. Elverum debuted solo with the cassette Tests (Knw-Yr-Own, 1999 - Elsinor, 1999), but adopted the moniker Microphones for the single Bass Drum Dream (Up, 1999) and the album Don't Wake Me Up (K, 1999), a concept dedicated to air (the element). This album, the EP Window taken from the same sessions, and the single Moon Moon, employing more instruments and tape loops, marked a change of direction, from an estranged lo-fi pop a` la Tall Dwarfs or Clean towards a more substantial dream-pop form. The drawback of these recordings was that their ideas were fragmented into miniature pieces of scant weight. It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water (K, 2000), dedicated to water, unveiled ambitions of baroque psychedelic-pop, but with an insanely chaotic approach (The Pull, the eleven-minute The Glow).

The sprawling 20-song The Glow Pt 2 (K, 2001), dedicated to fire, is virtually a solo album by Elverum, and, following the intuition of It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water, is an exercise in sophisticated orchestration a` la Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control, but fatally tinged with calm Syd Barrett-ian madness. The simplest tunes only provide faint glimpses into his insanely lucid musical mind: I Want the Wind to Blow for voice, guitar and hand percussion; Headless Horseman for voice and guitar; The Mansion for voice, guitar and ghosts; etc.
When he expands the instrumental palette, Elverum crafts some of the most original lieder of his generation: The Glow Pt. 2 with magniloquent piano, droning organ and John Fahey-ian finger-picking; The Moon, casually whispered over rapid-fire drums, droning organ and horn fanfare; Map, wrapped in distorted sounds, distracted by a martial piano fugue, and hijacked by a melancholy instrumental coda.
Too many fragments (some of which are only brief surges of noise) hamper, as usual, his quest for the ultimate heart-wrenching and mind-bending songs, although all those half-baked ideas compose a lyrical cubist patchwork.

The Microphones' fourth album Mount Eerie (K, 2003) is another concept containing five lengthy tracks, audio fantasies that absorb and metabolize apparently disconnected sounds to produce perfectly rational organisms. The 17-minute The Sun lays down a carpet of cryptic subliminal drones and glitches that slowly picks up form. Within minutes the piece has transformed into a maelstrom of percussive sounds. After ten minutes Elverum intones an a-cappella hymn that slowly involves more and more instruments until it explodes again as a chaotic bacchanal. Percussive sounds also set the stage for Universe before a gargantuan bass line emerges to introduce the vocals. The tune itself is little more than a clownesque folk elegy but totally deranged. Its ghostly ending (a braid of sustained "om"s that segues into the closing track) lends the album a metaphysical meaning that summarizes the progression from air to water to fire to the universe. The nine-minute Mt Eerie is a song in the process of being assembled, a song that continuously changes identity, from singalong to doo-wop, until it disappears into a vortex of hisses. The music seems to flow in a higher dimension, but then collapses continuously as if physics ceased to exist and then resumed again in an endless loop of disjointed transcendence.

Song Islands (K, 2002) collects the singles.

Live In Japan (K, 2004) contains all new songs in a live and solo (no orchestration) setting. The mini-album Seven New Songs (2004) contains the lengthy November 22nd 2003.

Then Mount Eerie became a full-fledge (home-based) project, but, alas, one of those hyper-prolific projects of very low-quality music: No Flashlight (2005), Singers (2005), collecting material from 2000 and 2003, Eleven Old Songs (2006), recorded between 2002 and 2003, the EP Pts 6 and 7 (2007) and the mini-album Black Wooden Ceiling Opening (2008), that includes revisions of old songs.

D+, formed with guitarist Brett Lunsford of Beat Happening and vocalist Karl Blau, released D+ and Dandelion Seeds (1998).

Mount Eerie's third album Dawn (2008) was yet another collection of old songs, recorded in 2002-3 in a remote cabin of Norway, and several of them were even older. It was released with a coffee-table book.

The mini-album Lost Wisdom (2008) was a collaboration between Mount Eerie and Julie Doiron of Eric's Trip (and guitarist Fred Squire). The spartan production (mostly just guitar and vocal harmonies) is a message in itself. The tone of the collection is set not so much by the stately and plaintive Lost Wisdom but by the dreamy existential Who?. The spaced-out Voice In Headphones strikes an odd balance between hippie hymns and church hymns. Some of the songs could be gems if they only lasted a bit longer (for example, the intimately surreal If We Knew).

Mount Eerie's Wind's Poem (Elverum, 2009), a work heavily influenced by Scandinavian metal and folk, is a schizophrenic and inconclusive work that on one hand indulges in the Neil Young-ian orgies of distorted guitars that fuel Wind's Dark Poem, (ostensibly Elverum's take on black metal replete with blastbeats) and The Mouth Of Sky; while on the other hand it plunges into an underworld of barely audible sounds: the dejected dirge My Heart Is Not At Peace, that adopts the pace of a renaissance madrigal; the feeble and blurred Summons; the languid Pink Floyd-ian litany of Stone's Ode. Elverum often sounds like the typical middle-aged musician who tries to update/upgrade their music to the emerging genres but with limited competence, little imagination and no passion. The only intriguing idea comes when Elverum fuses slocore and droning music in the eleven-minute Through The Trees that juxtaposes an anemic slowly-waltzing lullaby with a gentle organ drone and ends with a bleak electronic rumble.

Mount Eerie's intimate and subdued Clear Moon (2012), containing hypnotic songs like Over Dark Water and The Place I Live but nothing of revolutionary value, was merely the appetizer for the bleak, oppressive Ocean Roar (Elverum & Sun, 2012). The latter's mood ranges from the shoegazing black-metal evil of Waves to the solemn Robert Wyatt-ian meditation I Walked Home Beholding, from the quasi-mystical seven-minute instrumental Instrumental to the devastating cover of Popol Vuh's Engel Der Luft. The highlight (and an highlight of Elverum's career) is the gloomy torrential ten-minute Pale Lights, mostly an instrumental jam of metaphysical intensity wrapped around a church-like organ-washed hymn.

Mount Eerie's contemplative mood peaked on Sauna (2015), one of his most durable artistic statements. After the ten-minute psychedelic droning masses of Sauna, Elverum wanders through a forest of blissful inventions: the lo-fi guitar ditty of Turmoil, halfway between Syd Barrett and Lou Reed; the minimalist rigmarole of This, that sounds like a collaboration between Laurie Anderson and Steve Reich; the shoegazing orgy of Boat for pounding beats and distorted guitar riffs; the abrasive and atonal Emptiness; the robotic carillon of Books; and so on. Female voices intone the delicate fairy tale of Dragon over the rumble of an airplane in the sky. Pumpkin is an innocuous litany lifted by a majestic organ into a bleak piece of religious music. The 13-minute Spring begins booming and droning with horror overtones reminiscent of doom-metal and then drifts out in intergalactic space escorted by another organ drone and assorted solemn sounds, almost reenacting the apotheosis of Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets.

Elverum wore the hat of the confessional singer-songwriter on Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me (2017), a skeletal collection for acoustic guitar and voice, heavily influenced by his wife's death.

Continuing his stretegy of unpredictable detours, Elverum followed that album of regular songs with Now Only (2018), that contains only six lengthy songs. Unfortunately neither the lyrics (prosaic as usual) nor the music (little more than strummed guitar and barely modulated voice) justify the effort. These whispered rapid-fire stories lack drama. He comes through as a tuneless Donovan. The highlight is the eleven-minute autobiographical chronicle Distortion, which is little more than a personal recollection told over a beer. The nine-minute Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup is slightly more musical (and visionary) The only exception is Now Only, that exhibits (surprisingly) both melody and rhythm.

The brief album Lost Wisdom Pt 2 (2008) was the second collaboration between Elverum and Julie Doiron, containing mainly the seven-minute Belief.

Elverum resurrected the moniker Microphones for the 45-minute long song of Microphones in 2020 (2020), a profound and introspective analysis of his own life, accompanied only by his acoustic guitar. The song takes forever to begin, repeating the same chords for several minutes, as if to create a state of trance. After 13 minutes, the drums kick in, and after 16 the electric guitar unleashes a spasmodic glissando, and after 22 it emits a tidal fuzz; but the song continues, with the same calm and austere melody. When the vocals finally stop, a sea of tinkling keyboards takes over, perhaps signaling a pause of nostalgic recollections that cannot be expressed with words. Then Elverum resumes the same guitar chords and continues his story, with more interruptions but stubbornly anchored to his melody, until the last whisper.

Foghorn Tape (Elverum & Sun, 2021) is a 36-minute loop of the "foghorn" sound effect from The Glow Pt. 2, correctly presented as a "clear vinyl LP of background noise, no songs, no music".