Mount Eerie
https://www.pwelverumandsun.com
Phil Elverum is an artist and human being from the Pacific Northwest town of Anacortes. His recordings, released variously as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, represent just a portion of his artistic output, which has ranged from running a label and co-organizing festivals to self-publishing books, photography, and painting. But it is for his stunningly original music that he is known best, from the earliest tape experiments of the '90s to the immersive sound-diary of Microphones in 2020. Elverum has never shied from exploring the high mountain passes, finding new ways to sculpt with sound, and trying to communicate the momentary experience of being human as clearly as the water from freshly melted snow.
Parallel
https://paralleloakland.bandcamp.com
Like a rainbow captured in shades of gray, Oakland's Parallel draws on the post-punk psychedelia of bands like The Chameleons, Sad Lovers and Giants and the 4AD pantheon as well as the minimalist atmospherics of Slowdive, Wire, and Low to craft dream pop that is both lush and austere, sparse and overflowing. Parallel started playing together in the fall of 2019, writing the bulk of their first album while masked and distanced in their drummer Maria's basement. Making their live debut in July 2021, the band released their debut mini-album on Cherub Dream Records in April 2022 and went on their first West Coast tour from the Bay Area to Vancouver and Tijuana in May 2022. In addition to Parallel, members are also involved with a wide variety of other projects, including Ragana, Nothing Natural, Entrapment, and Lizard Bitch, and have also played in Negative Standards, Romantic Feelings, and nasty dilemma.
~~~~~~~~~
In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996 Phil Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs "The Microphones". Since then he's produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum's musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting someunexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of "the Glow pt. 2" (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie's albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum's voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called "black metal" (Wind's Poem, 2009), "dream landscape" (Clear Moon, 2012), and "raw and direct" (Lost Wisdom, 2008).The new album, "A Crow Looked At Me", sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, noproduction, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015, Elverum's wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, thespecific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem "Night Palace" is on the album's cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album "Arise Therefore".
show less
https://www.pwelverumandsun.com
Phil Elverum is an artist and human being from the Pacific Northwest town of Anacortes. His recordings, released variously as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, represent just a portion of his artistic output, which has ranged from running a label and co-organizing festivals to self-publishing books, photography, and painting. But it is for his stunningly original music that he is known best, from the earliest tape experiments of the '90s to the immersive sound-diary of Microphones in 2020. Elverum has never shied from exploring the high mountain passes, finding new ways to sculpt with sound, and trying to communicate the momentary experience of being human as clearly as the water from freshly melted snow.
Parallel
https://paralleloakland.bandcamp.com
Like a rainbow captured in shades of gray, Oakland's Parallel draws on the post-punk psychedelia of bands like The Chameleons, Sad Lovers and Giants and the 4AD pantheon as well as the minimalist atmospherics of Slowdive, Wire, and Low to craft dream pop that is both lush and austere, sparse and overflowing. Parallel started playing together in the fall of 2019, writing the bulk of their first album while masked and distanced in their drummer Maria's basement. Making their live debut in July 2021, the band released their debut mini-album on Cherub Dream Records in April 2022 and went on their first West Coast tour from the Bay Area to Vancouver and Tijuana in May 2022. In addition to Parallel, members are also involved with a wide variety of other projects, including Ragana, Nothing Natural, Entrapment, and Lizard Bitch, and have also played in Negative Standards, Romantic Feelings, and nasty dilemma.
~~~~~~~~~
In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996 Phil Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs "The Microphones". Since then he's produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum's musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting someunexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of "the Glow pt. 2" (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie's albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum's voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called "black metal" (Wind's Poem, 2009), "dream landscape" (Clear Moon, 2012), and "raw and direct" (Lost Wisdom, 2008).The new album, "A Crow Looked At Me", sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, noproduction, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015, Elverum's wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, thespecific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem "Night Palace" is on the album's cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album "Arise Therefore".
Mount Eerie
https://www.pwelverumandsun.com
Phil Elverum is an artist and human being from the Pacific Northwest town of Anacortes. His recordings, released variously as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, represent just a portion of his artistic output, which has ranged from running a label and co-organizing festivals to self-publishing books, photography, and painting. But it is for his stunningly original music that he is known best, from the earliest tape experiments of the '90s to the immersive sound-diary of Microphones in 2020. Elverum has never shied from exploring the high mountain passes, finding new ways to sculpt with sound, and trying to communicate the momentary experience of being human as clearly as the water from freshly melted snow.
Parallel
https://paralleloakland.bandcamp.com
Like a rainbow captured in shades of gray, Oakland's Parallel draws on the post-punk psychedelia of bands like The Chameleons, Sad Lovers and Giants and the 4AD pantheon as well as the minimalist atmospherics of Slowdive, Wire, and Low to craft dream pop that is both lush and austere, sparse and overflowing. Parallel started playing together in the fall of 2019, writing the bulk of their first album while masked and distanced in their drummer Maria's basement. Making their live debut in July 2021, the band released their debut mini-album on Cherub Dream Records in April 2022 and went on their first West Coast tour from the Bay Area to Vancouver and Tijuana in May 2022. In addition to Parallel, members are also involved with a wide variety of other projects, including Ragana, Nothing Natural, Entrapment, and Lizard Bitch, and have also played in Negative Standards, Romantic Feelings, and nasty dilemma.
~~~~~~~~~
In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996 Phil Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs "The Microphones". Since then he's produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum's musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting someunexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of "the Glow pt. 2" (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie's albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum's voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called "black metal" (Wind's Poem, 2009), "dream landscape" (Clear Moon, 2012), and "raw and direct" (Lost Wisdom, 2008).The new album, "A Crow Looked At Me", sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, noproduction, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015, Elverum's wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, thespecific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem "Night Palace" is on the album's cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album "Arise Therefore".
read more
https://www.pwelverumandsun.com
Phil Elverum is an artist and human being from the Pacific Northwest town of Anacortes. His recordings, released variously as The Microphones and Mount Eerie, represent just a portion of his artistic output, which has ranged from running a label and co-organizing festivals to self-publishing books, photography, and painting. But it is for his stunningly original music that he is known best, from the earliest tape experiments of the '90s to the immersive sound-diary of Microphones in 2020. Elverum has never shied from exploring the high mountain passes, finding new ways to sculpt with sound, and trying to communicate the momentary experience of being human as clearly as the water from freshly melted snow.
Parallel
https://paralleloakland.bandcamp.com
Like a rainbow captured in shades of gray, Oakland's Parallel draws on the post-punk psychedelia of bands like The Chameleons, Sad Lovers and Giants and the 4AD pantheon as well as the minimalist atmospherics of Slowdive, Wire, and Low to craft dream pop that is both lush and austere, sparse and overflowing. Parallel started playing together in the fall of 2019, writing the bulk of their first album while masked and distanced in their drummer Maria's basement. Making their live debut in July 2021, the band released their debut mini-album on Cherub Dream Records in April 2022 and went on their first West Coast tour from the Bay Area to Vancouver and Tijuana in May 2022. In addition to Parallel, members are also involved with a wide variety of other projects, including Ragana, Nothing Natural, Entrapment, and Lizard Bitch, and have also played in Negative Standards, Romantic Feelings, and nasty dilemma.
~~~~~~~~~
In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996 Phil Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs "The Microphones". Since then he's produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs.
The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum's musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.
After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting someunexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of "the Glow pt. 2" (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun. Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession; all all ages shows and never though a manager or booking agent, always self-recorded, hands on in all details.
Mount Eerie's albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum's voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called "black metal" (Wind's Poem, 2009), "dream landscape" (Clear Moon, 2012), and "raw and direct" (Lost Wisdom, 2008).The new album, "A Crow Looked At Me", sounds closer to the latter; minimal instrumentation, noproduction, clear and heavy words right up front. The difference here is the subject matter. In 2015, Elverum's wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.
The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, thespecific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.The writing draws inspiration from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Julie Doiron, Gary Snyder, Sun Kil Moon, and Joanne Kyger (whose poem "Night Palace" is on the album's cover). The sound was influenced by the spare production of the 1996 Will Oldham album "Arise Therefore".
show less
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