Like many of his fans, my obsession with Phil Elverum certainly borders on being far too fanboy-ish, especially considering the low-key nature of his songs and the relatively small level of fame that has come from his two musical projects, the currently ongoing Mount Eerie and the earlier work as The Microphones. In high school, “I’m a Pearl Diver” from the “Song Islands” compilation of rarities would soundtrack my drives to track practice in a Northern Virginia suburb. In college, I’d run concerts for the radio station and just about every year send Elverum an email in the hopes he might leave his home in Anacortes, Washington, and travel all the way across the country to Colonial Williamsburg. At one point, I tried to organize various bands nationwide to release a covers album of Microphones songs and, although it was cringe-worthy going back to our email exchange — due to my over-enthusiasm — it was obviously cool to remember Elverum had been so nice, saying that he was “flattered.”
In 2001, a little more than a week after Sept. 11, Elverum released “The Glow Pt. 2” as The Microphones, his most iconic work. At the time, although the site was still in its fledgling early days, Pitchfork named “Glow” the best album of the year, beating out Radiohead’s “Amnesiac,” The White Stripes’ “White Blood Cells,” and even The Strokes’ “Is This It.” Pitchfork’s founder Ryan Schreiber wrote the list blurb, concluding, “The Glow, Pt. 2 is to big-budget rock epics what camcorded home movies are to sci-fi Hollywood blockbusters: infinitely more affecting and sincerely moving.” Although comparing Elverum to “The Blair Witch Project,” which came out just a couple years before this in 1999, may seem a bit strange out of the context of the early 00s, the claim that Elverum is a sort of anti-blockbuster artist that still goes after creating pop songs makes sense.
Despite pursuing a rather unique version of noise experimentation, the cores of the songs are still straightforwardly affecting. Inevitably, when an artist finds a way to be great and epic in a lo-fi manner, that means fans feel as if they can get far closer and know the artist far better than it’d ever feel with Radiohead or The White Stripes or The Strokes. For this reason, admirers will do things like recreate one of Elverum’s recent Mount Eerie records on Twitter, a phenomenon he jokingly called out, and then further brought attention towards as it kept going on:
Should this be encouraged? Should I be flattered? Should it become cool to pose with a snack? (@janhune @slotte) pic.twitter.com/7sevdYzXBo
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Recalling his return from Norway, Elverum touched on his feelings about America and the current state of the world:
The countries that we have super imposed on top of this continent, particularly the United States, are bad. I mean I’m not proud of [it]. There’s a lot of things to be embarrassed about what we’ve done to this place. So it’s complicated, but yeah. We have a pretty brutal culture that we have put here and we really messed up the continent and the world. And I think that the traditional sense of being American in the Walt Whitman sense of being like something other than European, something more wild and more connected to the frontier that is something I can get behind. But in actual practice I think we’re pretty far removed from that type of wildness in 2015 and, in fact, we have all types of new perverted excess that is the primordial day-to-day experience. That said, I don’t necessarily think other parts of the world are much better. I just think humans are pretty devolved these days.
But at the same time, whether on the island of Anacortes on the western tip of America or driving with the car stereo blasting on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. — maybe there is a moon. Elverum told The Believer, “We sing about what’s missing and what we admire from a distance.”
All images from Phil Elverum & Sun website, except for top and green-shirted images which are WikiCommons.
