THE MAKING OF MOUNT EERIE BY THE MICROPHONES - FEATURING PHIL ELVERUM
Intro:
Dan Nordheim:
You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.
The Microphones formed in 1996 in Anacortes, Washington by Phil Elverum. He got his start recording in the spare room at The Business, the record store where he worked in Anacortes. After moving to Olympia, he met Calvin Johnson and began recording at Dub Narcotic Studios. The first official Microphones album, Tests, was released in 1998. After signing with K Records, he released Don’t Wake Me Up in 1999, It Was Hot, We Stayed In The Water in 2000 and The Glow, Pt. 2 in 2001. In late 2001, he began recording for the album that would become Mount Eerie, eventually released in 2003.
In this episode, Phil Elverum looks back on how Mount Eerie came together. This is the making of Mount Eerie.
Phil Elverum: My name is Phil Elverum and I’m here to talk about the album Mount Eerie by the Microphones from 2002-ish. It was for sure a turning point. For me, thinking about it now, it sounds like the album of...I wish there was another word category between childhood and adulthood (laughs). Is there? Adolescence? It’s not adolescence exactly but it’s also not quite adulthood. To me this sounds like the album of somebody reaching so hard just to figure it all out and to either find an answer to the big questions or like make an answer.
My memory of when Mount Eerie, the album, sort of was born was a specific moment. I was on tour by myself in like November, October/November 2001, I was on this like six week long tour around the U.S. by myself in a station wagon, that I was calling the “I will sleep in your yard without you knowing tour.” And I had like eight shows in Florida on that tour, which is crazy. But I remember driving south in Florida and it was just hot and trippy (laughs) and surreal. This is just the moment that I think of as the genesis moment, I remember seeing in the sunset, all of the signs, like McDonald’s, IHOP, Cracker Barrel, like the freeway signs for restaurants, the logos silhouetted by the sunset with pink sky, dark trees with cicadas. The world just seemed menacing plus it was October so September 11th had just happened and people were driving around, like most cars had flags flying from them and there were these rising violent racist acts happening everywhere and war was mounting, there was like hatred in the air. Things just felt menacing in general (laughs), driving around the U.S.. Driving in that context, I remember the song, “The Sun,” just kind of hit me.
I’m going to go get my notebook out because I have it written down, or I have what I scrawled in the passenger seat as I was driving in that moment. Sorry this is, I’m just kind of flipping through my notebook, (laughs) this is gripping radio. Ah here we go OK. “The Sun.” (sings) “Ball of fire,” like that, that’s the chorus, the word “ball of fire, you are a ball of fire.” And in Florida that was very present, that sun. And I drew this kind of orb, which is on the LP version of the album. Like this menacing kind of radiating psychedelic blob sun, which seems to take up the whole sky. I was in the Florida Keys camping for a few days by myself and I think I got bit by a barracuda (laughs) and then raccoons broke into my cooler and ate my food. Oh here’s a black ship coming up over the horizon. It just felt like nature doesn’t necessarily want us in it or the world isn’t necessarily accommodating. Whether it was the human world of the political violence that was going on or being in the Florida Keys, or in the South of the U.S. where nature itself just seems to not really want us there. Compared to the nature that I’m used to here in the Northwest where it can be cold and wet but it’s pretty gentle and accommodating, you can lie down on the moss and I just felt imperiled. The oncomingness of death seemed like not an abstract thing in that context so that was sort of what informed the plot of this album. Like, “I’m going to make a tale about me going through life as one long fleeing from death.” I think in that moment, driving alone in Florida, the whole kind of plot popped into my head. Mount Eerie plot of me starting on the beach and running from an approaching black ship, running up the mountain, ultimately not being able to outrun death, dying, getting transformed, eaten by vultures, and then a couple of songs called, “Universe.” Like I wanted to do something that was deeper, a big story, not just more songs. I felt like I had made a lot of albums and played a lot of shows that were a sequence of little ditties (laughs) or songs that maybe kind of held together and were cohesive as albums but I wanted to really make something like beyond cohesive. I knew that I wanted it to come out of The Glow Pt. 2, like a natural progression. So The Glow Pt. 2 ends with this foghorn tape loop thing and I wanted to just pick up where that left off and have it sort of naturally evolve into rhythms and tones. Almost like (laughs), this is going to sound like I’m such an asshole or like I have a messed up view of myself but the beginning of The Ring Cycle, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, the way that it sort of is like the formation of life itself, like it starts in this amorphous, just like drones, and then slowly you can hear it coalesce into form. In 2001, I wasn’t thinking about that but a similar goal of like starting with formlessness and then slowly creating form and structure out of it and eventually becoming like the chaos of life. But yeah I wanted to start from nothing and show the progression into like something (laughs).
After the end of making anything, I’m like, “OK that’s done, what’s the opposite of that because that’s what I want to do next.” And it’s sort of this pendulum swinging between big and small or quiet and loud or close and near, atmospheric or simple. I just have sort of an instinctual aversion to creative comfort. I just don’t want to repeat myself, that would be embarrassing to me. And it seemed like, “Wow this would be really challenging, this would be super hard to pull off, I wonder if I could do it.” I think even during The Glow Pt. 2, I was resistant to the pull of just wanting to write about hurt feelings, my little human hurt feelings. I think I was trying to write about that stuff and place it in the context of “The Universe” (laughs). And being small or being big compared to some things, you know, feeling these things, feeling the sorrow and pain of a breakup or love and also not pretend that that’s the whole picture. But yeah I think after making a bunch of those songs and maybe sort of getting over it more, I think I just went on tour a lot and I was by myself a lot more and I had more perspective. And I was out of the sort of small community, downtown Olympia, the social pushes and pulls. I never wanted to write small songs about merely feeling sad about a relationship. I definitely have done a lot of that in my life but my goal has always been to zoom out a little more. I knew right at the beginning that I wanted the tracklisting to be five parts, “The Sun,” “Solar System,” “Universe.” Those three are like zooming out in scale, “sun, solar system, universe.” And then I had this idea that Mount Eerie would be like this thing that the Universe is contained inside and then there’s more beyond that. I was thinking around then like, “What’s behind the stars that we can’t see?” “Well probably more stars, more universe, cause it’s infinite, right?” So I was trying to wrap my mind around that basic fact of infinity. Yeah and also just that there’s no end. Like that borders and boundaries and starts and finishes, those are illusions. Everything is actually just permeable and blurs into the next thing physically and temporally. And then, so there’s this mountain where I’m from, Mount Erie, in Anacortes, Washington. There’s a picture I took of it back then where there was like a farm house that is in the foreground at the base of the mountain with just one farm light on at night so you can see the silhouette of the mountain shape and then one glowing green light in the foreground. And I thought, “What if that little green farm light is the solar system? What if everything we know and can see and can wrap our minds around is (laughs) contained inside this lump of rock?” I didn’t mean to get so psychedelic or trippy (laughs) right away but yeah, that was the idea was that there was lowercase universe and then uppercase Universe that was outside of this vessel called Mount Eerie. That’s what I got into my head and I thought I’d make an album about it (laughs).
“The Sun”
“The Sun” is probably the track that is the most premeditated and also complicated. And that was sort of the genesis of this whole idea, driving in Florida and being sunburnt (laughs) and society-burnt and just thinking about it. Oh also, I was listening to the Black Orpheus soundtrack. Actually weirdly I put that record on this morning at breakfast. That’s what we listened to. Weird coincidence. But yeah anyone who hears the Black Orpheus soundtrack, the way it starts, will be like, “Ah OK Phil was just covering this (laughs) basically it’s almost exactly the same.” And I loved the movement of nonmusical sounds and crowd noise and just like the music of the world making up the world of the album. There’s a samba drum section parade that comes in and moves across the headphones from left to right or right to left and that’s after life has been created, that’s after the world has been manifested and it’s just chaotic and full of commotion. It takes a while, I don’t remember how many minutes it takes before “the song song” actually starts, ten minutes or something like that. I always thought in terms of an LP so twenty two minutes a side and a reel of tape on the 16-track held thirty two minutes so yeah I could fit one side per reel and just I would have to record it, everything that happens in that twenty two minutes would have to be recorded and mixed live. I don’t know, I loved the challenge of that. I loved all the times in the studio where I would have to use a lot of adapters and cables and string things together and make lots of notes and tape, marking on it everywhere. And so I wanted to create a bigger problem for myself, it seemed fun. Technically that’s the explanation aside from all this rambling I’m doing about (laughs) contemplating death and mythology making.
Yeah once I got back to Olympia and started actually recording, I did a lot of planning and charting. I did a lot of the work on paper, which I had never done before because it was just like physically kind of a feat to assemble this album because I recorded it on tape. Now it would be easy to make it on a computer and splice the sections together but it required a lot of paper, charts. The hardest one on the album that I can remember is that samba section in the beginning of “The Sun.” Maybe Adam (Forkner) played a little bit with me, played some tambourine or something but mostly it was just me trying to play as many tracks as I could and bounce them together. So yeah it was a 16-track although track 15 never really worked so it was a 15-track and I would record like 13 of the tracks and then bounce all of those to a stereo mix and then I would erase those first 13 and do it all again. Like on the samba section, I don’t know how many times I bounced but there’s probably like fifty tracks or something, there’s a lot. Because I wanted it to just be like a cacophony, I wanted it to sound like an actual parade. And I bounced it to one track, which is a little scary. You lose a lot of dimension when it’s not a stereo image, you can’t pan anything. It’s just this mono...and that mixed better be perfect because once you bounce it and then erase the other ones, that’s how it sounds. I don’t love it. I mean it’s OK but there are a lot of (laughs), you can totally hear it on the album too, there’s this one part where I accidentally (laughs) turned on a tambourine way too loud and it just sort of jumps out. Like this really aggressive tambourine right in your face and you can hear me turning it down. I mean in some ways, I really like those error moments where jumps up in level and you can hear the technician adjusting it. I like those flaws because it reveals, you can hear like the performance of the mixer. But yeah there’s a lot of strategy like that, thinking, “OK how’s this song going to end up? What are all the elements? What do I need to start with? I need to save some room for these things that will be bounced to then make room.” And usually the singing is the last thing. You kind of just have to hear it in your head, know what space it’s going to fill.
The singing and the song part of “The Sun,” I think musically was inspired primarily by the way that Bjork sings on “Cocoon” on Vespertine. Scary close, like it sounds like you’re inside her mouth (laughs). I had never sung like that before. I usually buried my voice a little bit in the mix but the intimacy of that was inspiring and scary to me and so I wanted to put my voice right up front like that. And also have it be expressive and breath-ey, breathy, in a way that I had never done before. Not breathy but you know what I mean, you can hear my breathing. And the breathing is part of the singing. So that and also the way the music is kind of jerky, the rhythm is like, (sings jerky rhythmic pattern) was inspired by this one Julie Doiron song. I think it’s called, “Piano.” “Le Piano” maybe, it’s a French one. I don’t know if anyone else would hear the connection but the way she plays guitar on that song, I just really love these simple two note chords that were muted (sings two held notes). Like barely guitar playing. Rhythmic almost like organ notes, treating the guitar that way. I wanted to build the rhythm of “The Sun” on that. And I actually think I sampled my guitar. I had this little (laughs) Dr. Sample by Boss, a very low grade early, and even back then it was obsolete, I got it used at a guitar store, sample pad thing. And it had eight samples and I think I sampled the guitar and played it that way (sings robotic rhythmic pattern). Yeah (laughs).
It is true that I always kind of had, in my mind, I had like my footnotes or my references and I just didn’t always share them. But I made this booklet, Headwaters, The Headwaters of Mount Eerie, with the idea that I was just going to be up front with my influences and it came with a CD of...yeah like Black Orpheus was on there. “Powderfinger” by Neil Young was on there because he says, (sings) “Look out Mama there’s a white boat coming up the river.” Anyway, I switch it to a black ship. Anyway, there are lots of reference points and ideas that I had at the time. I’ve been going through my notebooks a lot because I’m working on a box set of Microphones records and so trying to just like once again trying to review all of the notebooks and materials from those days and see if there’s anything worth using. And so going through my notebooks, I kept noticing how much I was talking about the Sade album, Lover’s Rock (laughs) in 2001. It was major. 2001/2002. Somebody at the record store I used to work at, The Business, they had a CD of it and I just...it’s so good. It hit me and I didn’t have a CD player in my car so I remember writing notes like, “Find someone with this CD, dub a tape of it before you leave on tour. You’re gonna need to listen to this album.” Yeah it was major, that was a major album for me right around then. (sings) “I’m in the wilderness, you are in the music in the man’s car next to me.”) Such a good opening line. (sings) “See them gather, see them on the shore.” Yeah what’s that song called? (sings) “Turn to look once more.” That was a major ingredient in that moment of picturing myself on the beach, like a scene setting. Looking out to see what’s coming. I had just, I was on this tour alone, I met up with my friend in Vermont and had sort of an emotional goodbye. This person I was kind of dating, the person I was emotionally entangled with. And the goodbye after we had our time together, before going to Florida, it felt conclusive. It felt symbolically heavy. And then I set off on my own down the East Coast and I remember migrating birds heading south as we said goodbye in Vermont and just feeling the symbolism of that and that made it into a song. (sings) “See the flock of birds goodbye.” Yeah. So it’s kind of like straight up autobiographical and also deeply symbolic.
I wanted to sing the quote on quote chorus, “ball of fire,” I wanted each word to stretch out like so uncomfortably long. I had never sung like this before, I had never really thought of myself as a performative singer or even good at singing. I can almost hit notes (laughs) but that’s about it and so Vespertine had come out and I just felt like, “Yeah why not me, I could do that” (laughs). Just to emote and stretch out my voice. Let the way that my voice frays be, take advantage of that, the frailty of what my voice does when pushed a little too far. And not in a screamy way but in a tender way. So that’s why I made myself sing those, (sings) “ball...of…” Like so long and running out of breath. And also it communicated the desperation of being under a hot sun and looking at death approaching.
Then the grunge band comes in on the last one with big (sings distorted sound) hits. That was more like back into my comfort zone. Distorted guitars and drums hit and the distortion rises until it becomes pure white noise. And I think that’s how the track ends, “The Sun.” Cause then “Solar System” starts with that same white noise evolving into the sound of a snare drum being brushed (sings brushed drum sound) and water rushing. I like how that worked out. Cause I used, I think I had a Moog synthesizer in the studio so I used that to create actual white noise. At the peak of the distortion part. Well that part was inspired by, there’s this band, Elevator To Hell, from Eastern Canada, like my favorite band. They had a song, I think it’s called “Sleep Experiment No. 5” or something like that. It’s about falling asleep and entering a dream world and it does that like evolving into pure white noise. Just this gentle hiss. Flat, perfect, neutral, blank hiss. I love that. I love erasing music and tone completely. That’s where I took the idea from, using white noise as a transition point between those two songs.
“Solar System”
The song, “Solar System,” I just knew it needed to exist. Cause I knew I needed it to be, “The Sun,” “Solar System,” “Universe.” I couldn’t go, “The Sun,” “Universe.” That’s like skipping a step (laughs). Yeah anyway, I like that word “Solar System” too. Also in that song, I think about, I had gone to Mexico with my family and walked through a dry river bed, like a hike into the backcountry, thinking about these things, in the midst of working through these ideas. It must have been like January 2002 so I’d probably started recording, maybe halfway done with “The Sun,” and being like, “OK what comes next?” (sings) “Here I am in the creekbed, here I feel my way in the dark.” So every time I sing that song still or hear it, I just picture that exact creekbed in Mexico. I picture walking there with my family and me probably walking fifty feet behind everyone, thinking my thoughts, thinking about my music that I was going to go back to Olympia and record.
Is it “Fall Flood” I think that “Solar System” has the melody? (sings “Fall Flood” chorus melody). And there’s no real reason for that, it’s just that that song was stuck in my head the day I was thinking of the song, “Solar System” (laughs). It’s not like a specific reference thematically to that Little Wings song. The more I talk the more I realize how much of this music is imbued and made of reference and borrowed pieces and fragments of things. Especially with Little Wings. Our friendship during that time was very freely giving and taking from each other’s ideas and notebooks. Almost like we were in a universe of our own and no one else was paying attention. Yeah he’s positive, I’m negative (laughs). Yeah that sums it up, the difference between our two approaches. I used to really tease him about it or I thought it was wrong or something in a way to deny darkness and I embrace darkness but now I’m older and I realize that everyone is different and everyone has their own approach to it. And I maybe embrace darkness a little more than him or maybe more than most people in my art and in the things that I pursue. And maybe I come off as being a person who is particularly dark or depressed or gloomy but the truth is that I’m not those things. I’m happy. And maybe it’s because of that happiness that I have more of a capacity to embrace those ideas. And then Kyle (Field) on the other hand, I think of as being, he definitely is aware of all the darkness and he makes this art that is full of light because he has enough of the darkness already in his nonmusical, nonart life. I don’t know, I’m speaking for him now but my perspective on it has changed. I used to be a little bit more pokey about it, saying like, “Ah don’t deny the full spectrum. It’s irresponsible!” But now I’m more forgiving, I hope.
And the image that I used for it was this person I saw playing soccer in a park in Stockholm, Sweden in 2001, it must have been. I was on tour there with Old Time Relijun. I played the drums in that band for a few years and yeah we went to Sweden and it was my first time in Scandinavia and it was just a beautiful summer day in the park and everyone was out and this very pretty girl was adeptly dribbling a soccer ball with her knees. And I just took a picture with my brain (laughs). It seemed like a good illustration of planets orbiting around the sun, the way that the ball was bouncing around her. I knew that the melody had a lot of room for interesting harmonies and Mirah’s very good at that and it just was really fun to do some multi-track recording with her and build out those chords with her. I didn’t really know what shape it would take.
Oh also I climbed a mountain and had this (laughs) sort of near death experience. That’s a big part of this story. Yeah I had some days off in the fall of 2001 and went into the White Mountains. I just sort of picked a trail at random and went up (laughs) for just a day hike. But snow blew in and it got so dangerous. I guess that’s typical in the White Mountains, the weather can change so quickly. But I remember the signs, the wording on the signs being hilariously dramatic, like, “Turn around now or you will die! Many have passed this sign and…(laughs).” And it was true, like I started off and it was crunchy autumn leaves and as it got higher, it was like 6 inches of snow and I couldn’t see anything. And I didn’t have the right clothing on, I think I did have boots at least but it was amazing. It was so beautiful. I got to this rocky thing that probably wasn’t the summit but I couldn’t see any further beyond me. It was just like I was on a rock, fog below me, fog above me. Like I couldn’t see the ground, I felt like I was floating in space or in the clouds. And then I could sort of see some snow covered small Alpine trees through short breaks in the fog and it just seemed like, “Those are not trees, those are ghosts (laughs) and those aren’t even of this world, those are from the other word, the other side.” That was sort of a moment of looking across the gulf into the abyss or looking at death. Looking at my ancestors, my grandpa who died or the world of the dead that is not far from us and getting a glimpse of it. And then I turned around and climbed down and probably went to see a movie at a matinee movie theater, which is one of my favorite activities back then. It was like getting cold and wet and then going to eat candy in a movie theater (laughs).
“Universe”
I just remembered that the song “Universe,” the first one starts with, (sings) “See me look unveiled when I walk out of the canyon.” That canyon is this riverbed in Mexico. This might be my favorite one on the album. I like when the drums come in. I also like the distorted bass, it’s like (sings four note bass line). I like the instrumentation, that’s what I like about it. And the shufflingness of the drums (sings drum pattern). I think it turned out well. And I can compliment myself about it because it was twenty years ago and it was all on accident anyways. The way I recorded the drums was just like, “Well let’s see what the mic is like if it’s recorded here. Oh it’s really good today. What good fortune.”
So this first song, “Universe,” I knew that I wanted Khaela (Maricich) to sing this one line. She probably chose which notes to sing but it was not that fun for her probably. For me to just be like, “Come in here, sing this line right, sing it like this, I just need your voice (laughs).” (sings) “Do you really think…” There is significance. She is the kind of friend that would ask questions like that. Like important and sort of devastating questions (laughs). But yeah, that’s an important friend who will ask you those types of questions I think. The hard ones.
And I liked that idea also of this album not being a regular album where it’s just like the voice of one writer or a band or something. I wanted it to be ambiguous what’s going on here. Like, “What is this, a compilation? Who’s this singing now? And why does it sound totally different?” I wanted it to be confusing in that way. And also in a theatrical way. I wanted characters to feel and seem different. (sings in a low voice) “What do you want?” (laughs). Calvin (Johnson) was perfect for “The Universe.” Playing the character, his deep voice. Whatever the voice of the booming sky at night asking, “What do you want?” That’s gotta be a big voice. It has to be deep and taunting. The voice of the night sky, it could only be him I think. (laughs) Also just in that building being, you know, running K Records, (laughs) just sorta seemed like he was already in an overlord position. (laughs) It was fun to cast him in that way. (sings four note melody). Those four notes, it probably has a musical term, is that a leitmotif maybe? Or on soundtracks, like a character’s, when a certain character enters, their motif plays. Maybe it was that but I didn’t know the name for it and still don’t. What’s funny is, this is kind of a side point but I hate musicals and Broadway, campy, theatrical anything. It’s like my least favorite thing. It’s so corny, I hate it. So it’s funny that I made this thing that is skirting the edges of those ideas.
It was always like that, during those years in Olympia, recording at Dub Narcotic, living in cheap houses close to the studio. And everyone else in the studio building was just like, people were just around. Nobody had (laughs) employment or money. People were just game for anything and collaborating on each other’s things. And I actually didn’t really like collaborating that much compared to the standard vibe that was going on there. I liked to sort of work in seclusion more. But it was nice that people were available. So this Mount Eerie album came after a few years, five years of living in that sort of petri dish (laughs) of collaboration. And I think I had reached a point where I sort of took for granted that these people were available around me and I was casting them as characters rather than saying, “Hey let’s collaborate on something together.” It would more be like, “I have an assignment for you (laughs).” Yeah even The Glow Pt. 2, which came before this was more loose and collaborative and friendly. It was more like, “I’m working on a song, I’m not really sure what it is yet but come and listen to it and see if any ideas pop out.” There was a little bit more of that but this Mount Eerie album was not that way so much. I pretty much had the ideas. Aside from the songs that Karl (Blau) and Kyle (Field) did which were explicit assignments.
“Mount Eerie”
Oh and then there’s a big group of singers, there’s the group singing section, does that happen before Kyle comes in? Kyle wrote those words. We just got a big group of people together. I think I put up posters around Olympia that said, “Singers needed. 10am on such and such a day. Come to Dub Narcotic studio.” And taught them the song, had the mics set up. Maybe like, however many people are on the credits, eight people came in and we recorded them.
So for Kyle’s rap (laughs) basically, I had the beats recorded and he wrote the words maybe kind of on the spot or maybe showed up with some. But he did a lot of takes to get in the mood, to get the right voice. And I think he ended up putting a sleeping bag over his head and crouching down Henry Rollins-style and just being like (makes roaring sound) and flexing and getting into beast mode (laughs). And that was maybe a little bit of a tease like I made him step into this area of discomfort and play the role of death itself. I gave him the assignment. I think he did great. Well plus it was a cartoony role. He did it in sort of a vaudevillian overblown villain, twiddling his moustache (laughs). And then, “Do you see what happens?” is a Big Lebowski reference (laughs), which there was a lot of that happening during those days.
I had this promo 12-inch of Bubba Sparxxx, which I don’t even really know who he is, I just happened to have this promo 12-inch from a record store. And I liked Timbaland’s production but I wasn’t a connoisseur, I just whenever I heard it I was like, “Ooh what’s that?” So I was listening to that cassette tape that I had made of that 12-inch a lot on that tour driving around the U.S. by myself. And then the drums on the part of “Mount Eerie” that Kyle sings, the “Big Black Cloud,” they’re pretty inspired by Timbaland. Although I didn’t have a sampler or a computer or know how to do any of that so I just made them by hand with multi-track recording. Maybe towards the end of making The Glow Pt. 2 and definitely on all of Mount Eerie, I switched over to recording drums, not recording a drum set but just recording one drum at a time each on its own track. So charting out the beat and individually playing the bass drum, the hi-hat and then bouncing it all together to usually like a stereo mix. So that would make the drums have this kind of jilty, synthetic, like a little bit too perfect feel, although not perfect at all because I was manually playing it. I don’t even think I used a click track, I would probably start with the hi-hat or some kind of grid. And it would also allow me to really tune in each drum sound, put the snare mic in a weird place and distort it a little bit or put a gate or a compressor on it. Or the bass drum, so yeah on that “Big Black Cloud” part, there are a couple of different bass drum tones. When I was bouncing them together to the stereo mix, I would turn the different bass drum, switch back and forth between different bass drum tones. One of them was really distorted, almost to where the…(laughs). This is getting pretty technical but the sustain tone of the drum, the (sings) boom, would when it’s distorted, it would sound like almost a note, like a distorted organ note. So it would be like, (sings) “baaaah” (laughs). Like it’s not just a thud, it’s a note. That’s how. Multi-track recording and then bouncing them together and I still do it like that.
And also the Karl Blau section, we haven’t touched on. Karl just sent me his section of the song, I guess it’s like the song “Mount Eerie,” second half of it? I think second half, I can’t remember, but he just made that. He didn’t come to Olympia, he just made it on a 4-track and I received this reel to reel tape in the mail, it was finished. So that’s just him. He wrote it, he recorded it. It’s a Karl Blau song that is just on my album and credited to me (laughs). I gave him sort of some character description and inspiration. Well so he was living at that time in this little house on Trafton Lake outside of Anacortes, which he just happened to be living in the house where I grew up. I moved there when I was seven months but I lived my whole childhood there, my earliest memories. And so I asked him to write a song from the perspective of the vultures that ate my dead body on top of a mountain and flew away. Kind of a grim assignment but the fact that he was living in my childhood home and I think he had just had his daughter was just born in that house and so I don’t know, the circle of life was very present with him and it was perfect. He wrote some stuff in there in these different voices. I think it’s supposed to be the voice of the vultures on one hand and the voice of the wind on the other hand, sort of conversing with each other. (imitates Karl Blau’s voice) “I am the candle clutching,” these memories. Those are the fragments of memories he was assigning to me. Man this sounds so theoretical and obtuse and impenetrable. Sorry to anyone who’s listening to this (laughs). Yeah he as writing from the perspective of “kid Phil” and elaborating on imagined memories. Like pulling the candle off the table cause we didn’t have electricity so it was just a lot of candles. He just thought of them so maybe they’re his memories or maybe he just imagined them for me. But they’re close enough. Yeah it was perfect. It just showed up in the mail one day, the Karl Blau song, I was so happy to be like, “Wow great. He just did it! Amazing.” Also it was perfect that he wrote and recorded his submission almost in seclusion, not in the studio, not part of my sounds because it is supposed to sound like an alien presence coming in, these vultures flying in from outer space and the wind blowing. It is a presence from another world so it was perfect that all the sounds are different. It works really well I think.
I think of Mount Eerie as this fall of 2001 thing. That’s when I got the idea for it. It took me a while to record, maybe six or eight months. And then it came out kind of a while later kind of because it takes a while to make things so I think it came out in 2003. January maybe? But by that time, it was old to me. By that time I had moved on. It was old ideas and I had probably changed my band name to “Mount Eerie” by then. I moved out of my house in Olympia in June of 2002, I moved out of the Track House but not into anywhere, I just moved into my pickup truck and I thought this is what I’ll do forever or for as long as I can. I’ll just always be on tour or my version of tour, driving around and staying at friends’ houses. And that lasted until September, not that long. And then in September of 2002, I flew to Europe and had a train pass and did the same thing by train in Europe and then in November, I got a cabin in the north of Norway. I think it was just a desire I had in me for a long time, and I still do (laughs). To do a retreat basically, to have a simplified version of life for a period of time to sort of start over. Yeah it was definitely a turning point in my art and in my life. I decided I was done living in Olympia after five years and it was an intense five years of lots of amazing friendships were formed and it was this utopian time. And so much was made, like my life was made. I became almost a grownup but it was done and I needed to sort of draw a clear line. That’s why I say in that Microphones in 2020, I wrote the name on a piece of paper and burned it in a cave. I didn’t literally have a ceremony to end my band name but I needed to draw a line and say this is before time and this is after. I was a child and now I’m a grownup or something. Like a clear distinction.
“Universe”
(sings) “Now that I have disappeared I have my sight. Beautiful black, you are unveiled,” yeah. Just like being, not in the afterlife but rather just like a greater awareness of a larger vastness. There are stars beyond those stars. There’s something bigger beyond our lives and deaths. Our lives and deaths and our stories that just kind of play out, there’s a greater world beyond that. So that’s what the idea is with that second song called, “Universe.” But another reason why I wanted to start calling my music project Mount Eerie was because I felt kind of unresolved about the way the album ended. I didn’t know how to end it and I had all these different ideas how to end it and I tried them all out. Just like these little poetic fragments that I couldn’t quite figure out how to piece together into a way that would be a punctuation mark on this kind of overblown idea that I had tackled. I feel like what I ended up settling on was sort of a cop out. Like the way the album ends, I still am not satisfied with it, it’s just sort of like a non-ending. It’s this abstract universe choral thing. These bleeps and bloops of voices going like, (sings) “Uh ah ah ah.” Like the 2001 soundtrack has a lot of eerie, spooky voices in outer space sound. It’s cool and beautiful but I don’t know what it’s saying. I don’t know what the point of it is. I guess maybe what I settled on was, “It doesn’t have to have a point. Maybe the point is there is no point.” I don’t know, it’s a little annoying.
I think I ended up ending Mount Eerie by saying “Universe, I see your face looks just like mine. We are open wide.” That’s OK. Yeah that’s not bad. I’m OK with that now.
Mount Eerie pts. 6 & 7 I think was my way, I think I wanted to bring it back down to Earth. I was Geneviève (Castrée) and we were just living this domestic life of creativity. And I wanted to sort of bring these universal, epic, bombastic ideas back down to Earth and into the house and still have it be huge but in a domestic if that makes any sense. So there’s songs like “The Known World,” “The Unknown World,” “Living in the house, looking out the window.” Like the black night that looms every night above the house while you’re inside just doing your stuff, washing dishes and looking out the window. Sort of like, “I am in the wilderness, you are in the music in the man’s car next to me” (laughs). Like mundane, pedestrian moments coexisting right next to this vastness. That was the idea with those sequels.
I haven’t thought about this album in a while, deeply. I’ve thought about it because like, “Oh I need to repress it or whatever. The artwork needs to have this thing happen to it or whatever.” I’ve thought about it from like a manufacturing perspective (laughs) but I haven’t thought about what I was trying to say with it in a while. I didn’t really play the songs for very long after I recorded them. You know, it’s not that performable, these songs, although I did some. It is strange, I think of it as a stop along the route of the evolution but it is true that it’s unlike all of the other stops along the route. It’s not just like some other album that I made, it is unique in my body of work, I recognize that. What cockiness for this twenty three year-old, twenty four year-old to be writing a vaudevillian (laughs) story about dying and sort of playing around with these funny characters. In the context of actual death I sort of, I don’t want to say I wanted to disown it exactly but it felt a little embarrassingly young and cocky. Although at the same time I feel like it’s necessary to be that way when you’re young and exploring big ideas. I would have done it the same way I think.
And then right after making it, I just sort of went and had my big solitary retreat time in Norway where I sort of obliterated my own brain and self (laughs) in a good way. Including obliterating that thirst for an answer. So this Mount Eerie album to me sounds like a lot of thirst for meaning in a way that I later sort of grew out of. It doesn’t sound like I achieved meaning necessarily. It’s an album about asking and wonder and being subjugated by the hugeness of the question.
Outro:
Dan Nordheim:
Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about the Microphones. You’ll also find a link to stream or purchase Mount Eerie. Thanks for listening.
Credits:
“The Sun”
“Solar System”
“Universe”
“Mount Eerie”
“Universe”
© ℗ P.W. Elverum & Sun, ltd.
© 2003 K Records
Album Credits:
Was recorded at Dub Narcotic in Olympia, Washington between Nov. 21, 2001 and June 10, 2002, except for the Karl Blau song, which he recorded on his 4-track in Anacortes. Other parts by Phil Elverum.
The Precipice Carolers:
Kyle Field, Phil Elverum Mirah Maricich, Phan Nguyen, Amber Bell, Bethany Hays Parke, Shawn Parke, Hollis Parke, Dennis Driscoll, Zach Alarcon, Adam Forkner.
I. “The Sun”
-From Mount Eerie liner notes:
“Adam Forkner plays the cowbell and the trumpet. Anna Oxygen makes the sound of a swelling breath of a million voices.”
"In which the story begins, where you are born and run away from death up the mountain in fear and are watched by a ball of fire.”
-From Headwaters: “Family leaves, solitude, island, flee for mountain”
“From the journals of Phil Elverum: October 8, 2001: Grover, Vermont - I put Khaela on a bus to New York at 7:30 in the morning and watched a high team of migrating birds leave as she left. I felt a large and significant ‘leaving’ and turned to see the back of the bus go over the last distant lump of road and onto the interstate. I sat in the car and stared at the map with the heat on.”
II. “Solar System”
-From Mount Eerie liner notes:
“Mirah Y.T. Zeitlyn keeps saying “I know you’re out there.” We are reminded of the Little Wings song, ‘Fall Flood.’”
“In which, in a valley on the way up, the day is ending while you reminisce about a girl gracefully juggling a soccer ball in the park like a sun juggling (you as) a planet.”
“Monday, May 14th, 2001 - Stockholm, Sweden - Sunday, May 13th, 2001 - Walking through the Tanto ‘Gardens’ Park on a Sunday afternoon. She got the ball kicked to her and lightly tossed it around with delicate legs I could see through a thin white skirt, back lit by the northern spring sun light. I know she’s out there.” “You’re like lanterns on wide night lakes.”
-From Headwaters: “Notice sun and grace of soccer girl, the planets, the heavens”
-From the journals of Phil Elverum: “November 23, 2001 - Olympia, Washington - ‘Theory: the whole universe exists as a tiny lightbulb in the core of a giant rock mountain, a silent dark tower of solid black mountain, and on top of that mountain is a lit up tower beaming out to the outside of the universe, a universe outside the mountain that contains the tiny lightbulb universe. The eerie dark wall between our universe and a larger universe is thick but finite. Mt. Eerie. So there is large and there is small and we exist in neither all the way, in either most of the way.’”
-“What Wonder?” is a response to a trilogy of albums by the Little Wings called “The Wonder Trilogy.” The premise of “The Wonder Trilogy” was that being alive is a bottomless trough of pleasure, that the world around us is impregnated with magic and joy. “What Wonder?” is also the name of a small booklet of plays and sayings by the Microphones, published in 2001.
III. ”Universe”
-From Mount Eerie liner notes:
“Mikhaela Maricich is the close dark voice. Calvin Johnson is the universe’s question asker and Jenn Kliese is the reply.”
“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 dark backdrop above asks you intimate questions and sings.”
“On a mountain’s maine I climb to my claim.” “I am aimless, alone, and unravelling while above the barren wastelands of space know my true name.” “What a wide shadow!” “I see summits buried in more air.”
-From Headwaters: “Notice wider universe, my own inner universe”
“How many times have I made up this song before?” “This is a reference to the fact that all Microphones songs are basically about the same thing: the statement ‘There’s no end.’”
IV. “Mount Eerie”
-From Mount Eerie liner notes:
“Mt. Eerie In which, on a precipice, you watch your killer roll up and kill you. Vultures eat your body and fly off, leaving the peak empty and windy again.”
“Mikhaela Maricich says “your legs walked…” and then Jenn Kliese and Anna Oxygen say “I watched you…” Then the “Precipice Carolers” sing. Then Kyle Field is Death and Karl Blau is the birds. They wrote and sang their own lines.”
-From Headwaters: “Notice the darkness of that wideness, the sturdy void
V. “Universe”
-From Mount Eerie liner notes:
“Joining Phil Elverum in the performing and producing of Mt. Eerie are Jenn Kliese, Kyle Field (Little Wings), Calvin Johnson, Khaela Maricich (the Blow), Mirah, Anna Oxygen, Karl Blau and Adam Forkner (Yume Bitsu). With Jenn Kliese on the voice and Phil Elverum on the swiss alpenhorn.”
“In which, invisible, you realize there's a mountain above the one you just walked up. Also, the "Universe" painting you'd gazed at before turns out to be a lot bigger than you thought, and 3-D.”
-From Headwaters: “Super depth; full company inside ultimate solitude.”
References:
Headwaters: An Attempted Explanation Of “Mount Eerie” By The Microphones
Wise Old Little Boy - documentary by Ryan Banta
Episode Credits:
Theme Music:
“Winter Cold” by North Home
℗ Meladdy Music (ASCAP)
Intro/Outro Music:
“Burn That Bridge” by North Home
Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim
Mastered by Jeremy Whitwam