Phil Elverum’s work (first as The Microphones, now—for the last two decades—as Mount Eerie) is a tender study into the infinite reverberations of small things: asphalt parking lots, gusts of wind, etc. After a detour into more narrative (though still quotidian) songwriting, Elverum returned last November with Night Palace: an epic and dynamic plunge into elemental mysteries and personal histories. In our conversation, we chatted about the hazards of metaphor, returning to analogue recording, making black metal with his daughter, self-referentiality, and much more.
Night Palace is a very expansive and eclectic album, not unlike some of the Microphones records. But, as I understand it, the recording process was much more solitary. What entices you towards more solitary music-making these days?
I always kept The Microphones pretty ambiguous whether it was a band or a collective. I mostly decentered myself in the list of names. I don’t want to minimize the other musicians’ contributions. But the truth is, for the most part, those friends were people I brought in by saying, “Hey, can you sing this note for a little bit?” Night Palace isn’t that different in this sense. This has always been my own solitary studio experimentation.
However, those Microphones albums were made in a phase of my life where I lived in Olympia downtown. All my friends lived within a few blocks. Nobody had internet or cellphones. I’ve written about this in Microphones in 2020, trying to get at what was different about that time. It was very much a communal thing. Even though the actual practice of me recording happened when no one was around. Life was more communal and utopian.
Do you find yourself surrounded by other artists these days?
No. I live on a small island now and I’m way less social. I live at the end of a dead end road. I’m fine with it. I can go for long uninterrupted days just doing my own thing.
Is part of the reason you’re able to work way more isolated now because you had a background in a much more social, artistic environment?
I think that’s a good point. Without that foundation of community, for my own development as a human, I wouldn’t have that stability to build on. But a lot of it is also practicality. Being a parent, my window to make art is way more limited. Since I only have fifteen minutes sometimes, I’m less fussy about what works for me.
What’s your day-to-day routine like when you’re recording?
Drop my daughter off at school at 8:30. Check the PO box in town. Then, drive home immediately. I’ll have equipment set-up from the night before. I do a lot of work mentally, thinking about what I’ll do the next day while making dinner or talking to people. In my head, I’m saying, “Hmm, what if I put distorted bass on that part? Or if I moved that section over here?” When I actually have the freedom to start my work day, I jump right into it. Usually, I have to stop to eat lunch which is annoying. [Laughs.] But otherwise, I go until it’s time to pick [my daughter] up.
Does it feel more like a day job in that sense?
Kind of! I’m going to work during my available hours. But it doesn’t feel like work. It feels mentally unhealthy. After a full day of being in that zone, I get in the car, and I feel disembodied. I’m looking at the other parents and kids, thinking, “Who am I? What is this?” It’s disorienting. My partner is a painter, and she has the same thing. When you paint for too long, you’re just not good in the mind afterwards.
Does parental obligation keep you from going overboard and living entirely in that zone?
Probably. It’s easy to romanticize the art life and wonder, “What if I didn’t have kids? What if I could go for 18 hours and really ruin my body and not pee or eat or keep the fire going?” I like having to be more grounded and healthy about it. It’s more sustainable.
One of the great lines on this record is “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall.” How do you expect these songs will mutate as you tour them?
I have a band. We’ve played a couple shows so far. It’s a good question because I’ve never really tried to replicate an album in a live context; I always see it as two separate things. You shouldn’t try to replicate multi-track recording live. It just comes off as weird. With this band, I want to strike something new. We haven’t quite found it yet. There’s a lot of potential, but we’re still getting to know each other. But also, I know at the end of the touring, the music will have solidified. I’m going to mourn this period I’m in now. I hate when it solidifies. Right now, every time we play a song it feels different. I hate when bands over-practice.
Does that uncertainty ever frighten you?
Yeah, it’s totally scary. Terror and joy mixed together is the sweet spot to be in when making art.
On another note, for a while you were making records in rapid succession. There was a much longer caesura between Microphones in 2020 and Night Palace. Was your approach to recording very different for this one?
Yah, I decided after Microphones in 2020 that I didn’t want to record on the computer anymore: something I’d done for the previous four or so albums, starting with A Crow Looked at Me. It started out of practicality; I was moving around a lot, I didn’t have a space to set up for analogue recording. But I still had my old stuff. I decided I wanted to revert back to analogue, which takes up more space and requires a lot more tinkering.
What do you like most about recording analogue?
The forced slow-down. The limitations. It makes you more mindful of what you’re doing to the song, rather than just hitting the space-bar infinite times. [With digital,] you’re checked out; you’re not actually hearing it.
So it’s more about the practice of making music than the sound?
I think so. It helps me hear what I’m doing more. I think about it deeper. Also, the time it takes to rewind a tape to the beginning—that pause—makes you take a breath and recentre. That’s important for me.
A part of the A Crow Looked at Me and Now Only records was about peeling back how your own songwriting had long dealt with death or what you call “conceptual emptiness” as a poetic subject or metaphor. It seems Night Palace, especially a song like Non-Metaphorical Decolonization’, is doing something similar with the concept of post-colonialism. When I first heard that song, my mind turned to the line in ‘Toothbrush / Trash’ where you position photos as a force colonizing memories.
Honestly, I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks for pointing that out. I forgot about that line. I woke up with that song in my head the other day, for some reason. I was in B.C., and maybe that’s why; [my late wife] Geneviève was Canadian. Colonized was a bit of a loaded word for that moment. This was before I was feeling imperative about talking about actual settler-colonialism in a song.
A trend in your recent work is interrogating the very idea of metaphor. What do you think the potential harm in a metaphor is?
I inevitably use a ton of metaphors, even as I’m squirming against them. I’ve been prickly over the years of writing these songs. I use this nature imagery, then people talk to me about the songs and say, “Oh I love nature too!” People mirror back what they take from the music, and I often realize I’ve just created an escapist, beautiful picture. I don’t want to talk about nature but, rather, foundational ideas. I’m using nature as a metaphor, and I’ve experienced the downside to that, which is having people interpret it as pastoral escapism.
Are you saying hearing that reception has changed how you approach songwriting?
It’s made me way more aware of my tendency to use those words, but I don’t know if I’ve actually changed. I’ve rollercoastered; I go through a phase where I’m like, “I’ll sing a lot about parking lots! And trash!” But a year or two ago, I had a realization walking on the beach nearby. It was a peak Pacific Northwest nature experience. It was raining, I was drenched. I was super alone at this meditation retreat. And I thought, “This moment is what I want to evoke.” But this other part of me said, “Phil, wait! If you just talk about rain and solitude and wind, the same thing will happen. You’re creating this Pacific Northwest nature escapist fantasy.” But then part of me said, “Fuck it! Just embrace it! Let it be what it is! Speak from the heart.” I don’t need to think about how people will take it. It was a very liberating moment. That’s why there are songs on Night Palace that are very metaphorical, very nature-y, full of wind stuff. It’s always a bad path to get too meta and get too mindful of the listener.
One of the things I find most censors artistic practices is—when you’re a person who reads discourse and goes on the internet—you have all these common forms of criticism that implant in your brain and moderate certain impulses. Is that something you find happens a lot, or is it more isolated to this one example?
I mostly do a good job not looking at that stuff. I know it’s out there. I’m not perfect. I peek at reviews, they’re interesting to read sometimes. But the amateur commenters can be disorienting. I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to look at that stuff.
Well, you did record the song ‘Get Off the Internet’.
[Laughs.] Yah, feels like a million years ago. That was a whole different internet.
The song ‘Swallowed Alive’ has your daughter screaming as vocalist.
I had the idea a long time ago to record her screaming. I wanted to make some black metal with her for personal use, not to release. During COVID, I got double kick pedals. I was practicing, training my leg muscles, watching YouTube tutorials. I wanted to record that music, and I know that I couldn’t scream. But my daughter can scream!
Her screaming wasn’t recorded alongside the drums in the song. They were recorded on their own from my improvising. I recorded that improvised blast of noise then, separately, her screaming into a mic that was running into a huge bass cabinet with distortion. After that, I had a mic on that cabinet recording onto a four-track. Then, I recorded the clean and distorted signal through the amp. I sat on that tape for four years. When I was putting together Night Palace, I took it and pitch-shifted it down. That’s why it sounds like a huge man talking. At the end of the tape, she was just talking, saying, “You get swallowed by the lion, swallowed alive and you live to tell the tale.” She was just improvising. She’s so proud to have a vocal part on the album. Whenever I tell her I did an interview, she asks if they asked about ‘Swallowed Alive’.
Do you and her share a lot of music together?
Totally. She’s pretty resistant to it these days. Every car ride we bicker about who gets to choose the next song. But she’s always exposed to whatever weird music I’m listening to.
There’s a lot of parent-offspring collaborations. Alan Sparkhawk (who you’re playing shows with soon) has a new album with his kids on it, Jeff Tweedy has albums with his sons, Leonard Cohen’s son recorded most of You Want It Darker. Is a close creative relationship something that appeals to you?
I would be so happy if she has a life in the arts of any kind. She’s just nine now, so she’s still becoming who she is. I would love it, but there’s no particular pressure about it.
Another collaboration on the record: ‘Blurred World’ has Geneviève credited with humming. Was that just an old archival recording you sampled?
Since tape is expensive, I was taping over old reels of mine. Not my own songs; I used to record friends a lot. One of the songs was by Alex Mahan which Geneviève and I had done background humming on. The two humming tracks were beautiful on their own, so I erased all other instruments and wrote ‘Blurred World’ to fit with it. It was too good to erase.
Are there other archival elements that slip into the record?
The same thing happened when I recorded over a song from Adrian Orange [Thanksgiving], an old friend. On his song ‘You’ve Been Fucking Indoctrinating Me Blues’. I had these room mics on an organ and piano take. The song was recorded with a full band in a big room. But the room mic on the organ and piano was the weirdest, ethereal thing. I took that, ran it through distortion, compressor, and gate to make it sound really distressed. That’s the root of ‘Myths Come True’. There’s some really old tapes on ‘Breaths’ too. I was into the idea of making tape collage rather than songs. So there’s some old stuff from Dub Narcotic studios in the early-00s on the record. Just sound: room hiss, noise. I wanted to transport the atmosphere of that time and place onto songs.
Is that another thing working with analogue offers you? It makes you look at old tapes from your archive.
Maybe, though it’s actually harder to do it with analogue than a hard drive that’s organized.
But when you have to record over the tapes, it forces you to look over it. I imagine you listened to everything before taping over.
For sure. And I backed it all up digitally too. It’s very physical to tape over something. It’s like recarving the same piece of wood.
Like much of your music, there’s a lot of returning references on Night Palace. The line “My roots are strong and deep,” for instance. Even Joanne Kyger’s “The Night Palace” has come up at least twice in your work before this album.
Self-referentiality can get to be too much, to get too spiralled inwards into your own self. I’m trying not to do that. I don’t want to try and disguise the interconnectedness of my work and present it as unique islands of disconnected things. I like to draw my thread through things, to leave little breadcrumbs. I like that as a listener hearing other peoples’ work. I’m reading The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard right now; it’s part of a trilogy of novels. A character they run across in a grocery store actually appeared two books earlier. The feeling of making that connection is so satisfying.
For me, your self-referentiality is interesting because lines (like “Let’s get out of the romance”) appear across your work, but often they keep getting complicated or contradicted when you come back to them. It feels like we’re seeing a whole evolution of your thought across your music.
Yah, I’m definitely pro-complication. It’s easy to let things boil down into a closed and easy answer. I don’t want that.
Mount Eerie’s Night Palace is out now via P.W. Elverum & Sun.
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