New Old Space: Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum in interview

Phil Elverum is Mount Eerie. He once was The Microphones. Formerly signed to K Records of Olympia, Washington, he now self-publishes under the P.W. Elverum & Sun label that he runs out of Anacortes, Washington. He’s released six albums under his Microphones moniker, and six as Mount Eerie, including two in quick succession last year – Clear Moon and Ocean Roar – which he recorded near his home, in a desanctified church.

Elverum's music alternates and shifts as often as the natural imagery that fixates it, transitioning from beautifully delicate melodies to pounding, fuzzy riffs, off-kilter percussion and wide-eyed vocals. For him, he says, nature is “just the version of the world that I use to represent a neutral, non-human place where we're living out our weird adventures.”

Clear Moon begins with the line: ‘Misunderstood / and disillusioned / I go on describing this place and the way it feels to live and die.’ Elverum's inspiration is, he explains, “always zen poetry, straight up. Almost all of the ideas are directly lifted from that world – Cold Mountain, Eihei Dōgen, Gary Snyder...” Dōgen – founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism – described himself as ‘Drifting pitifully in the whirlwind of birth and death / As if wandering in a dream,’ and so it often feels with Elverum's music, which is by turns dreamlike, morbid and transcendent.

Elverum also cites metal music as an influence, from its mysterious song titles to the one-man bands, the atmosphere and the imagery – and Ocean Roar is darker and messier than Clear Moon. “Extremes are interesting,” he explains. “I like the totality of the aesthetic presentation in black metal. It’s presented as a fully conceived world, not just some people playing music.”

“Things have changed a lot. My first tour was booked by telephone” – Phil Elverum

This year, Elverum will re-release five remastered Microphones albums on vinyl. The process was, he says, “in some cases a little embarrassing, but mostly I stand behind it all.” In the time it took for The Microphones to become Mount Eerie, the internet arrived and swept the rug from under the music industry’s feet. “I’ve been doing this for a weird period in history,” he agrees. “Things have changed a lot. My first tour was booked by telephone. It’s easy to be nostalgic for a pre-internet time but that’s pointless. I think I’m able to be self-sufficient because of the internet, but it is making us all worse as human animals.”

This self-sufficiency was borne out of the DIY movement of the 80s and early 90s that spawned labels like Dischord and K (whose mission statement remains ‘exploding the teenage underground into passionate revolt against the corporate ogre’). How do those ideals fit into the new digital landscape, where everything is free forever? “If anything it’s more important now than ever to keep our underground art/music stuff disconnected from the corrupt economic conglomerates,” Elverum proposes, “if only to prove that we can make actual cultural changes without using the tools and money of shitty companies and websites. It’s very difficult now because people don’t want to pay for stuff and the world is already drowning in ‘content,’ but making quality shit and doing it in a bad ass way is actually still very uncommon.”

And what about ‘punk ideals’? “The notion that music is something that has money-value doesn't seem to exist for kids these days, so taking an idealistic stand about how one navigates that music-economy is not always super relevant,” Elverum says. “This is a complicated issue and I am still constantly asking myself how to do it all in a good way and how to exemplify what I see as a legit model. Saying that ideals are totally irrelevant is a cop out. The world still exists. It’s just weird and different.”