Transcript 0:00 [gentle music] Phil Elverum is the primary songwriter, performer, and producer for Mount Eerie and The Microphones. 0:07 For around 27 years, Phil has been creating some of the most revered and critically acclaimed indie folk of all time. 0:12 His music veers between stripped back acoustic guitar recordings to terrifyingly loud and distorted sonic experiments. 0:19 Mount Eerie is currently on the verge of a return to Aotearoa, playing in Tāmaki Makaurau, Pōneke, and Ōtepoti with Black Belt Eagle Scout, another band from Washington State that will bring new and classic Mount Eerie tunes to a new full band soundscape. 0:32 I've been obsessed with the music of The Microphones and Mount Eerie since I was 14. I think that I had the Glow Pt. 2 album cover as my profile picture on Google for about four years. 0:41 So suffice to say, it was a real privilege to interview him. We had a yarn about the upcoming shows, his previous tours of Aotearoa, 20 years of Mount Eerie, and more. 0:49 You're on the verge of coming back to Aotearoa for, I believe, the third time now, previously in 2018 and 2013. This time touring with Black Belt Eagle Scout to kind of have a bit more of a full band type vibe going on. 1:04 How have those rehearsals been? So fun. Yeah, it's been a while since I've played shows with, like, drums and distortion and stuff, and it's my favorite thing to do. 1:13 It's a big switch up from, like, I guess your music across the years has two different sides of the distorted stuff that just goes absolutely batshit, especially in the early days, as well as the more stripped back stuff that you've been doing a bit more recently under the Mount Eerie moniker. 1:31 Are you kind of trying to combine the two within this performance? No, not really. I'm just trying to do a new thing. Mm. But also we're playing some older songs. Uh, uh, yeah, I'm always trying to reinterpret the song. 1:42 Even if it's a song [laughs] no one's heard before, I'm, like, reinterpreting it from my own conception of it. Yeah, I mean, you're not really touring any particular album at the moment. 1:50 It's more so just kind of like a classic just touring to see what's going on. Is there anything in particular that you're looking forward to performing? Any new material that might be coming up? 1:58 Yeah, we're playing about half new songs. I'm sort of in the middle of making an album on a very slow schedule, giving myself lots of time to just explore. 2:08 What have been some of the things that have been influencing your newer music recently as you've been slowly trekking back into it? The last few albums I made just on a computer. 2:17 That's maybe a minor detail for people, but for me it affected the experience a lot of recording. It just sounded so perfect. 2:23 [laughs] I- most of my recording life has been analog and just, like, with the flaws of tape and the way it messes up, and there's confusing things and all these limitations. 2:33 So anyway, I, for these recordings, I've gone back to analog. I got my reel-to-reel stuff back out and set up my little studio at, at home in a nice workflow, and it's just feeling so good. 2:45 Feels like, ah, I've returned home. 2:48 You mentioned that you don't think that many people would care about, like, the difference of analog versus digital, but I feel like for you and your history as an artist more than anyone else, I think it was a lyric in Microphones in 2020, "The name The Microphones stems from just me enjoying the recording audio that I use so much." 3:03 Does it really feel like kind of a return to that style of the early days back in the mid to early 2000s? In a way, yeah. It feels like a return to the familiarity and simplicity of these- these- these methods. 3:15 Actually, I say simplicity, maybe understanding, like, how a reel-to-reel tape recorder and, like, analog signal chain works is more complicated than people just plugging into their laptop and [laughs] recording with one click. 3:29 But to me, there's something abstract about that that I always felt unsettled by. Something about the tangible moving parts and the mechanics of reel-to-reel feels like home. It's true. 3:40 I named my thing The Microphones 'cause as a teenager I was just, like, fully immersed in recording. That's not what I'm singing about [laughs] anymore, is I'm not singing about gear like I was when I was 16. 3:51 Do you think that having used digital production for the past few albums will influence the way that you look at analog production now? Actually, no. I, I use the computer treating it like a tape machine. 4:04 I, I didn't do what people might think of when they hear digital production or computer production. I didn't use the computer for anything other than just documenting the signal that was coming through the microphone. 4:14 I wasn't doing special effects or MIDI or Autotune or anything like that. It's more about, like, my experience as I'm sitting in the room hitting record. 4:22 Like, is there a screen blasting me with digital light, or am I looking out the window? You know what I mean? It's more about the vibe in the room the moment of recording. 4:32 Nowadays, I would guess that more of the recording happens at home rather than in a studio. 4:38 Is that preferable compared to having to go out to a different space that someone else has kind of controlled versus having your own space that you've curated and found all the different gear and devices and things that just work best for you? 4:51 I've never done it any other way, actually. I have never recorded in a real recording studio- Oh, really?... really. Wow. 4:57 I mean, there, there were some times when I lived in Olympia where, I guess it's a real recording studio, but I kind of considered it an extension of my home, 'cause I lived across the street and I was there every day. 5:07 Dub Narcotic Studio it was called. I guess the most recent release that you've had was on the collaborative [laughs] album with Huge Fire. Do you think that there'll be more of that on the next record? Yeah. 5:17 It's, it's all over the place. There's some really spaced out experimental stuff that I wouldn't even call songs. Lots of songs with drums and distortions. I like how it's turning out so far. 5:28 You've really mastered concept albums in the sense of, again, Lost Wisdom, Crow Looked At Me And Now Only were very lyrically driven. 5:36 Um, most of that was just you, an acoustic guitar, and a drum machine versus, say, the album Mount Eerie or the Glow Pt. 2 or even It Was Hot We Stayed In The Water. 5:46 All of those, they make so much sense as a full album listen when there's so much space in between with the recurring motifs in a Glow Pt. 2 with the foghorn and all of those sorts of things. 5:59 How do you curate the album into one big listening space, which includes the kind of more sonic experiments that are dotted in between the standard tunes that could be listened to on their own? 6:11 I think maybe I'm always trying to straddle the line between having an album feel cohesive, like these things belong together without sounding homogenous. A lot of variation. 6:21 I like a lot of kind of radical juxtapositions of tones and sounds within an album, but not so much that it feels like [laughs] a compilation of different bands or something, or just like, yeah, un- unhinged and incohesive. 6:33 It's so intuitive the way it comes together. It's more, I think, chronological. Like, I'm recording and just zeroing in on my own experience and ideas and documenting what comes up. And because it's all happening 6:46 In the same period of time in my life, thematic cohesion, it all sort of gels because, yeah, I'm thinking a lot about, like, the ocean these days [laughs] or whatever it is. The theme emerges naturally. 6:57 I think that the Glow Part 2, for example, feels more broad or something because it is broad. It's, like, talking about these universal things. 7:04 And A Crow Looked At Me and Now Only and also Microphones in 2020, I think of it as, like, my hyper autobiographical phase of songwriting. Lost Wisdom Part 2 was actually in there in my life. 7:16 It was, was sort of in between those things, but included in this hyper autobiographical stuff. 7:21 Those were times when I was overtly trying to just, like, anchor it to a microscopic place and time and, uh, actually say the dates and the places and be really specific, like diary entry type stuff. 7:33 Although Microphones in 2020, I tried to do both, where I was doing that and zooming way out, back and forth, in and out to create sort of a feeling that was relatable for everyone, not just me and the details of my life. 7:48 I mean, the title of the album itself, Microphones in 2020, I think anything that ends with "in 2020," everyone can kind of agree it's like, yeah, there was a lot that happened there. [laughs] Oh, yeah. 7:58 Um- Well, weirdly, I made that before the pandemic. Really? Yeah. Shit. Do you think that the themes of that album changed at all as the pandemic hit and you've had to rethink the release around that? 8:08 No, I don't think so. I think it was early in 2020 before the pandemic fully kicked in. It used to be, like, the working title was Microphones in 2019, actually. [laughs] But I just didn't finish it in time. 8:20 And it just took me a while to write it, obviously, and, um, record it. So yeah, it wasn't a COVID project. The music of Microphones in 2020, how about the visuals, like the photo book? Mm-hmm. 8:33 I think I remember you saying it was pretty much just like a real life PowerPoint presentation [laughs] of- Yeah... the short film of Microphones in 2020. Was that made during the pandemic? Definitely, yeah. All the... 8:43 Once I finished the music, there's... it takes a long time to, like, g- actually get the record out, so I had, whatever, six months or more of making the artwork, making the video, making, like, a book. 8:55 I was also designing this monograph book of Genevieve's art. Genevieve, my former wife. That was a big COVID indoor computer project. And also I made this Microphones box set. 9:06 So lots of projects happened, but, um, they sort of came on the tail end of Microphones in 2020. 9:13 All of those more visual projects have really been a part of your work since the beginning, doing a lot of your own illustrations and visual curation. 9:23 Do you find that those two processes of creating the music and creating the visuals are separate, or do you get ideas for the visuals as you start to put the music together? Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. 9:34 I mean, they are separate, but definitely I sort of view all of it as the same project. 9:39 You know, I love making records 'cause the ar- [laughs] the artwork gets to be so big on this physical thing you get to hold, making a lot of small paintings or whatever. 9:48 I'm glad that records still exist as a physical thing so that they can have this visual component. I guess at some point vinyl should stop existing 'cause it's so bad for the Earth. 9:59 But, uh, I would still wanna make some kind of tangible thing to hold that had a, a strong visual aesthetic component, 'cause I feel like that's such a big part of listening to music for me. 10:08 Like, that's how I think of music, as having this visual counterpart. I mean, you've done the companion books and zine with many of your albums. 10:16 Maybe just the future of it is, like, I don't know, having those booklets be decomposable and just having a digital download link. [laughs] But I don't know if that's- Mm-hmm... a bit too Black Mirror-esque or not. 10:27 [laughs] Yeah. No, that's... I mean, people are trying all kinds of stuff and different ways of releasing music, putting a download code on some object, on a bowling ball, [laughs] whatever. Uh, yeah. 10:38 I'd like to see the bowling ball Mount Eerie project. [laughs] I thought about maybe, like, a boulder or something humongous and ungainly but with a little headphone jack in it. 10:47 [laughs] And then- Although the themes and the composition styles of your music across both of the main projects has obviously changed drastically throughout the years, I still feel like the atmosphere feels quite strong in the Twin Peaks, situated in the Pacific Northwest atmosphere of just foggy forests and suburbia. 11:08 Is that still something that comes to you on purpose? 11:12 I remember you saying in a previous interview that, I think, the Glow Part 2, that sort of Lynchian Twin Peaks influence was a bit more intentional alongside the various other works that have that same vibe. 11:22 So is it still in- intentional at all? Probably not that exact thing. I don't wanna be too on the nose with referencing a TV show all the time. 11:30 [laughs] The atmosphere that comes out through this stuff is mostly unintentional. Well, there's a lot of intention. Uh, but it's not about like, "I see this vibe and I'm gonna, like, do these steps to manifest it." 11:42 It's more like intuitively following the idea as it evolves over the course of the creative process, and it never turns out the way I think it's going to. 11:51 It's always like a process of chasing the idea and never quite catching it. 11:55 Oh, I heard somebody say, some artist, Joni Mitchell maybe, saying that the weakest points in the previous album are the seeds that lead to the next album. That really resonated. 12:08 Like, whatever ways that I failed to articulate the idea in any given project, that fuels the next thing. That makes me wanna, like, fix it or, like, elaborate on that sort of mysterious blurry part. 12:21 Even with musicians here in Aotearoa New Zealand, I feel like you kind of can't disassociate yourself from the place that you're making the album or the place that you grew up, especially if you're... 12:32 you kind of only have your own spaces to draw from, no matter how desolate or there's still quite strong niche interests that even if you don't, say, I don't know, the Pacific Northwest has a lot of trees and lakes or New Zealand has some really nice beaches That still comes through in the music just because of- Yeah... 12:50 I don't know, just the soul of it, [laughs] I guess. It's true. Yeah. And that thing is pretty mysterious how that works. Yeah, it's something sort of unintentional and unspoken that gets communicated. 13:01 I think that's cool. I'm, I'm glad that it happens and I don't know how it works. [laughs] What's it like to have the internet be so latched onto The Glow Part 2, and also in parts A Crow Looked At Me, like so strongly? 13:13 Mostly I'm oblivious to it- Mm... 'cause I, I don't look there for that kind of stuff. But it sometimes gets back to me, like you saying what you're saying now. And mostly, I don't know. 13:24 I- I've gone through phases of, "Oh man, I wish they would l- like the other stuff too. I tried also as hard as I could [laughs] on those ones." 13:31 But, um, I'm over that, that grumpiness, and I feel like so grateful to have any attention at all. It's, it's kind of absurd and amazing to me still. 13:43 One thing I actually forgot to talk about earlier when we were talking about the last few Mount Eerie projects was Lost Wisdom, both part one and two, and the collaboration with Julie Dorian on those projects. 13:54 Is there anyone else that you think that you would like to do that style of 50/50 work with or do you think that you'd ever go back with Julie? Yeah, definitely. I wanna make another record with Julie always. 14:05 We're talking about it a lot and, uh, we're gonna do it. I can't think of other people. She's just, uh, there's something about singing with her. Our voices, it feels so good, and she's so amazing at harmonizing. 14:17 It's something I miss when we're not doing it. 14:19 Probably the most weirdly specific music question that I'm gonna ask is just about the song that was both on Lost Wisdom part one and Dawn with Voice in Headphones and the Björk sample in there, which is obviously, I don't wanna say obviously when I'm talking to you, but I think that it's fucking fantastic playing. 14:37 Would you ever bring that further into music in the future? 'Cause it was like, I don't know, it was just really interestingly done in both versions of that song. Thanks. 14:46 Uh, I don't think of it as a sample 'cause we just sang it. Maybe, what's the musical term for that? Homage? Interpolation, I think. Yeah, interpolation. Um, I liked putting little references like that to other music. 15:00 I think that that is kind of a beautiful thing about how music works. Lots of art forms do this, but especially music where it's inter-referential. People do little m- musical trick or treats I'd call them. 15:12 This time about 20 years ago was really the turning point between The Microphones and Mount Eerie. I think it was like early gen 2003 that Mount Eerie, that album came out, and then Seven New Songs that next year over. 15:25 How do you think that specifically Mount Eerie as a project has evolved during that time? Oh, yeah. There's been a lot of different phases when I look back at like the records. Yeah, I think of them as just phases. 15:39 Some of them kind of funny in hindsight where I was like just doing lots of weird compilations and seven inches and trying out this and that, doing kind of novelty souvenirs, making lots of records. I don't know. 15:52 Yeah, I, I might be the worst person to ask about- [laughs]... perspective on my own project. It didn't always- I'm just- Yeah. It, it just changes over time as life changes. Yeah, exactly. 16:02 Coming back to the next few dates in Aotearoa, New Zealand, is there anything that you're particularly looking forward to? I guess this time you're coming to Auckland, Wellington, and Dunedin. Have you been... 16:12 You've been to Auckland before. Where, where'd you go on the 2013 dates? I spent a lot of time on the South Island actually by myself driving around in a little rental car. That was awesome. It was such a fond memory. 16:25 And played a show on the west coast in Barrytown that I think fondly of 'cause it was so small and yeah, like little Grange hall. Just the neighbors came over, walked around a lot. I loved that. 16:39 So I'm looking forward to have a couple of days to do similar thing like that on the North Island this time. 16:45 I mean, the entire country has a lot of that nature that's I think similar enough to Washington State and the Pacific Northwest that it feels- Mm-hmm... 16:54 I guess I assume that it feels quite familiar to you, but also there's enough difference in just the overwhelming bush of this country. [laughs] I know. I wish I had more time. 17:04 I was looking at things to do to fill those days and I was like, "Well, if I had like five days I could do this like epic mountain climb and ba da da da, and bring my like camping stuff." 17:15 But unfortunately time is short like usual. I'm sure that you're always welcome back here if there are any tours in the future. Thank you. 17:23 I guess just to close out without being too gushy, I'm such an incredibly big fan of your work from The Microphones to Mount Eerie. So I just kind of wanted to say thank you for making incredible music. 17:33 I hope that you know how much it's affected so many people across the world. [laughs] Good. Thank you so much. That's really powerful. Yeah. 17:41 And I guess to close out and get back onto my professional journalist type thing, um, yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing you locally here in Tāmaki Makaurau. 17:50 I believe that is on the 1st of October at Wemy Bar, again with Black Belt Eagle Scout. 17:56 I think it's gonna be a really awesome show, and I think that pretty much everyone that I know who was in the same scene as me is really looking forward to seeing you live. 18:04 So yeah, great mahi, and we're looking forward to seeing you back here. Thank you. See you soon. That was Phil Elverum from Mount Eerie and The Microphones. 18:12 Again, Mount Eerie will be touring Aotearoa with Black Belt Eagle Scout next October. Tickets for their show at Wemy Bar are available from Under the Radar. 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