Mount Eerie

Mount Eerie is the current project of Phil Elverum. In high school in Anacortes Washington in 1996 Elverum started calling his tapes of self-recorded noise and songs “The Microphones”. Since then he’s produced two decades worth of records that span a wide spectrum from studio heavy atmospheric landscaping to simple raw songs. The Microphones project was nourished by and located within the community of artists around K Records in Olympia in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Phil Elverum’s musical ideas were clearly the product of the flood of independent music in the NW during those years.

After five albums the project was renamed Mount Eerie just as the Microphones were getting some unexpected attention from the widespread acclaim of “the Glow pt. 2” (2001). The Mount Eerie recordings got weirder and broader, and Elverum left K Records and began releasing everything himself, ultimately building a self-contained small town operation in Anacortes called P.W. Elverum & Sun.

Radical self-sufficiency has been a theme and obsession, always self-recorded, hands on in all details. Mount Eerie’s albums have always aimed to push into new territory, both in sound and idea, but the thread of Elverum’s voice has remained constant throughout, soft and human amid the wide range of textures and worlds. Often the lyrics have attempted to grapple with big questions, the briefness and the smallness of human life being a running theme. On occasion the music has been called “black metal” (Wind’s Poem, 2009), “dream landscape” (Clear Moon, 2012), and “raw and direct” (Lost Wisdom, 2008).