Mount Eerie

Washington state multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Phil Elverum has carried forward the introspective and intimate character of his Microphones recordings under the Mount Eerie banner. Central to this work remain his candid lyrics and open-ended narratives, framed by an atmospheric mix of ambient textures, folk elements and black metal that intensifies the sense of awe throughout his output. Although the boundary between his earlier Microphones material and the first Mount Eerie releases such as 2005’s No Flashlight remained understated, subsequent projects revealed a marked expansion in scope. The imposing metal-inflected grandeur of 2009’s Wind’s Poem, the tranquil electro-acoustic reflections of Clear Moon and the thick sonic environments of Ocean Roar each lent fresh shading to his meditations on existence and mortality. Elverum chronicled the period following the death of his wife, the artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, on the widely praised 2017 album A Crow Looked at Me and its 2018 successor Now Only, both noted for their direct and articulate portrayals of loss. With 2024’s Night Palace he returned Mount Eerie to its origins by merging the project’s initial lo-fi aesthetic with refined lyrical craft.

Elverum closed the Microphones chapter by issuing the 2003 album titled Mount Eerie and promptly adopted that name for his ensuing endeavor. He established the imprint P.W. Elverum & Sun Ltd., which issued two CD-Rs—Seven New Songs of Mt. Eerie and Mt. Eerie Dances with Wolves/Wolf Mountain Howls in the World—in 2004, prior to the official debut album No Flashlight arriving the next year. The package, issued as a CD/LP set accompanied by a poster recognized as the largest album cover ever produced, established the pattern for Mount Eerie’s abundant and elaborately designed releases. Also appearing in 2005 were The Drums from No Flashlight, Singers (assembled from various vocalists performing Elverum’s material) and the electronically inflected 11 Old Songs of Mount Eerie. Mount Eerie, Pts. 6-7, presented as a picture disc bundled with a book of photographs, and the Latitudes Series Black Wooden EP both surfaced in 2007. The Black Wooden Ceiling Opening EP of the following year introduced Elverum’s notion of performing “black metal with natural materials.” Later in 2008 he joined Eric’s Trip and Broken Girl vocalist Julie Doiron together with guitarist Fred Squire for the recording Lost Wisdom. Dawn, a journal and CD set composed during Elverum’s residency in Norway spanning late 2002 and early 2003, emerged in spring 2009, while the full-length Wind’s Poem, shaped by ambient and black metal influences, appeared that summer.

Elverum sustained this pace with White Stag, a CD-R captured in Portland, Oregon, and the 2010 singles collection Song Islands, Vol. 2. Mount Eerie reemerged in 2012 via the paired albums Clear Moon, tracked inside a deconsecrated church and released in May, and Ocean Roar, which followed in September. Live in Bloomington, September 30th, 2011, documenting substantially altered renditions of pieces from Wind’s Poem and Clear Moon, surfaced in mid-2013. Later that November Elverum issued Pre-Human Ideas, another collection of reinterpretations. He first performed new songs on the road in 2014; those pieces coalesced into 2015’s Sauna, a largely reflective album centered on “Vikings and Zen and real life.”

In 2015 Elverum and his spouse Geneviève Castrée, known for her work as Woelv and Ô Paon, learned after the birth of their daughter that Castrée had been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. She passed away in July 2016; two months afterward Elverum commenced writing and recording in her studio using her instruments. The outcome was the austere and cathartic A Crow Looked at Me, issued in 2017 and drawn from his shared time with Castrée as well as her death. He continued with 2018’s Now Only, which likewise addressed the reverberations of her absence in his and their daughter’s lives. The live album (After), documenting his 2017 presentation of material from both records at the Dutch experimental festival Le Guess Who? inside a thirteenth-century Gothic church, appeared that September. The next July Elverum performed with a reunited Microphones before releasing Mount Eerie’s subsequent album, Lost Wisdom 2, again featuring Doiron, which arrived in November.

Toward the end of the 2010s Elverum once more invoked the Microphones name for a July 2019 concert and the following year’s The Microphones in 2020, an album comprising a single forty-minute track performed on the first guitar he had owned. After a period away from music he began composing poems that supplied the lyrics for Mount Eerie’s next release. Captured across two years, Night Palace, issued in November 2024, linked the raw, D.I.Y. sonics of the Microphones and early Mount Eerie with explorations of motherhood, the natural world and renewal. Elverum additionally produced a limited-edition book containing the poems from Night Palace late that year.