In the music video for Mount Eerie’s “The Place Lives” frontman Phil Elverum walks through the Washington wilderness poking his head around, exploring what he seemingly already knows like the back of his thirty-four-year-old hand. A cell phone camera barely recording in 720p follows the musician formerly known as The Microphones as he comes face to face with his muse, Mt. Erie, a stone-faced summit barely exceeding 1,200 feet. He heats up water on a camping stove that he mixes with dirt (coffee?) which he pours in the earth ending the strange (meaningless?) experiment. Oddly, there is no better way Elverum could display his fascination (fetishization?) with the place of Anacortes, Washington than he does in the first ever music video of his 14-year career. It's a place he was born and raised, and loved enough to stay and build a studio. A place he loves enough to write about time and time again; a place he holds in higher esteem than bustling cities like Seattle, a mere 40-someodd miles from the island. A place he loves enough that he depicts its scenery on most of the items for sale at his merch table. And since Mount Eerie changed his name from The Microphones back in 2003 he has declared the place his beloved, so much that when he tours he packs the million-ton mountain into his suitcase as a traveling evangelist does his concordance study Bible.
Last night Elverum unpacked his baggage and approached the mic circled by a surprisingly packed Ninth Ward and said, “Hi, we’re Mount Eerie. We’re from out West.” The man carries a gentle, yet self-assured stage presence, looking the audience in the eyes, perplexed as to how we all got here. After a little sound checking, Elverum and his four accompanying members break out in a droning, low-key track off the first of two full-length albums the musician has put out this year, Clear Moon, entitled “House Shape”. The track bustles with confounded organ germinating against sprinkled cymbal clinks. Elverums voice, which doesn’t enter the track until two minutes in, can barely be heard amongst the shadowy ensemble: “A separate way of seeing / A separate way of breathing it in / A lost world separate from the usual barely meaningful waking and dreaming.” There is no upbeat crowd-pleaser to open with. Mount Eerie begins and ends with an overflowing vacuum of dimly-lit poetics which becomes increasingly vital in driving the murky mix of distortion, sonorous drums, 12-string electric riffs, and organ blips.
The next track presented is “The Place Lives”, the aforementioned track off Clear Moon. While the rest of the band shows little to no animation on stage in their steady dedication to technics, this makes way for the subdued reactions emitted by Elverum himself. He shakes his head quickly as he lulls a verse. He closes his eyes during another. He cradles his guitar diversly and tilts it slowly during “Lone Bell” in an attempt to manipulate sound/mind/space. At the center of the band lies a cluster of plastic logs with tatters of orange fabric illuminated by a light inside. A dim fire, the final touch in anthropomorphizing Mt. Erie and its wilderness, as we are camped hundreds of miles away from the shores of our Erie.
The musicians finally deviate from Clear Moon to play “Who?” a track off 2008’s Lost Wisdom. “Who?” is a downcast folk song and one of Elverum’s greatest lyrical accomplishments. Elverum harmonizes along side his bassist: “What do I want with my home now that I’m gone? / I want the shades drawn.” And suddenly, 8 tracks into the set, Elverum declares he has two songs left sending them into the title track off the second LP released this year, Ocean Roar. This song is slightly darker, but somehow allows the show to end on a redemptive, albeit disappointing note.
Altogether, the performance was satisfying, but felt hurried, and a little frustrated at times. At the start of the show Elverum asked continually for treble to be turned down in the bass, and wasn’t really getting the results he wanted. For the obsessive, this might have colored the mood of subsequent songs. Although the composition of the songs were well-furnished, they seemed suffocated at times, especially for a venue known to render such sprawled-out techniques even more intimate.
Still, in some ways the show was one of the most enthralling experiences I've had in some time. Mount Eerie is a cerebral force in the shrinking experimental-folk stratosphere, and just as with any live performance, there is often an internalization of principles and images in the music to some degree. This can result in an abstract kind of experience where the intellect comes second to imagination. Experiencing Elverum's presence up-close, it was hard not to think of him as the Thoreau of the Pacific Northwest. Mt. Erie as his Walden Pond, simple and central, yet mysteriously sacred and enveloping. It all reflects back to the relationship of his art and place, which Mount Eerie has devoted itself to. In a 2009 interview with The BelieverElverum talked about place: “Towns are all generic because if everyone is going to move soon, who cares if it’s an Olive Garden or something more permanent-feeling? The lack of “home” that most people feel is fucked.” If anything, the most important aspect to Mount Eerie’s performance is the significance of this message, which was clearly exerted Sunday night. He carries his song because, as he states, “all things in the world are singing a song, reciting a poem, inaudibly, to their surroundings, to the things they encounter.”
If you regretably missed Mount Eerie last night you can still catch him as he plays shows in Toronto tonight at The Great Hall and Syracuse tomorrow (9/11) at Badlands.
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