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Aug 06, 2020 The Microphones By Christopher Roberts Photography by Katy Hancock

Phil Elverum first got attention with his project The Microphones, but in recent years he’s been going under the name Mount Eerie. But back in June he announced the first album as The Microphones in 17 years, Microphones in 2020, and shared a teaser trailer for the album. The album consists of one long 44-minute song and so no advance music from it has been shared. It’s officially out tomorrow, but now the whole album has premiered on YouTube via, as Elverum describes it, a “kind of a lyric video, but also a slideshow, a powerpoint presentation, a flip book.” Watch and listen below.

Elverum had this to say about the video in a press release: “It’s not a music video really. A short film? A not-moving picture? An unboxing of a not yet made photobook? Amateur hypnotism? I like the idea of ‘lyric videos,’ because music videos always seem weird to me, and I like making people read the words. This is kind of a lyric video, but also a slideshow, a powerpoint presentation, a flip book. For this long autobiographical song, since there was no archival footage to use, I spent 3 weeks carefully arranging over 800 of my printed photos to sync them with the lyrics, line by line. It is a documentary, illustrated with blurs, clouds, ghosts, and the real actual people and places that are being sung about.”

Microphones in 2020 is the first album under The Microphones name since 2003’s Mount Eerie and is out on Elverum’s own label P.W. Elverum & Sun. It’s all semantics really, as regardless of the name he’s releasing music under, it’s still a Elverum solo project. But The Glow Pt. 2, the 2001 album by The Microphones, was one of the most acclaimed and beloved indie rock albums at the start of the millennium so symbolically it’s nice to have the project back.

Elverum had this to say about the album in a previous press release statement: “I used to call my recordings a different name. A small clump of albums from 1997-2002 were called ‘the Microphones,’ including some popular ones. But the essence of this project has never really changed: me exploring autobiographically in sound and words with occasional loose participation from friends. The name it has been called has never mattered much to me.

“In the summer of 2019 I played a little local concert under the old name for no big reason. The little flurry of weird attention around this announcement got me thinking about what it even means to step back into an old mode. Self commemoration would be embarrassing. I don’t want to go backwards ever. There is nothing to reunite. So I nudged into the future with these ideas and came up with this large song. It took almost a year to write and record, working constantly at home, digging through the archives, playing the same two chords forever on the same $5 first guitar. In it I have tried to get at the heart of what defined that time in my life, my late teens and early 20s, but even more importantly, I tried to break the spell of nostalgia and make something perennial and enduring. All past selves existing at once in this inferno present moment. The song doesn’t seem to end. That’s the point.

“We all crash through life prodded and diverted by our memories. There is a way through to disentanglement. Burn your old notebooks and jump through the smoke. Use the ashes to make a new thing.”

The last Mount Eerie album was 2019’s Lost Wisdom pt. 2, It was a collaboration with singer Julie Doiron. In 2008 Elverum and Doiron previously collaborated on the Mount Eerie album Lost Wisdom.

In 2017 Elverum released an acclaimed album, A Crow Looked At Me, which was followed in March 2018 by another equally acclaimed album, Now Only (which was our Album of the Week). Both were written after his first wife, Geneviève Elverum (née Gosselin and also known as Geneviève Castrée), passed away in July 2016 after losing her fight with pancreatic cancer. Geneviève was a musician and comic book artist who had recorded as both Woelv and Ô Paon. Geneviève was diagnosed with inoperable, stage four pancreatic cancer just four months after giving birth to their daughter and died a year later, leaving Elverum to raise their infant daughter on his own. But then in July 2018 it was announced that Elverum had secretly married actress Michelle Williams (alas they have since divorced). In September 2018 Mount Eerie also released the live album (after).

Read our 2017 interview with Mount Eerie about A Crow Looked At Me.

Read our 2018 interview with Mount Eerie about Now Only.

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