by Conor Lochrie (@conornoconnor)
Last year, after fifteen years operating under the name of Mount Eerie, Phil Elverum slipped into an old form: as he performed in the summer of 2019 as The Microphones he started to wonder what it even meant to step back into a past identity. What - if anything - distinguished Elverum as he played that day from the artist who had gone by a different name days, weeks before? So here we are: Elverum’s decision was to release Microphones In 2020, an album composed of one track lasting almost 45 minutes, a deep foray into his past transformations and the never-ending pursuit of meaning in life.
In an essay accompanying the album, Elverum stated that “self commemoration would be embarrassing. I don’t want to go backwards ever,” and nor does he. Elverum has always attracted a devoted following but the record isn’t pious; he has enjoyed a blessed artistic career but he is never righteous. Rather, he acknowledges the precariousness of personal history and how it can be moulded and eroded. There’s a section in the Mount Eerie song “Distortion” - from 2018’s Now Only - that seems pertinent now: “I watched a movie on the plane about Jack Kerouac / A documentary going deeper than the usual congratulations / They interviewed his daughter, Jan Kerouac, and she tore through the history / She told about this deadbeat drinking, watching Three Stooges on TV / Not acknowledging his paternity, abandoning the child / Taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology” This aggrandizing is what Elverum wanted to avoid and he thankfully manages to do so.
In Microphones in 2020 there is no chorus. There is no respite. The minuscule instrumentation that runs through the song hews closer to the arid Mount Eerie compositions; some strains of analogue noise intersperse, reminding one of his earlier The Microphones roots. Elverum actually doesn’t start singing until almost eight minutes in but the extended instrumentation feels right, a quiet meditative moment before the unspooling of his thoughts begin.
It almost feels more correct to consider Microphones In 2020 as a literary work; Elverum has always possessed a mastery of his own language and this song reveals itself poetically. If we accept it as a literary work the record is, then, a Kunstlerroman, or an artist’s novel: it’s the story of an artist’s growth to maturity, in this instance the journey from the foundations of The Microphones through Mount Eerie to the 42-year-old single father who narrates before us. Is Elverum an unlikely poet or, perhaps, the most likely? He’s consistently been overcome by existential pondering, as evidenced by his writing both as The Microphones and Mount Eerie.
This record takes the form of his recent wave of melancholic meandering monologues and the journey he takes us on is not linear. Elverum’s mind runs and unravels, his point of view skipping through the last three decades, from the wider picture to the minute details. He remembers his life “as if it’s just some dreams that I don’t trust / Wounds and loves unresolved,” touching on the precariousness of memory. After taking us back to 1995, when he was just seventeen, and he “put the name Microphones on the tapes I would make late at night after work at the record store,” there is minimal specificity afterwards. When it does come it’s memorable, as when he recounts seeing the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: “It was a rainy matinee, 2001, Sunday, March 18th / And in the parking lot afterward / For a few minutes in the rain / I stood glowing with ideas / Of what I might try to convey with this music”. Another moment of lucidity arrives later: “It was early 2001 and I was almost 23 / I’d finished recording / The Glow Pt. 2 / And I was always on tour or setting up a tour / Always running, voracious, thirsty”; it was only right to mention the album that most casual observers associate with him.
Any sentimentality is always undercut. When he recalls that day seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, he immediately acknowledges “It looks ridiculous now / But the truth is that alone there / Something was formed”; “Plus all this nostalgia is embarrassing” is another swift and wry undercut. We are given a small list of musical predecessors, those that inspired him: Julie Doiron (who he recently worked alongside), Tori Amos, Red House Painters, and This Mortal Coil are all mentioned.
The Red House Painters was the band of Mark Kozelek. Only a few weeks ago, an expose was published on him detailing his history of sexual violence against women. It also, on a lesser level, unveiled the trouble with an unreliable narrator. Where a song like “Soap For Joyful Hands” under Kozelek’s guidance was a tale of a tame discussion of life and music before he returned to his hotel room, the truth was sadly vastly different, Kozelek pressuring a young woman into coming to that very hotel room and trying to coerce her into sex. While we cannot know fully, it’s to be expected that Elverum’s narration is more trustworthy. Both reveal themselves in stream-of-consciousness stories but only one has kept close to reality and obeyed the truth.
“The true state of all things”. This is the opening line of the record. The true state of humanity is that, underneath it all, we are the same. This is the greatest gift Elverum has provided us with in Microphones In 2020: he makes the rest of us realize how relatable the journey to art is. There are no flashes of metaphysical blinding light; there are no unbelievable moments of profundity. Instead, Elverum being awestruck by Crouching Hidden, Tiger Dragon feels so imminently available. In his words, the myth of the tortured artist is transformed into the myth of the normal artist and it’s a blessing that it is so. The record is an invitation for the listener to enact the same exercise upon their own life. It’s impossible to listen to Elverum’s rememberings without wanting to do the same with our own past.
Perhaps the most encapsulating line is this: “I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising”. It doesn’t matter if Phil Elverum is The Microphones or Mount Eerie or any other project, for everything continues, everything moves on.
“And if there have to be words, they could just be:
Now only
And
There’s no end”