Mount Eerie - No Flashlight

https://pwelverumandsun.bandcamp.com/album/a-crow-looked-at-me

this is probably going to be a depressing listen

That is devastating

Oh god this backstory

Mount Eerie, the longstanding musical outlet of Phil Elverum, has announced the release of A Crow Looked At Me. It will be released on Elverum’s label P.W. Elverum & Sun on March 24th 2017. The album is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest reaction to the death of Elverum’s wife, the artist Geneviève Castrée, last year. He has shared “Real Death,” a candid expression of stark domestic grief that is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie discography.

Elverum has shared the following statement about why he made A Crow Looked At Me, and why he is sharing it with the world:

“Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) In May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. ‘What matters now?’ we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known.

“DEATH IS REAL could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why.”

Elverum has stated that he will be playing these songs in front of audiences later in the year.

...

In 2015 Elverum’s wife, the French Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée, was diagnosed with a bad cancer just after giving birth to their first child. She died a year later. Elverum wrote and recored the album throughout the fall of 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments; her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper.

The songs are about the brutal details of that experience, from the hospitalizations to the grieving, the specific domestic banalities that become existential in the context of such huge and abrupt loss. These songs are not fun. They are pretty and they are deep, and they find a love that prevails beneath the overwhelming and real sorrow. It is unlike anything else in the Mount Eerie catalog in its unvarnished expressions of personal grief, metaphor-free.

Yeah, this is just heartbreaking.

"Nothing wise or learned, just the described experience of living through unimaginable domestic obliteration, with names and dates"

That verse about the backpack she ordered for her daughter :(

"collapsed there on the front steps I wailed." I am sobbing.

Has always been amazing at conveying moments of being hit with a wave of emotion or sadness, but that verse is brutal.

another song from the album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r5y-6tapYo

christ this is gonna be brutal

cant bring myself to listen to this yet

I don't really know what to say about this but it is so strong and raw

man this song

This is brutal. So powerful.

I love Phil and will always support him...raw stuff

Yeah, likewise.

Phil was already incredibly direct but here he just immediately lets it know that "poetry is dumb" in light of what he's feeling the effect is unlike anything I've listened to before. I can't even really place the emotions listening to these songs and describing them as sad feels equally silly.

wrote a review of the show here. hard to do justice to how heavy it was.

Thanks for sharing that, very nice and thoughtful review.

I can't recall anticipating an album this much yet feeling almost 'scared' to listen to it...

Hi Fits,

Thank you! Really appreciate you posting that piece.

yeah, great piece!

v nice piece on the show.

wrote a review of the show here. hard to do justice to how heavy it was.

― fits

but you pretty much did! great writing, and i can tell you're v v well-versed in his musical output.

great piece, fits.

love that he walked out as soon as he was done

http://www.youtube.com/H2R2Ck8qKWM

Heartbreaking.

Sorry: https://youtu.be/H2R2Ck8qKWM

oof. hold on to the ones you love.

True words. I am actually nervous for this album... Ravens alone reduced me to a sobbing mess.. :-/

maybe i haven't seen any other recent pictures of him, but man Elverum looks like he's aged years and years in the new press pic on p4k. i gotta hold off on listening to this until it comes out... the first single was so brutal

absolutely terrific piece on the show up there, fits. i read it on a lunch break and sat there and cried into my burrito

these songs are just devastating to listen to. the backpack bit ...

he announced some tour dates today, in case anyone missed it:

04-04 Eugene, OR - WOW Hall
04-06 Big Sur, CA - Henry Miller Library
04-09 Santa Ana, CA - When We Were Young Fest @ Observatory
04-10 San Diego, CA - Irenic
04-11 Los Angeles, CA - The Masonic Lodge @ Hollywood Forever
04-14 Oakland, CA - Starline Social Club
04-17 Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios
04-18 Olympia, WA - Obsidian
04-12-14 Arcosanti, AZ - FORM Arcosanti

Seems like he has no intention of coming back to Vancouver after that shambolic show years back. I'm with flappy bird - want to listen to this and will support him $, but there's so much grief and death in our culture, that I'm not sure I can handle this atm.

http://pitchfork.com/features/profile/10034-death-is-real-mount-eeries-phil-elverum-copes-with-unspeakable-tragedy/

One hell of a read.

It is.

And without trying to beat a point into the ground, that it's Jayson Greene doing this story is vitally important. If you don't know why:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/opinion/sunday/children-dont-always-live.html

^ jesus, i had no idea. the p4k feature is great, dreading the day i listen to A Crow Looked at Me for the first time

knowing that makes a harrowing interview even more powerful.

To me this was the key moment:

“I sometimes think about the life that my daughter will have with no mom,” he wonders. “What does it mean to have a ghost mom? Not that I can do anything differently about it. But it’s an inferior version of what we had planned, you know? This was not our top choice.” We both crack up; grief is funny sometimes.

Jayson is one of the best writers in the game right now; I am in awe of everything he writes

Jayson was the perfect choice for such an intimate interview. Could not have been penned better by any other writer.

Excellent article, it's rare to see Phil this candid

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/phil-elverum-on-creating-art-from-grief/

That Elverum piece was fabulous - so understated and clear-eyed. And I had no idea about Jayson Greene's daughter. Dear god. One would hope for an ounce of such humility and humanity in the face of such tragedy.

streaming on npr

http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520013269/first-listen-mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me

Fuck, this is beautiful

yeah, hard to find words for this as a whole but Soria Moria is just breathtaking

http://www.metacritic.com/music/a-crow-looked-at-me/mount-eerie

So this has a 96 on metacritic. Looks like we've got a year-end list juggernaut on our hands.

This album has such potent observational details and emotional heft. Don't think I'll ever listen to it again, but I'm glad Phil can express this way.

this is all i've listened to this week; something hypnotic about it, different guitar lines and lyrics follow me after each listen. is an astonishing work, wouldn't envy anyone who has to review it though.

joanne kyger, whose poem is on the cover, died like two days before the album came out :-/

I too have been listening to this all week. I've been a fan of his work forever but yeah, this is different. It reminds me a bit of my experience with Bowie's 'Blackstar' in that the music is inseparable from what it's about and I wonder if I would feel the same if the narrative was more open to interpretation.

as different as it is though, no one else could make something so understated yet devastating. think this is a really good, thoughtful review about it's relation to his previous work:

http://www.popmatters.com/review/mount-eerie-a-crow-looked-at-me/

am curious about the experience of people new to elverum, hard for me to untangle this from having followed him for years.

this is amazing - the way it plays, rather than wallows, in grief is key to it, plus the brilliant songwriting and arrangements. imo far more devastating than other 'tragedy response' albums of recent years

This album has such potent observational details and emotional heft. Don't think I'll ever listen to it again, but I'm glad Phil can express this way.

― Carlotta's Portrait (Ross), Friday, 24 March 2017 19:47 (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I listened to the album once over the weekend and this is exactly how I feel about it.

i don't really like the first Lost Wisdom much, it's ok but a pretty minor work and i definitely prefer the Dawn versions of the tracks that were on both.

everytime i put lost wisdom (pt. 1) on i'm there in the living room with julie and phil and fred. three people kneeling by the tape recorder, singing live. it sounds like dirty socks, wooden floor, rain on the window to me and it plays out so perfectly.

Lost Wisdom 1 is... my favourite Mount Eerie album?

yea it's my favourite too, i also love how lived-in sounding it is. the songs are so haunting and memorable. new single is just as good

it definitely had a sustained vibe. I'd think I'm in a minority of Elverum fans nowadays, not going in so much for the hauntedness of it all.

it definitely had a sustained vibe

one thing that phil really excels at is creating a sustained vibe for each of his releases. he covers more musical ground than his non-fans would probably know, but for each album he manages to create really coherent and complementary collections of songs

Definitely. Most of them have a wider palate than Lost Wisdom but still hang together so well. You can get lost in any of them.

palette

they're like a pallet full of sound from a fog filled netherworld

not really feeling this new one

https://youtu.be/LsvQkuwMb0Y

Album is out. Oof. Phil misses Michelle. It's pretty but it's another tough listen.

it's lower key than Now Only, which is his career peak imo, but i'm still enjoying it and certainly more than the first Lost Wisdom

Peak eh? I liked it a lot, bought the record, but I can't spend a load of time with these things. Anyway the first song put out from this new one, "Love Without Possession" is my favorite of his in years. Gorgeous.

After that plus the name of this project, I was surprised that it is basically Now Only pt2 featuring Julie Doiron... that doesn't have the same ring to it though. I do look forward to listening more when I'm in the mood. Some pretty stunning moments here.

Is this the default Mt Eerie thread?

I don’t know anything about this music but my good friend is selling a job lot of early stuff - all the proceeds going to First Nations Development Institute

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Rare-Collection-of-Microphones-Mount-Eerie-Vinyl-and-Ephemera-FUNDRAISER-/303611851564?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292

https://www.firstnations.org/

Ah man, cool selection. I swear there was another thread bumped recently for the upcoming album - might be under Phil Elvrum or his Microphones moniker.

haha, i own kind of am embarrassing amount of stuff in that auction. but some really rare stuff too, like the test pressings!

:o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7BkabF31ak&feature=youtu.be&t=01

the microphones - microphones in 2020 (2020)

heads up, phil is guesting on my mate's nts show this week reading some poetry and doing some new songs acapella. airing tuesday night/wednesday morning depending where you are:

https://www.nts.live/shows/plastic-language/episodes/plastic-language-12th-july-2023

https://www.lowprofilepodcast.com/season-7/72-phil-elverum-and-matt-fenton

Check out this podcast episode if you, like me, picked up "On Earth" by Peace from Phil's merch table and wondered what in the hell you were listening to. A 17 minute album I could never finish. I didn't know if it was a joke or some toss-off made with friends in an afternoon. No. Apparently Phil thought for a minute he'd release other people's music and wasted a lot of money recording them in Florida. And a bunch of other details that probably aren't true. Fun listen.

clear moon sounded absolutely wonderful to me tonight in a way that it never has before. must be the clear moon outside

Still umming and ahhing about tickets to his Brisbane show. Saw him last in 2013 (ocean roar/clear moon era) and it was a wonderful show in an intimate venue and I just think that might be enough for me.

Gave The Microphones - Mt. Eerie another spin driving through the hinterland the other day and that first track is still a majestic effort.

i'm going. he's playing mostly new material live at the moment and it sounds great, all like "huge fire" from earlier this year so i'm looking forward to hearing it in person

& he's released his best two albums (now only and microphones in 2020) in the past 5 years so hopefully he'll at least do something from now only

That’s a good sales pitch. I’m going to see David Toop and Loren Connors the night before there (highly recommend, free/donation gig), maybe I’ll back to back it? Time to listen to his new material and see what he does

I kind of got off the bus after A Crow Looked At Me, seems like I have a lot to catch up on.

if you've ever been a fan of any of his music you've absolutely gotta hear microphones in 2020, it's his masterpiece. utterly transcendental

Just chucked it on, nice to return to that lovely stereo acoustic percussive thing he had going. A mellow version of one of my favourite gastr del sol numbers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaDfGFW6MZo

Thanks for the rec ufo, just bought a ticket. Let me buy you a drink if you're up for it (y)

good show tonight, nice to meet H.P too

the new material (which made up most of the show) was great to hear and i'm looking forward to the album. i do hope "huge fire" will be on it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpyhHs32SpY