Mount Eerie - No Flashlight

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.

Will certainly listen again. Just as the album seems to be flagging those last three tracks come in and they're amazing

all fails
my knees fail
my brain fails
words fail

got through the first 4 songs on this and felt completely drained. i can't get through it. waves of blank depression and meaningless sadness. the NYT review of this is spot on - this isn't "art" really, because art is concerned with aesthetics. it just is. the scariest thing about it is i understand what he said after his wife death - everything lost meaning, it all became absurd. this makes Blackstar look like a party. that's a man staring death in the face, one last rattle and rage. this is soul-sucking.

"It just is."

Yes, it just is. It is also beyond admirable, amazing, soul crushingly honest and extremely uncomfortable to witness. It shakes me up completely and indeed sucks my soul bone dry. Only to fill it up till it overflows with love for life, love for love.

If that is not art, I honestly do not know what is, and I probably do not even care about discussing it. Because life is literally too short.

i'm interviewing Phil soon and i have no idea how to do it. any insights welcome.

Oof. That sounds like once a dream gig turned into a nightmare. Not literally a nightmare, I think Elverum is awesome. But the grief is so all encompassing it's not even an elephant in the room, it is simply unavoidable. A dinosaur of grief crushing you.

But I think you can still have a very meaningful conversation with him. You could ask him about how he feels, now that he put this album out there, it being reviewed as a piece of art, or work, and how that affects him, how that 'response' makes him reflect on the album. The dynamic of putting such a personal thing out in the world is something that would interest me, to read about.

What medium are you writing this for?

a print paper...will be online, too, of course

thanks for the thoughts, LBI. we'll certainly cover that kind of stuff, i'm sure. i'm interested, too.

what i find most fascinating by the whole thing is his response to this loss in his life - that he feels "ripped open" and exposed, so why not just record these songs and play them and talk about them, etc. "My internal moments felt like public property," he has said. TO BE VERY VERY CLEAR: he should grieve exactly how he feels is right. period. and i think "talking about it" is generally thought of as healthy, but it's not necessarily a *typical* reaction, particularly for someone who is somewhat of a public figure.

anyway, i am a human being with loved ones, i figure we'll just have a conversation and i'll go where it leads.

I agree with pretty much all of that and I think it's fine to have doubts. Christ, I'm sure he had them, too (about going in at all, let alone making all this 'public').

I think, essentially, I find it too uncomfortable to listen to. It's not intrusive, as such, as Elverum has chosen to make his grief work public, but the simple fact of being party to watching someone trying to give voice to, to give language to, something which evades that impulse induces a kind of shame. Or it's like that thing that during one of the first American expeditions to the moon, an astronaut accidentally pointed his camera at the sun, which immediately burned out the camera's cells. It was as if the camera couldn't tolerate the source or purity of what its own raison d’etre is to capture and relay.

I took No Flashlight as a reference to being in the dark but maybe it's more about having stared at the very centre of things and having one's cells burnt out. Or both of those things.

this is amazing - the way it plays, rather than wallows, in grief is key to it

I agree with this. I find it sad and intense but not as bleak as others seem to, just relentlessly real. Some of it is even kinda wry? "Do the people around me want to keep hearing about my dead wife?"

Yeah, agree with this ^

it's so sad, but i don't struggle to listen to it ... except maybe the part about the backpack. that's tough.

I think Phil does manage to have a good sense of humour and levity despite the heartbreak, which does make the album easier to listen to.

Personally still I don't feel compelled to listen to it regularly, I just majorly hope it has helped him.

Album is a little long but it has its moments

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mount-eerie-night-palace/

Pitchfork gives it a best album status

I missed the Hana Stretton album earlier this year (re-released by Elverum) and, I think, a subsequent UK tour.

Sounds really nice. Prohibitively expensive, given the postal costs, but suppose I could ordered digitally.

"could order"

got it with my order. it is a beaut. it's on streaming and whatnots

happily the Night Palace notes are folded for reading in the style of a comically large newspaper, browsable by record side.

the No Flashlight notes are handwritten chaos. Tempted to frame it.

Yeah, if I'd noticed it I would have ordered with "Night Palace".

Have never shopped at World of Echo (in the UK) but fair play to them - Googling suggests they did have stock at some point.

New Mount Eerie album and book (and some back catalogue) on its way, apparently. I confess to being quite excited.

I've only played on Spotify so far but it seems great. Maybe too sprawling and covering a lot of ground to be perfect but easily one of my favourites of this year. I don't even get uppity about the one where he chats with a fish.

Would anyone in Oxford (or thereabouts) or the UK want a Hana Stretton album?

I'm trying to work out the optimum number to buy to get the best from the US postal system ...

(Oxford, as I could hand deliver ... which might be off-putting, I suppose ... or get you to come to my place of work).

Strange. Was talking about Mount Eerie with a friend at the weekend and he was convinced that Phil would only play one UK date (London) if he toured this album. I'd have thought loads of people would want to hear Night Palace, live.

Amusingly, my order from America arrived from ... Slough.

Easily my favourite album of the year. It's sprawling and there are sometimes tracks I want to skip but it covers so much ground. Enjoying it *differently* as two CDs rather than a Spotify playlist.

Enjoyed this and the accompanying playlist: https://deepvoices.substack.com/p/deep-voices-113-phil-elverum

sweet, thanks for that!

I've had so little time to digest Night Palace but i really like it so far.

i like that there are a few genuinely funny moments. Not unprecedented but coming a bit easier than before?

I like that there's a new Gleam. i can't hear that song now without thinking of some live release where there's a false start or aborted take, where he just starts.. I know you've seen the billowy black.. and starts laughing. a perfect Phil moment. What release was that?

Niche but you can get a "custom print" of the painting used for Night Palace direct from the artist - at indigofree.com (circa $300)

Weird - thought this had been posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LchMiVRd-iA

That Hana Stretton album is so beautiful.